Among the most common mechanical possessions in the households of America, outnumbering even the motor vehicle and possibly outnumbered itself only by the flush toilet and the television set, is a device which, having won the West and championed liberty over the years, some householders would now proscribe as the instrument of our collective undoing. In short, the gun. I mean rifles, shotguns, pistols, and revolvers, at least 150,000,000 of them tucked away in bureau drawers and attic cupboards or racked splendidly above mantel-pieces. There are big ones and little ones; Krags and Enfields, Springfields and Mausers, Mannlicher-Carcanos and M-1 Garands, Remingtons and Winchesters and Brownings and Berettas and Rugers and Lugers and Colts; guns for all seasons and reasons; guns to punch holes in targets and tin cans, coots and Kodiak bears; guns for their own sake, guns never used; guns as last line of defense against burglars and rapists, looters and lunatics; guns to be stolen by burglars and lunatics; guns for irate lovers, quiet patriots, raving assassins, earnest sportsmen, feisty poachers, gentle collectors; guns for the people who passionately believe that the U.S. Constitution gives them a personal right to keep and bear arms.

A number of institutions operate in behalf of the gun owners of America. These include the arms industry, the hook-and-bullet press, hunters’ groups functioning at the state level, and some half dozen national membership organizations whose involvement in the preservation of personal weaponry is often secondary to some other interest, such as the propagation of game species in order that hunters might have something better than tin cans on which to exercise their right to bear arms. In addition, gun owners are staunchly represented on Capitol Hill, in most statehouses, and generally throughout those rural jurisdictions where sheriffs still prevail along with rocking chairs and Bull Durham tobacco. It is a diverse constituency, this gunnery. With overlapping subgroups, it embraces 16,000,000 licensed hunters, most of the nation’s farmers and ranchers, countless edgy urban shopkeepers, and, by some estimates, as many as four of every ten heads-of-household in the land. No one institution could possibly speak for every Tom, Dick, and Harriet of them. And only one tries—the National Rifle Association of America, better known as the NRA to friend and foe alike, of which there are plenty.

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