Report from L.A.

The Gun Rights Policy Conference 2005

By Cindy Ellen Hill

Friday, September 23, 2005

1:00 p.m. Vermont (“real”) time

I am in the Burlington airport, on my way to speak at a conference in Los Angeles. The Twentieth Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference, to be exact. I am flying courtesy of Paladin Press and the Second Amendment Foundation. Paladin (www.paladin-press.com) published my handbook about Brady background check law for gun owners, Brady Denial? You CAN Get Your Guns Back. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are the conference sponsors, supported by numerous other organizations and businesses including Women and Guns magazine, whose publisher Julianne Versnel Gottlieb will serve as master of ceremonies for the event.

I am nervous over more than the flight. Despite being a, well, let’s face it, ‘gun nut,’ I am for all intents and purposes a liberal. A union-supporting Irish Democrat of generations of union-supporting Irish Democrats, disgusted enough by the Clinton administration to throw in the towel on the Party and run with the Progressives. Pro-choice, environmental activist, anti-death penalty, civil libertarian… I grew up shooting. I believe strongly that all ten Amendments to the United States Constitution which comprise the Bill of Rights work together; that means the Second Amendment securing the right to keep and bear arms is there to enforce the other nine against governmental intrusion. This latter concept seems to be where I lose many of my liberal friends and somehow wind up as the darling of the right wing.

Since publishing this book, I’ve done numerous radio interviews. Except for the one with Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (which exists to remind us of the horrifying relationship of gun control and governmental tyranny), all of these interviews have been with entities best described as “Conservative Christian.” I am neither, which caused some tongue-biting moments.

But this conference means an entire weekend surrounded by firearms activists, which could only mean the evangelical right. I wondered if they’d run this pagan Vermonter out on a rail.

7:30 p.m. LAX time

The plane left Burlington late for no apparent reason. The couple seated next to me, a young doctor doing his residency and his lovely first-time-pregnant wife, are also headed to a conference. We chat about childbirth and breastfeeding and ear infections. They ask where I’m going. I tell them, to speak at a gun rights conference. They respond with a polite, “oh”, while looking like deer caught in headlights. I want to say, ‘it’s okay, I’m really a nice person,’ but I don’t.

The conference is at the LAX Marriott - I check in and change into what I hope passes for cocktail reception attire; I wonder if people are smirking at me.

I pass by the reception ballroom twice to scope it out and gather my nerve before walking up to the registration table. There seems to be a wide range of attire, and more women present than I expected, though men – some wearing shooting vests, others in cowboy costumes – clearly dominate the room. Food seems to consist of some hunk of pink flesh going around on a spit – not what this vegetarian wanted to see after mere peanuts on the plane. I sign in and the earnest young table-worker recognizes the name. I get a big red ribbon that says “Speaker”. Keeping a low profile will be right out.

I step in and am immediately met by Joe Tartaro, president of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). We had never been face to face, though I’ve emailed him for years. I don’t know what I expected, but he’s straight out of Goodfellas. White hair and drooping mustache heavily tobacco-stained, pinstriped suit with slightly sagging shoulders. He sweeps me up and I’m off, meeting the other people who are on my presentation panel, various other speakers, people who were waiting to meet me. After about fifteen minutes of high-energy chatter I mention that I haven’t eaten yet. Joe offers to buy me a drink.

The bartender is from Ecuador. We chat in Spanish and I get a Canadian rye after complaining jokingly about the lack of Irish whiskey. I notice several harsh glances tossed my way during this exchange. I wonder whether it’s for the lousy quality of my Spanish or whether this is an anti-Irish institution. Hmmm, is Los Angeles Loyalist territory? I couldn’t imagine why it would be.

I return to the fray, circulating through the thinning crowds, looking for other people with speaker badges to introduce myself to. By accident I bump into Alan Korwin, another guy I know only through email. Alan runs a website, www.gunlaws.com that sells another of my books, A Gun Owners Guide to the Laws of Vermont. We’ve had some prior email debates about the Minutemen (the volunteer bands who patrol the southern U.S. border supposedly doing citizen enforcement of immigration laws by identifying and reporting illegal immigrants); suddenly, I realize from the conversation he’s engaged in that he’s actually a Minuteman himself. We find common ground and chat about music – I play Irish pub music and he has a band, that does conservative political satire covers of pop songs, called the Cartridge Family.

