The View From Here: NRA fund-raiser not what I expected
The friends of the National Rifle Association fund-raiser I attended in a neighboring state last weekend was not at all what I expected.
After traveling to this event due to a family commitment, I have to admit I was less than enthusiastic. I thought it was the last place I wanted to be, even though I enjoyed the Midwest visit with relatives. I thought I had heard enough about this issue after many spirited debates over the past 11 years with my better half to last a lifetime.
The expectation was to see a bunch of gun-toting, government-despising, middle-aged-men sitting around with a slight edge of paranoia about them in relation to who’s taking their rights away. But that’s not what I found.
Instead, I noticed about 500 men who could have been stand-ins for my dad. In one corner was a flannel-shirt wearing hunter and nature lover who thinks about his right to have a rifle and go deer hunting in the woods somewhere for a week every year.
In another corner was the guy who, after putting his 60 hours a week in a factory that he can’t stand very much any more, with too much of his paycheck going to Uncle Sam, thought he could get first dibs on some NRA-embellished weaponry for his collection.
And the women were appropriately not dressed in flannel, as one might ridiculously assume. Instead, they appeared to be these guys’ wives and came along for the free meal, and to keep their significant others’ spending in check, perhaps.
Not once did I hear any of the familiar diatribe of people who can’t stand the media or who tout “bias” every time there’s a story about an equality issue. No one said a word about any of that or even mentioned the word “liberal” or the perceived unreasonableness of gun control.
They did make mention of the waiting period if someone purchased a gun, but in all, it was an eye-opener counter to my preconceived notions. “So this is what they’ve been talking about all these years,” I thought. Instead of negative messages and paranoia, the presenter, on many occasions, just kept thanking people I haven’t been exposed to in a long time for contributing to the auction-style event.
“Thank you for supporting freedom,” he would say after someone forked over a sizable amount of cash for wildlife/nature print or, of course, some kind of weapon. This was an NRA event, after all.
A few hours into the auction, I counted at least $6,000 in cold, hard cash raised, not counting the miscellaneous lottery-style chances to win throughout the evening.
So this is how it gets done, and no one can complain about that. The masses of money put into the NRA, which lobbies government for protection of 2nd Amendment rights, comes directly from the people. Like it or not, that’s America. This fund-raiser went specifically to support safety education programs, they said, and I had no problem with that.
I guess I took away the idea that as passionately as some feel about other Amendments — for journalists, the First; for lawyers, the Fourth; for the minorities and women and others, the Fourteenth — they feel just as passionately about the Second. Maybe I’m beginning to understand, although I’m not completely convinced limiting some weapons is trampling on that right exclusively. After all, many of those freedoms are not free-for-alls.
Perhaps those who stand on one side of any issue should go through an exercise like this once in awhile. In this instance, it appeared to be nothing more than a bunch of guys who like to hunt and looked like my dad, and I couldn’t find much fault with that.
(Amy Satterwhite is a reporter for the Standard. She can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)