Well folks, today is the day that the board of the National Rifle Association will elect its new president, and in this case it'll be a hard-line culture warrior who has worked for decades to make the NRA a more aggressive political force. The election of Mr. James Porter, essentially ensured after the endorsement of outgoing President David Keene last week, is one of many defiant signals to come out of the NRA's annual meeting in Houston this past weekend. The organization vowed to continue to fight against any compromise on gun-control legislation in Congress.
Amid news that the NRA's membership had grown to a record 5 million strong, Mr. Porter hit the nail on the head when he told the group's meeting, on Saturday, that, "Revenge is what's motivating the president's unrelenting attacks on gun owners today." He went on to say, "Millions of Americans are becoming first-time gun owners." He added, "The media calls it fear. That's not it. It's a sense of natural outrage that's been building for quite some time." Speaking as one of those first-time gun owners, I couldn't agree with him more.
Mr. Porter is 64 and a lawyer from Birmingham, Ala. who purpose in life has, up to this point, been defending gun manufacturers, and he has been building that outrage his whole life. His father, Irvine C. Porter, was president of the NRA back in 1959, or back when the son says the NRA was "a glorified shooting society." At a breakfast Friday, Porter told grass-roots organizers that they are on the frontline of a "culture war." In describing Mr. Porter, Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence said, "He seems to come out of a mold that's much closer to the base than David Keene."
The weekend's event also featured speeches from politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — who challenged Vice President Biden to a debate on gun violence — and the NRA's crowd-pleasing executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre. "We will never surrender our guns. Never," LaPierre said. "The media and the political elites can lie about us and demonize us all they want, but that won't stop us." Observers said the tone of the convention wasn't surprising, given the debate over universal background checks in Congress, which the NRA has stood firmly against!.
So as more than 70,000 people visited the weekend event, primarily for the gun trade exhibits on the floor of the Houston convention center, at the same time roughly 70 protesters held a vigil across the street, reading the names of 3,863 victims of gun violence since the shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. Too bad no one saw fit to read a list of names of those whose lives have been saved either because they had a gun, or someone close by had one. Despite the drivel we constantly hear from Democrats, Barry included, far more lives are saved every year because of guns, than are lost.
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