The N.R.A. in A Hunter's Sights

By ROBERT HUGHES

Like George Bush and thousands of other people, I am a Small White Hunter. - Which means that, two or three times a year, one scrambles into one's brush pants and jacket, pulls on a pair of snake boots and goes ambling off on a sedate horse with friends and dogs in pursuit of quail in a pine forest in southern Georgia. Or spends cold predawn hours in a punt on Long Island Sound, or a damp blind on a California marsh, waiting for the gray light to spread and the ducks to come arrowing in.

I have done this at intervals most of my life, ever since I was eleven years old in Australia and my father first issued me a single-shot .22 and two bullets and told me to bring back one rabbit. I hope to keep doing it as long as I can walk and see.

I don't shoot deer anymore; the idea of large-game trophy hunting repels me. But I have never thought there was anything wrong with killing as much small game in one day as I and a few friends could eat in the evening -- no more than that and always within the limits. On a good day I can break 24 targets out of 25 at trapshooting, and 22 or so at skeet, which is O.K. for an art critic.

In short, I am supposed -- if you believe the advertisements of the National Rifle Association -- to be exactly the kind of person whose rights the N.R.A. claims to want to protect. Why, then, have I never joined the N.R.A.? And why do I think of this once omnipotent though now embattled lobby as the sportsman's embarrassment and not his ally?

The answer, in part, goes back to the famous Second Amendment of the American Constitution, which the N.R.A. keeps brandishing like Holy Writ. "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," it reads, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The part the N.R.A. quotes is always the second half. The first half is less convenient because it undermines the lobby's propaganda for universal weaponry.

The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom -- and more pointedly, their experience -- distrusted standing armies. They associated British ones with tyranny and lacked the money and manpower to create their own. Without a citizens' militia, the Revolution would have failed. Does the Constitution let you have the second half of the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, without the first part, the intended use of those arms in the exercises and, when necessary, the campaigns of a citizens' militia to which the gun owner belongs -- as in Switzerland today? That is still very much a subject for legal debate.

& The constitutional framers no more had in mind the socially psychotic prospect of every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a barnful of MAC-10s, Saturday night specials and AK-47s than, in writing the First Amendment, they had in mind the protection of child-porn video, which did not exist in the 18th century either. Nowhere does the Constitution say the right to bear arms means the right to bear any or all arms. Which arms is the real issue. At present, firepower has outstripped the law's power to contain it within rational limits.

Where the N.R.A. has always revealed its nature as a paranoid lobby, a political anachronism, is in its rigid ideological belief that any restriction on the private ownership of any kind of hand-held gun leads inexorably to total abolition of all gun ownership -- that, if today the U.S. Government takes the Kalashnikov from the hands of the maniac on the school playground, it will be coming for my Winchester pump tomorrow. There is no evidence for this absurd belief, but it remains an article of faith. And it does so because the faith is bad faith: the stand the N.R.A. takes is only nominally on behalf of recreational hunters. The people it really serves are gun manufacturers and gun importers, whose sole interest is to sell as many deadly weapons of as many kinds to as many Americans as possible. The N.R.A. never saw a weapon it didn't love. When American police officers raised their voices against the sale of "cop-killer" bullets -- Teflon-coated projectiles whose sole purpose is to penetrate body armor -- the N.R.A. mounted a campaign to make people believe this ban would infringe on the rights of deer hunters, as though the woods of America were full of whitetails in Kevlar vests. Now that the pressure is on to restrict public ownership of semiautomatic assault weapons, we hear the same threadbare rhetoric about the rights of hunters. No serious hunter goes after deer with an Uzi or an AK-47; those weapons are not made for picking off an animal in the woods but for blowing people to chopped meat at close-to-medium range, and anyone who needs a banana clip with 30 shells in it to hit a buck should not be hunting at all. These guns have only two uses: you can take them down to the local range and spend a lot of money blasting off 500 rounds an afternoon at silhouette targets of the Ayatullah, or you can use them to off your rivals and create lots of police widows. It depends on what kind of guy you are. But the N.R.A. doesn't care -- underneath its dumb incantatory slogans ("Guns don't kill people; people kill people"), it is defending both guys. It helps ensure that cops are outgunned right across America. It preaches hunters' rights in order to defend the distribution of weapons in what is, in effect, a drug-based civil war.

But we who love hunting have much more to fear from the backlash of public opinion caused by the N.R.A.'s pigheadedness than we do from the Government. Sensible hunters see the need to follow the example of other civilized countries. All fireable guns should be licensed; delays and stringent checks should be built into their purchase, right across the board; and some types, including machine guns and semiautomatic assault weapons, should not be available to the civilian public at all. It is time, in this respect, that America enter the 20th century, since it is only a few years away from the 21st.