Finally I find myself sitting at a table with five guys deep in conversation about firearms law, and I realize we’re the only people left in the ballroom besides the cadre of dark-eyed, dark-haired waiters waiting politely for us to leave so they can strip the table. I pull off the table cloth and take it over to the pile of linens so they can get it down to the laundry. One of the guys I’ve been chatting with snarls, “Don’t do that, it’s not like they’ve got anything else to do.” The frowns while I was ordering my drink slip back into mind, and suddenly I’m putting two and two together. There are apparently “us”es and “them”s in the room and protocols for interaction. I’m breaking rules I didn’t know existed.

I stop at the gift shop on the way back to my room. Then it’s off to bed. So far, no one has tried to convert me.

Saturday September 24, 2005

7:30 a.m.

In the light of day I notice what I’d missed the night before: the entire hotel staff is Hispanic. They sport name tags with their first names and, inexplicably, their country of origin: Mexico, Guatamala, Ecuador. I’ve never seen this before. The waitresses at the Midway Diner in Rutland, for instance, do not bear name tags saying “Lydia – Bennington County USA”. I’m reminded of governmental labeling requirements for garment manufacture. The connection troubles me.

There are a few non-Caucasian conventioneers wandering through the chairs, but not many. There are fewer women than the night before; of course, I realize, the wives came to the cocktail party. But there are some women, and a few children, among the 700 or so attendees.

I grumble loudly at the lack of Irish breakfast tea, and choose Earl Gray over English Breakfast, testing my L.A. loyalist theory. I attract the attention of a California criminal defense lawyer, whose wife is a Sinn Feiner from Northern Ireland. We chat about the recent IRA disarmament; more common ground.

Taking my seat, I find a pile of books and pamphlets topped off by a bumpersticker: Border Control Not Gun Control. I set it aside, not interested. The American flag is brought in by members of the Single Action Shooters Society, a recreational organization in which members adopt the persona of a real or fictional western person of the Great American West era. The founder of the St. Gabriel Possenti Society (the patron saint of handgunners) gives an invocation. We are underway.

There are national, international, and state gun laws and legislative updates. Information, data, florescent lights, uncomfortable chairs. Then Wayne LaPierre, notorious vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) hit the podium. I’d never liked the man; his books advocate curtailing Constitutional criminal due process rights like bail and appeal supposedly, in his opinion, to reduce crime and make gun control unnecessary. I don’t believe in selling off other Constitutional rights to save the Second Amendment, which is meaningless on its own. I’m prepared to hate him as he speaks. But he comes out with a different topic: Post-Katrina New Orleans.

For those of you who might have missed this detail, in the aftermath of Katrina, law enforcement agencies instituted a house-by-house search in New Orleans and removed firearms. Houses in which resided lawfully licensed firearms owners in possession of lawfully purchased legal firearms. Although the city was not under ‘martial law’, this was declared some manner of so-called emergency measure. For anyone concerned with gun rights – or with civil liberties of any kind – this unprecedented search and seizure of private property by government agents without warrant or good cause sends chills to the bone. The NRA and the SAF sued and sought a temporary injunction against this governmental disarmament of the lawful citizenry. LaPierre was there to announce that the temporary injunction had just been won in the federal district court. By the time he was done, the crowd was on its feet, chanting ‘Remember New Orleans’.

Chanting ran counter to my Yankee sensibilities, but I applauded.

Noon

Box lunches are brought in, even vegetarian selections. While we eat, the nationally-syndicated radio talk show host Michael Reagan speaks. He’s the son of Ronald Reagan who doesn’t dance. He talks mainly about his father’s death, how awful it was, how kind everyone was about it, how God told him what to say at the funeral because he hadn’t prepared remarks before hand, etc. When he’s done, the audience is on its feet. I don’t want to appear rude, so I too stand up quietly.

Then comes the Pink Panel. The theme of the conference is “Expanding Gun Ownership” and this is the first panel on reaching out to new constituencies; in this case, the constituency under discussion is women. It’s a panel of three gorgeous authors: Debbie Ferns (Babes with Bullets), Paxton Quigley (Armed and Female and Stayin’ Alive), and C.J. Songer, a mystery novelist who frequently writes for Women and Guns.

