Fear, Paranoia and Loathing: Inside the NRA's 2013 Convention

May 8, 2013  |  

HOUSTON – To swing the door on a National Rifle Association annual meeting is to enter a world where Freedom comes from a gun. The gun’s purpose is not important. It doesn’t have to be American made. It can be any number of shapes, so long as it has a grip, a trigger, and a barrel. But only from a gun barrel can Freedom flow. In the words of multiple NRA members who confronted protestors this past weekend, “The Second Amendment is the one thing protecting the First.”

Last May in St. Louis, NRA leaders pounded away at this idea in a torrent of Apocalyptic warnings about the consequences of failure in the November elections. A year later, gathering two weeks after helping defeat the biggest effort to strengthen gun laws in a generation, the same men delivered the NRA’s Second Amendment gospel with a newfound swagger. Unchanged was the primacy of guns and gun rights in the NRA’s understanding of the world and everything in it. In his opening speech, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre described the gun enthusiasts before him as “Freedom’s biggest army, greatest hope, and brightest future.” The group’s chief lobbyist-strategist, the boyish Tennessean Chris Cox, celebrated the convention as “the biggest celebration ever of American values,” whose 86,000-plus attendees embodied “the essence of participation in American democracy.”

NRA summits involve leadership votes and platform debates, but NRA-style democracy isn’t about those things alone. It’s also about the guns that make it possible. Which is why NRA conventions feature an exhibition hall packed with hundreds of booths displaying Freedom’s latest fashions – what the group calls “the most spectacular displays of firearms, shooting and hunting accessories in the world.”

The big story on the floor this year was the post-election sales bounce following Sandy Hook and a revitalized gun violence debate. Companies that had reduced production to normal post-election levels in November were blindsided by

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet