NRA - Friend or Foe of Hunters?

The NRA, Friend or Foe of Hunters?

(c)2005 by Pat Wray

I am a hunter. Like most hunters, I care deeply about our hunting heritage and our ability to pass it on. Like most hunters, I consider people and organizations who work on behalf of hunting my friends, and those who work against hunting my adversaries. Like most hunters, I am confused when the lines become blurred. And today the lines are blurry indeed in regards to the National Rifle Association (NRA).

The NRA is one of the most powerful and effective lobbies in America. It has protected our right to keep and bear arms for more than 100 years and I have been a member for more than 20 of those. Because I am a gun owner I am thankful for what the NRA has done. More than that, I believe in the NRA.

And there’s the rub. Because I and millions of others just like me believe in what the NRA does on behalf of our gun ownership rights, we are inclined to believe them when they tell us they are standing up for our hunting rights. This is a dangerous idea, because where the interests of gun ownership and hunting diverge, which happens more often than they would have us believe, the NRA will always, ALWAYS come down on the side of guns, sometimes to the detriment of our future hunting opportunities.

Not that the NRA hasn’t done some good things for hunters. They have helped introduce legislation to allow hunting on Sundays in states which presently prohibit it. They are working to reduce the minimum hunting age in states like Wisconsin. They are supporting No Net (hunting) Loss legislation in several states, which will require states to open state land for hunting when other state land is closed. These programs are a lot like glitter on the window. They are pretty but insubstantial. Their primary effect is to hide the really important stuff behind the window.

Behind the window, where issues of real hunting importance are being decided, like the protection of wildlife habitat and land on which our future hunting opportunities depend, the NRA sells out regularly to politicians who care nothing about the land or wildlife, but who will deliver votes against gun control. Politicians like Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who serves on the NRA Board of Directors and has made a career of opening public lands for private exploitation. Craig was a primary supporter of the Bush Administration’s recent action removing Federal protection of 58.5 million acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas in our National Forests and returning their fate to the tender mercies of individual states. There Craig, who regularly scores zero with the League of Conservation Voters for his consistently anti-environmental votes, hopes the powerful hands of logging and mining interests will prevail and open those lands to extractive industries.

The NRA regularly parrots Craig’s misleading message about our public land roadless areas, interchanging the terms Wilderness, Roadless Areas and Road Closures, in an effort to confuse the public and convince hunters their hunting access will be lost in those areas, a blatant falsehood. In fact, land covered by any of those three designations is open to hunting; only motorized access is restricted to various degrees. In fact, hunting and fishing are usually better, often much better, in roadless areas. The most exhaustive scientific studies have repeatedly confirmed that elk, deer, bears, mountain goats, bighorn sheep and trout do better in areas away from active roads. They grow bigger, live longer and reproduce more effectively. This is not under debate. People who contest it will probably also argue that cigarette smoke is good for you.

Perhaps the NRA thinks, as President Bush seems to, that if you raise bluegills in a pond, white-tailed deer in a fenced enclosure and feed wild turkeys in your backyard, you are a friend to wildlife. That simplistic approach doesn’t work here in the western states, where our big game and game fish species are far less adaptable to human encroachment.

Western hunters and anglers have lobbied repeatedly for protection for wildlife and wild lands, but the NRA ignores them and underwrites Larry Craig and his ilk, no matter what the impact of their legislative actions may be on those resources. In doing so, the NRA shows its true colors. No friend of hunting would support actions sure to decimate wildlife habitat on so broad a scale.

The problem is not that the NRA leadership acts aggressively to protect the 2nd Amendment. It is their mission. The problem is that they mislead hunters into thinking their actions will benefit hunting. All too often, hunters are foolish enough to believe them. In effect, the NRA is running one of the most effective scams in the country. They are promoting activities sure to decrease future hunting opportunities …and convincing hunters to help pay for their efforts.

Here’s the bottom-line: if the Bush Administration, with the active support of the NRA, builds roads into our previously roadless public lands, the premier hunting and fishing once available there will decline precipitously until these areas will be just the same as places you can drive to now.

I know a man who raises snakes. His snakes are very important to him. He raises mice also-to feed to the snakes. He takes good care of the mice, feeds them well and keeps them clean. He wants them breeding regularly because he needs lots of them to support his snakes.

We hunters are the NRA’s mice. They want lots of us, too, but they worry because there’s always the outside chance we might start thinking for ourselves. So they keep us scared with enemies, or people they want us to think are enemies. Then we dutifully cough up money to help fight those enemies. The NRA feeds our money and our hunting heritage into the coffers of political snakes who will use their influence to ruin the land we hunt.

Think about it; when was the last time you heard of a mouse actually helping a snake?

What a scam. What a con. What a load of garbage.

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