All three tell similar stories: they were either opposed to or purely ambivalent about guns, until they went out shooting with friends and became absolutely hooked. They shoot for sport and advocate that women be trained in firearms use for self defense. All three seem pretty normal, and Songer even admits to being a Democrat. Their advice is simple: offer to take someone who might express fear or even opposition to guns out shooting. They’ll either love it, or at the least have a better basis for understanding and communication. Real simple. Good message.

During the break I introduce myself to Ferns, who is sporting hot-pink cowboy boots. We bond instantly.

Before I know it, it’s time for my panel, built around the theme of my book. I can’t resist opening with a few remarks about being from the Republic of Vermont. I tell them that many of the things they’ve been talking about at the conference are quite alien to Vermont. Take firearms registration and permitting, for instance. In Vermont, if you misuse a firearm you go to jail. If not, then so be it, we don’t need permits. In Vermont, we don’t want Minutemen traipsing through our fields looking for illegal aliens in our barns. What’s in our barns is None Of Your Business. Buy your own field and traipse through it. And in Vermont, we can still shoot pickerel, though it requires both a hunting and a fishing license, apparently.

After confusing them on these finer points of Vermont culture, I talked about Brady background check law. Anyone purchasing a firearm from a licensed firearm dealer must go through this background check, which is done by a branch of the FBI searching millions of records in various databases, and attempts to pre-determine if the gun purchaser is prohibited by law from legally possessing a firearm.

Much of the media would have you believe that this is an easy distinction to make, but it’s not; the law regarding who’s disqualified from having a firearm, and the quality of the records in the databases, is very, very confusing. A person can easily be disqualified and not know it, and on top of that, as in any huge database, factual mistakes are made. But getting a Brady denial, even if it’s in error, can mean having your guns seized, forfeited, and destroyed, or even with you winding up charged with a serious federal crime.

Another common misconception about Brady denial law is that only serious criminals aren’t allowed to have guns. There are nine categories of disqualifications; only two of the nine are for crimes, the other seven are non-criminal disqualifications (such as being someone who any law enforcement agency has noted as a ‘known drug user,’ even if you have no criminal record whatsoever; or having been at any time adjudicated mentally incompetent). Many of these categories of disqualifications are raising records privacy issues and are of concern to many groups that previously might not have gotten involved in a ‘gun rights’ issue. For example, the uploading of Veteran’s Administration records regarding medical discharges based on mental health issues such as battle fatigue in the Viet Nam war era into the Brady databanks raises the spectre of mass breaches of medical privacy which has attracted the attention of veteran’s groups and medical privacy advocates.

My talk flew by. I got a very hearty round of applause, but no one chanted. That was fine with me.

I was followed by Sandy Froman, the new president of the NRA. This lovely, petite Jewish woman could not be farther from the image of Charlton Heston. I am a life member of the NRA, despite everything – and this development heartened me.

7:30 p.m.

My feet are aching from high heels and I remember why I hate pantyhose so much. I walk into the ballroom again for yet another cash-bar-eat-on-your-feet reception. As I walk in, Luis the Ecuadorian bartender smiles broadly in a display of genuine warmth that seems remarkably out of place in this dull white-guys-in-suits-under-florescent-lights assembly. He gestures to the shelf behind him, where a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey has been installed. He not only understood my rotten Spanish the night before, he’d remembered. I promptly procured a large glass of the stuff and very deliberately circulated the room speaking Spanish to every staff person I could find, just because I was feeling puckish.

In the room next door, there is a dinner reception going on with a theme of renewing U.S.-Iran relations. The hallway is filled with stunning middle eastern women in silk and gold-thread saris and ball gowns. They’ve clearly spent the day resting, going to the beauty parlor, and dressing for this grand event. I see that some of the gun guys – even some of the cowboys – were deliberately wandering through the Iranian crowd, on the assumption that Homeland Security would be watching the gathering. Apparently I’m not the only one feeling puckish.

