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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (475410)	10/13/2003 1:02:28 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 769670

The N.R.A. Is Naming Names October 13, 2003 By BOB HERBERT The National Rifle Association doesn't call it an enemies list, but deep in the recesses of the organization's Web site is a long, long compilation of the names of groups and individuals that the N.R.A. considers unfriendly. I'm happy to report that I'm on the list, but my name is truly one among very many. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is there, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The Children's Defense Fund and the Lutheran Office for Governmental Affairs are there. The United States Catholic Conference, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Y.W.C.A. of the U.S.A. are all there. Among the celebrities on the list are Dr. Joyce Brothers, Candice Bergen, Walter Cronkite, Doug Flutie, Michelle Pfeiffer, Vinny Testaverde, Moon Zappa and the Temptations. Also on the list are the Kansas City Chiefs, Hallmark Cards, the Sara Lee Corporation, Ben & Jerry's, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. I'm sure there's a method to the N.R.A. madness, but to tell you the truth, all I can see is the madness. All of the groups and individuals listed are supposed to be anti-gun. I can't speak for the Kansas City Chiefs or Moon Zappa, but I'm not anti-gun. I think soldiers, the police and certain other law enforcement officials should have guns. Civilians, however, should be required to demonstrate a good reason for having firearms. We should go to great lengths to keep guns out of the hands of children, criminals and insane people. All guns should be registered. And all gun owners should be properly trained and licensed. The N.R.A. sees this as a radical, even lunatic position. So I guess we're at odds. I asked Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.'s director of public affairs, why the list had been compiled and displayed on the Web site. He said, "We put the list together in response to many requests by our members wanting to know which organizations support the rights of law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms, and which organizations didn't." I asked what he thought his members would do with the information. He said, "How they use the information is at their own discretion." I recently read Jules Witcover's book "The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America." The murders that year of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were among the great tragedies of U.S. history. Both were killed by freaks with guns. What is not so well known now is that President Lyndon Johnson tried, in the aftermath of the murders, to get Congress to pass legislation requiring the registration of guns and the licensing of owners. The gun lobby fought and killed that effort, and it continues to fight to the death any attempt to bring sanity to the manufacture, sale and possession of guns. Between 1968, the year of Johnson's failure to get his legislation passed, and 2001, the last year for which complete statistics are available, more than one million Americans were killed by firearms. No number of gun-related fatalities or serious injuries is sufficient to deter the N.R.A. from its fanatical course. A former N.R.A. lawyer has admitted in an affidavit in a lawsuit that distributors and gun dealers have for years been illegally diverting guns that end up in the hands of criminals, and that the industry has closed its eyes to the practice. Instead of fighting to end this threat to the public's safety, the gun lobby and its allies in Congress are pushing legislation that would protect the practice by granting special immunity from liability to gun manufacturers and sellers. The big item on the legislative agenda next year is the federal assault-weapons ban signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Because of a sunset provision, the law will expire next September if it is not renewed by Congress and the president. The gun lobby has made it clear that it will do all in its power to bury the ban. The plan is to not even let the issue come up for a vote. The N.R.A. Web site and its enemies list (which looks like nothing so much as a broad cross-section of America) has led inevitably to a counter Web site, nrablacklist.com, created by a group called stopthenra.com. In addition to facing off against the gun lobby on legislative matters, the new group and its site are inviting people to volunteer for a spot on the N.R.A. enemies list. Ah, free expression. nytimes.com