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Even Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Montanan with a large hunting and shooting constituency, did a turnabout by announcing for Tydings' bill. "Maybe it's a recognition that we've come to the end of an era. It's a new day, a new population, in the cities now. Lots of things are coming together at once, and they are bringing a change in the thinking of the American people."
Glassen on Goebbels. Not all of the people. The N.R.A. is just beginning to mount its counterattack, and most legislators know how fierce that offensive can get. As New York State Democratic Assemblyman Leonard Stavisky, who tangled with the group over a gun bill last month, puts it: "They tell legislators, 'We will terminate from public office anybody who disagrees with us,' and the legislators believe them." As well they should. N.R.A. officials have privately bragged that within 72 hours the organization can produce half a million letters from its members on any gun bill.
As unofficial spokesman for the nation's private-arms industry, N.R.A. provides safety and conservation programs for gun owners—who also benefit by receiving cut-rate surplus weapons and free ammunition, courtesy of the Pentagon. Most of N.R.A.'s members are responsible hunters, target shooters and collectors, scrupulously respectful of their weapons and aware of the need for some control; the outfit likes to boast that John Kennedy was a life member. But some are notorious hotheads, drawn from such ultraright paramilitary outfits as the Minutemen and the California Rangers. After New York Freelance Author Carl Bakal published his celebrated antigun tract, The Right to Bear Arms, N.R.A. members wrote him by the hundreds; among the friendlier salutations were "poltroon," "blatherskite" and "Communist and pervert." Exclaims Bakal: "And these are the people who own guns!"
As sentiment for controls surged, N.R.A. President Harold Glassen, a loose-tongued Lansing, Mich., lawyer, declared: "We see Americans behaving like children, parroting nonsense, accepting unproved theory as fact and reacting as the Germans did in the 1930s as the Goebbels propaganda mill drilled lies into their subconsciousness."
For Social Welfare. Despite N.R.A.'s oft-demonstrated tactics, Glassen insists: "All this talk about the gun lobby is baloney. We have yet to spend a single dollar on lobbying; we have never hired a lobbyist. We don't tell anyone to write his Congressman." In fact, no lobby in Washington—except perhaps the American Medical Association, which came a cropper on Medicare—rivals N.R.A. in effectiveness. Exempt from taxes under the same Internal Revenue Service provision that covers the Volunteer Firemen and the Veterans' Association, the N.R.A. is classified as an organization "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare," with earnings "devoted exclusively to charitable, educational or recreational purposes." The same provision allows it to lobby but without requiring it to register. And lobby the N.R.A. does—in and out of Congress.