Eventually I find Debbie Ferns, who is there with one of her closest female friends and that woman’s twenty-ish daughter. We fill our plates with fruit and cheese and sit down together. A guy comes up and before he can finish his sentence asking to sit down with us, we’ve collectively barked “NO” at him. He slumps away and we laugh, and for half an hour we are an oasis of chatting and laughing female companionship surrounded by a sea of white gun guys and Hispanic wait staff swirling around us. We talk about shooting, but also about family and marriage and shopping and food and which of the guys at the conference are cads and which are geeks and which seem like pretty nice folks.

But my work is not over. At 8:30 I’m off to another conference room, this time to give a workshop for lawyers and law students on representing clients who have Brady database record issues. I wind up with a pretty full room of very interested people who also include a few police officers and one guy who declines to identify himself, but appears to be a conservative version of Michael Moore. This should have given me a clue, but it didn’t. So far as I could tell, he was a large, disheveled, loud, somewhat obnoxious individual who kept interrupting my presentation with irrelevant questions. I wound up resorting to serious attorney mode to shut him up.

My program was open-ended, and it didn’t end until 11:00. Then it was time to visit the various organizational hospitality suites. The large interrupting person was making his presence known at these as well.

At least three different people have asked me how come if Vermont is so wonderfully pro-gun and conservative it can elect people like that gay liberal guy Barney Frank. I’ve patiently explained that although I don’t personally have a problem with Barney Frank, he’s not from Vermont, and that in fact there are plenty of gay people from just about every state, and not all of them are from Vermont. I have further explained that Vermonters are very fond of their Congressional delegation, which comprises Jim Jeffords, Bernie Sanders, and Pat Leahy. The lights go on: You mean, Jim Jeffords the turncoat? Bernie Sanders who voted for the Assault Weapons Ban? Pat Leahy the Democrat on Judiciary? You’re damn straight, I tell them. And we love every one of them, return them by huge margins every election because they’re decent people and we trust them.

This confuses my questioners just about as much as pickerel shooting, if not more so.

At least ten people asked me about moving to Vermont. What’s land going for? What are the schools like? By sheer coincidence, my digital camera still had on it the photos I’d taken the week before of sunset over the Adirondacks from the Bernie Sanders birthday cruise on Lake Champlain. I played them back and passed them around. Audible sighs.

At least twenty people said, God bless you for all this work you’re doing for our rights.... To which I told them thanks, but She already had.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

8:00 a.m.

The conference coordinators are running around with stern looks on their faces and clipboards of paperwork; apparently communications with the hotel are not running smoothly. Perhaps they should try speaking Spanish. Just a thought.

Up comes the panel on Illegal Immigration, Crime, and Terrorism. This is where it falls apart for me, along the lines of “all these illegal immigrants are coming to America to steal our jobs by not working, collecting welfare, and committing crimes and acts of terrorism like September 11th.” Let me count the ways. I remember a conversation I had a few years back with a federal marshal who told me that they shouldn’t bother with airport security for everybody because it’s obvious who these guys are and they don’t have names that sound like yours and mine. Yeah, I answered then, and I answered silently now. Guys like Tim McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph. Yeah, I can see why you want to keep guys like that out of the country, and how they are so easy to spot in a crowd. Yeah, let’s bring in a team of crackpot feds and vigilantes and bust up the immigrant neighborhoods looking for those people, you know, the kind who speak Spanish.

Alan Korwin got up and started singing his gospel spoof entitled “Miguel Row Your Coke Ashore.” At least one out of every five staff persons on the ball room floor of the hotel was, according to their name tags, named Miguel. Although I was not the person singing, I was mortified. I walked out and up to the lobby to look for coffee. I found a Starbucks. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, I whispered. But when I opened my eyes, it was still only Starbucks.

A long winded campaign speech by U.S. Senator Larry Craig, R-Idaho, which contained derogatory references to his Judiciary Committee colleague Pat Leahy, D-Vermont, closed the conference, and not a moment too soon.

I wait for the shuttle bus back to the airport terminal, and I chat with the bellhop – Miguel from Mexico – while I wait. He says it’s a great place to work, he’s been there 23 years and now has cut down his hours there and taken a higher-paying desk job at another nearby hotel. He says people stay working at the Marriott a long time, they are good to their people, and the employees all bring in their siblings and kids and cousins and get them jobs there so it’s like one big family.

