The Last Gun (31 page)

But there is a great and growing body of analytical evidence that “the myth of the fearsomely potent NRA . . . is just that—a myth.”
⁵¹
For example, an exhaustive 2004 study—conducted with the cooperation of the NRA itself—found that the conventional wisdom (started by Bill Clinton) that the NRA cost Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 1994 is simply not true.
⁵²
“When the impact of organized interest groups on election outcomes is closely examined. . . the systematic evidence routinely fails to support claims like Clinton's.”
⁵³
Other independent studies have found the same thing. A study published in 2012 declared, “Despite what the NRA has long claimed, it neither delivered Congress to the Republican party in 1994 nor delivered the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.”
⁵⁴

It also turns out upon objective examination that “while the NRA spends a good deal of money in total, that money is spread over so many races—well over 200 House races alone every election—that it has little more than symbolic effect. . . . [It] may be enough to keep the volunteers in donuts, but it won't swing any races.”
⁵⁵

And the NRA's vaunted endorsements and “grass roots” power? The NRA brags, talks tough, and threatens. But the electoral successes it claims are in fact those of the broader coalition to which it has attached itself. “The NRA's influence . . . seems to interact with the party trend that is evident in any particular election year.”
⁵⁶
In other words, like the remora, or suckerfish, which attaches itself to a shark for scraps of food, the NRA simply gets the benefits of its association with a much larger right-wing
coalition. Like the remora, it neither causes harm nor contributes significant value.
⁵⁷
The NRA's bloviating might be of incidental benefit, but it doesn't make or break elections. The NRA rides the trend. It declares victory in good elections and the coming apocalypse in bad ones. “The NRA has virtually no impact on congressional elections,” the latest study concludes. “The NRA endorsement, so coveted by so many politicians, is almost meaningless. Nor does the money the organization spends have any demonstrable impact on the outcome of races. In short, when it comes to elections, the NRA is a paper tiger.”
⁵⁸

If the NRA is a paper tiger, politicians in Washington are trembling pussycats. This political surrender—and the NRA's exploitation of it to puff up its credibility—can be traced to three interwoven trends. The first is the influence of poll-driven, “triangulating” political operatives searching for a “third way” to evade taking hard stands on core principle. The second is the revisionist history of the political impact of gun control legislation, expounded by Bill Clinton and adopted as gospel by “moderate” politicians and the political mechanics they employ. The third is the rise of what media critic Tom Rosenstiel has described as “synthetic” journalism that is “shallowing out our understanding of American politics.”
⁵⁹

Scholars of political science describe one of the core dynamics of power in Washington as the “iron triangle”—special interests, the career bureaucracy, and Congress.
⁶⁰
There ought to be added now another geometric figure, the “golden triangle” of commercial public opinion pollsters, well-paid professional political consultants, and career politicians. Interacting with these artful technicians, ambitious political “candidates are using polls to select their voters and to fashion their policy choices,” with the overall effect of “distorting the process of democratic accountability and responsiveness.” In order to “avoid the risk of electoral punishment, they turn to polls to craft appealing campaign messages and to microtarget voters,” according to Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, professors of political science.
⁶¹

Recent trends in the news business have made the media not only receptive to, but eager for, the golden triangle's output of polls and artfully spun candidate and issue narratives. One of these influences has been the vastly expanded universe of the “information revolution.”

The explosion in outlets has not meant more reporters doing original shoe-leather reporting. Instead, more people are involved in taking material that is secondhand and repackaging it. This greater reliance on secondhand material inevitably has two consequences. First, it means that the reporting news organization is less likely to have independently verified the information. Second, the understanding of the reporting news organization is usually more superficial. They did not do the work themselves, discovering its nuances and limitations. Rather than conducting the work, usually the reporter or editor is paring down, summarizing, or rewriting a news agency account.
⁶²

Other factors include staff cuts and the demands of a twenty-four-hour news culture in which there is “more news time to fill than there is news to fill it,” so that “there is more appetite for the latest poll, the latest anything.” Finally, the reduced news staffs “tend to be less experienced” and thus have a “shallower grasp” of issues they report on.
⁶³
In this environment, “Values, political philosophy, life experience, authentic belief, and all the other motivations behind political action are devalued in the coverage because they are harder to report, harder to identify, harder to measure.”
⁶⁴

The politics of guns and gun control combine the worst of these influences. If “the best way to think about public opinion and its relationship to politics and policymaking is that the American public is typically short on facts, but often long on judgment,”
⁶⁵
gun control compounds the problem by orders of magnitude.

The inflated myth of the NRA's invincibility began in the late summer of 1994, when the Clinton administration badly needed a win in Congress. The President's health care proposal was stuck on a reef. Other plans, like welfare reform, were foundering. On top of all this, the White House was hit by a court-ordered change in the special counsel conducting a criminal investigation into the Whitewater affair, ensuring that it would drag on at least through the 1994 election.
⁶⁶
Democrats were “clinging to the passage of a crime bill as their only evidence of late that a Democratic majority in Congress can accomplish something of lasting significance,” observed the
New York Times
.
⁶⁷

The omnibus crime bill on which Democrats now hung their hopes was a wallowing $30 billion tub. “With the bulk of a Tolstoy novel, this 960-page monster includes something for everyone,” the
National Journal
reported.
⁶⁸
“The law includes a sprawling array of programs, many of them untested, that taken together have little overall coherence,” reported the
New York Times
. “It reflects the ideological divisions that had stymied Congressional efforts to enact a crime bill for years as well as the pet projects of legislators whose votes were needed to pass it at last.”
⁶⁹
On the eve of the final vote in the House of Representatives, the bill's cargo included the assault weapons ban, a revived federal death penalty, and grants to help local governments hire a hundred thousand police officers. It was also packed with federal funds for crime prevention programs.

