Meet the New N.R.A. President

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Conan O’Brien noted that Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s front man, is merely its executive vice president, “which begs the question, how freaking crazy do you have to be to be the actual president of the N.R.A.?”

That’s not what begs the question means; the N.R.A.’s executive V.P. functions as a sort of chief executive officer; and it’s an easy joke. But as it happens the N.R.A. has just elected a new president, an Alabama lawyer named Jim Porter, and he’s, if not freaking crazy, certainly aggressively provocative.

Among the less inflammatory statements he’s made in the last few years is that the Obama administration “wants to take us …to a European, socialistic, bureaucratic type of government” and that the Democrats have made “a run on our rights, our individual rights.” That’s humdrum by contemporary standards.

Less humdrum, and currently making the rounds on the Internet is a speech he delivered at the New York Rifle and Pistol Association’s annual meeting in June, 2012. At that speech he called Mr. Obama a “fake president” and Attorney General Eric Holder “rabidly un-American.” He claimed that Mr. Holder and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were “trying to kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations.” (For what it’s worth, he was referring to a proposed treaty regulating global trade in conventional weapons supported by every U.N. member state except Syria, Iran and North Korea.) And he gave a short lesson in terminology to the assembled Yankees, “Now y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ down South.”

For Mr. Porter, shooting = freedom.  At the same annual meeting, he said, “Every time you take your nephew to the gun club, every time you take your daughter skeet shooting, every time you take your grandchildren out, we’re passing on the legacy of freedom.”

Outgoing president David Keene said Mr. Porter was a “perfect match” for the job. “As we are likely to win most of the legislative battles in Congress,” he told The Washington Times, “we will have to move to courts to undo the restrictions placed on gun owners’ rights in New York, Connecticut, Maryland and Colorado.” State by state, Mr. Porter will pass on the legacy of shooting freedom.

Original Article
Source: takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com
Author: JULIET LAPIDOS