8:00 p.m.

I’m sitting on the floor in the glass bridge between terminals of LAX, reading my second novel of the weekend. I am on my second pair of socks, having knit through the conference talks.

About every five minutes an LAX police officer walks by. These guys sport perfectly coiffed hair, and wear their guns “tactical style,” like cowboys, in holsters down on their thighs. Most of them have huge guns and the safety straps that are supposed to be snapped across the butt of the gun are unsnapped. And most of them have lunch in one hand, shopping bags in the other, and a cell phone in the third, which is confusing, but hey, it’s L.A. and I don’t even know what day it is anymore. Meaning, their guns are flopping unattended. In between the cops, families are wandering by. The toddlers are also at my eye level, at exactly the same height as the guns. All this hype about airport security, and these guys are a walking menace. No terrorist would have to try to sneak guns into LAX, all they’d have to do is lift a couple off a cop as he walked by talking on his cell phone about what party he was going to that night. I do not feel secure. I do feel like I really want a shower.

Monday September 26th 2005

unknown

I flew all night from LA to Newark. The Newark airport security personnel have normal haircuts and guns securely fastened at their belts. I feel like I’m back in my own country again.

I got bumped from my morning flight from Newark to Burlington. I get a free lunch ticket and a travel voucher for my trouble.

I watch a Filipino short-order cook flinging eggs and hot peppers at an omelette joint. It’s hypnotic. I tell him he’s awesome and he smiles, says he’s been doing this 26 years and appreciates the compliment.

I think about the illegal immigration issue that the gun guys were so wound up about. Between fuming at the speakers, I’d learned that 1.6 million illegal immigrants enter the U.S. every year with the intent to remain, many more than those who enter legally. The crime rate among those communities is high; many of them are the victims of illegal human trafficking and sweat shop labor, many of them are the victims of unscrupulous landlords, gang protection rackets, and outright exploitation. The liberal cry of being ‘pro-immigrant’ and therefore opposed to measures tightening border controls does not help the poor people who are in this position.

I start to get mad at myself: am I going soft towards the Minutemen schpiel? No, but I’m compelled to admit its more complicated that I had originally thought. If those 1.6 million people are coming in every year, then we need to acknowledge that and let them come in safely, with dignity. Or start seriously buying our oil from Mexico to improve their economy and make it less necessary for people from beyond our southern borders to come here. I buy an omelette with my lunch ticket, with extra hot peppers in it, and I pour on the Tabasco sauce.

I think about the LAX police guns dangling at the same level as toddler’s eyes, and I know why there is a large gun control movement. We love our kids and fear for them, and nothing invokes fear better than things which are beyond our control. We’ll accept the extraordinary death toll of automobiles on our kids lives, because we have a sense that we control our automobiles and therefore we can make it safe. We fear that New York minute in which a small stray piece of lead might end our child’s life, even if that’s significantly more remote a possibility than getting hit by a truck at the end of the block.

So if we make rules about gun ownership, we somehow feel better about it, more in control. We think that if we can just stop those other people, those people who carry guns, those people who come from somewhere else and don’t speak English, those people who swirl around us without following our sense of order in such a way that we can feel confident that life is progressing as it should, then all will be right with the world. When we live in a place and in such a way that everything is out of our control, when we can not choose what we eat and what we hear and where we work and what we do, then we want to control what other people do in the hopes that it will all make sense.

Monday, September 26th, 2005

8:00 p.m., Real Time

I am home with my guns and my books and my woodstove and my daughter and my pickerel-shooting husband. I have my Green Mountain Coffee Roasters coffee set for the morning’s brewing, my dinner from the jars in the pantry filled with food from my garden, my jeans and my clogs that definitely were not featured in that issue of Vogue that I read.

I sit down at the computer, and delete the photos of the sunset from the Bernie Cruise and chuckle to myself that the next time I see Bernie I’ll tell him that the guys in California think he’s Barney Frank. I don’t need the pictures anymore, the fading rays of the autumn sun are glowing on the Bristol Cliffs ridgeline right outside my window. There are no palm trees, no designer shorts, and no one wearing tags indicating their country of origin.

It all makes sense.