The original youth-programs amendment to the crime bill, introduced by Senator Chris Dodd, a Democrat, called for $1 billion of funding for one program.
⁷⁰
By the time the Senate passed its version of the bill, the package had grown to $3.8 billion and a dozen programs. The House version ballooned up to
$6.6
billion and even more programs. The funding topped out at $7 billion and twenty-eight programs after the House and Senate reconciled their bills in conference.
⁷¹
These programs came to be lumped under the phrase “midnight basketball,” an image charged with social and racial subtext.

Passage of the reconciled conference crime bill was predicted to be “an easy win for Clinton and a certain campaign trophy for Democrats.”
⁷²
But on August 11, 1994, the conference report suffered a surprise in the House. Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats voted down a procedural rule that would have brought the bill to the House floor for a final vote.
⁷³
Such “special rules,” issued by the House Rules Committee, specify the length of debate on substantive bills and detail other procedural matters.
⁷⁴
When such a rule is defeated, consideration of the underlying bill halts until a revised or new rule is approved.
⁷⁵

“Democrats were so stunned at their loss that they could hardly explain their gross miscalculation,” reported the
New York Times
.
⁷⁶
President Clinton was described as “very nearly sputtering with shock and anger.”
⁷⁷

What had gone wrong?

According to contemporary post mortems, the bloated prevention programs, which had grown from $ 1 billion to $7 billion, were the fulcrum that gave the bill's opponents—who had a wide variety of motives, including opposition from the left to a federal death penalty provision—the leverage to bring it to a halt. Certainly, the NRA was doing all it could to rip the assault weapons ban out of the bill. But the ban had so much public support that President Clinton insisted that it stay in the crime bill during the next two weeks of frantic negotiation to resuscitate it.
⁷⁸

The
Washington Post
reported that the bill's opponents “have turned the debate over the final version of the crime bill into a debate on the merits of the prevention programs, which they denounce as ‘social welfare' and ‘pork.' “
⁷⁹
The
New York Times
saw the same dynamic. “The bill was much ridiculed for spending money on dance programs, arts and crafts, midnight basketball leagues and programs to promote self-esteem,” it reported.
⁸⁰
A lengthy analysis in the
New Yorker
traced the roots of the rout to radio rants by the right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh, who “had been hammering away at the crime bill—not as much on its anti-gun provisions as on the social programs it contained.”
⁸¹

Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts “plainly struck a chord and excited an antipathy toward the crime bill.”
⁸²
As a result, casting a vote against the bill lost the sting of its being seen as soft on crime by conservative voters. House minority whip Newt Gingrich asked conservative polling consultant Frank Luntz for a read on public opinion. Luntz's poll confirmed the wisdom of attacking the prevention programs. Those polled, he wrote, “are far more concerned that convicted criminals remain behind bars than teenagers in inner cities learn to ball-room dance and slam dunk from the foul line by the pale moonlight.” Luntz advised Republican members, “If you want to oppose this legislation, you should.”
⁸³

Two weeks later, Democrats got their crime bill, slightly pared down. The bill included the assault weapons ban.
⁸⁴
The president signed the bill into law on September 13, 1994.
⁸⁵
Republicans, however, were conspicuous by their absence from the signing ceremony
⁸⁶
Newt Gingrich and his party's strategists had gained a valuable insight into the public mood.

On September 27, he and more than three hundred Republican lawmakers and candidates stood on the steps of the Capitol and announced their commitment to a ten-point Contract with America.
⁸⁷
They said they would run a campaign focused on its promises, and would implement the contract's laundry list if they regained the majority in Congress. Frank Luntz had “market tested the message like a breakfast cereal.”
⁸⁸
The Republican “contract” promised a tougher “anti-crime package,” the “Taking Back Our Streets Act.”
⁸⁹
But significantly, the legislation did not propose repeal of the assault weapons ban or the Brady law.
⁹⁰

The NRA was reported to have spent about $4 million in the 1994 midterm campaign, including a battery of television ads in which Charlton Heston attacked specific Democrats who had voted for the Brady and assault weapons bills.
⁹¹
The NRA's funds went “overwhelmingly to support Republican
congressional candidates,”
⁹²
evidencing its embryonic “culture war” alliance with the right wing.
⁹³

Democrats woke up to disaster the morning of Wednesday, November 9, 1994. Riding “a tidal wave of voter discontent,” Republicans had taken control of the Congress, winning their first majority in the Senate since 1986, and their first in the House since 1954.
⁹⁴
For the first time since Abraham Lincoln was president, a sitting Speaker of the House, Thomas S. Foley, was rejected by voters in his own district.
⁹⁵
But virtually no one—including President Clinton—blamed the sweeping Democratic loss on the assault-weapons ban or even gun control in general. Clinton accepted some of the blame, saying his agenda of change had not moved fast enough. But “he drew the line on any turning back against gun control and the banning of assault weapons, two pieces of legislation he was able to get through Congress this year.
^”96

The
New York Times
opined that morning that it was “easy to see why the Democrats got whacked.”
⁹⁷
Adding to “the sour national attitude toward politics generally and the rebellion against incumbents in particular,” the
Times
wrote, “failure of governance must be laid at the feet of the retiring Senate majority leader, George Mitchell; the embattled Speaker, Thomas Foley, and a leadership team that placed loyalty to them above cooperation with the White House or public demands for Congressional and campaign finance reform.”
⁹⁸
The
Boston Globe
reported that “throughout the nation, voters complained about a bickering Congress, bloated government and what one described as ‘a cream puff president who had made many hopeful promises but had produced little.”
⁹⁹