Happiness Is a Warm Gun
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The conference room was absolutely silent as Hupp told how she instinctively reached for her purse, where she usually kept her gun. Everyone knew what had happened next. “I realized that a few moments earlier I’d made the stupidest decision of my life. My gun was one hundred yards away in my car, totally useless to me.” George Hennard shot and killed 23 people that day, including Hupp’s mother and father, before he killed himself. Hupp escaped out a broken window. “I gotta tell you,” she continued, “after all these years, I’m still not mad at the guy who did it. We’re talking about a guy who went nuts. …But I immediately—the quote from me in the paper the next day was, ‘I’m mad as hell at my legislators, because they have legislated me out of my right to protect myself and my family.’ I still get angry when I think of the stupid decision that I made to follow a very bad law.” She did something about it, testifying extensively for changing the law so that citizens could carry a concealed handgun. Texas made it legal in 1995, and she was elected to the state House a year later. “A gun is not a guarantee,” Hupp said. “But, by God, it sure changes your life.”
AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, a gathering of 60,000 pro-gun fanatics will draw a few protesters. Two of them showed up on Friday and four on Saturday—including the two from Friday. On Saturday afternoon Pam Olson and another woman (who asked not to be identified) walked back and forth on a sidewalk directly in front of the convention center taking turns carrying a sign that read on one side “Over 2,000 Children Were Killed Last Year From Gunshots” and on the other “Actually, Guns Do Kill People.” “I used to be a hunter,” said Olson. “But the proliferation of guns is devaluing human life. I’m not saying banish guns. I’m saying there are too many guns. Why do people have to have so many?” At one point a man with a convention badge approached and, pointing up at the words “Actually, Guns Do Kill People,” said, “You’re absolutely right, Miss, and you’re lucky they do. Otherwise you’d be living under Hitler.” A car drove by and another man yelled out, “Guns don’t kill people! People kill people!”
On a corner across from the entrance stood the other two protesters, each carrying a sign. Linda Abdmoulaie’s read “Why So Many Guns, Christians? Why So Many Killings?” She wanted to know why there were only four protesters out on a beautiful, sunny, 80-degree day. Where were the people from groups like Texans for Gun Safety and the Million Mom March? “Where are all the parents of children who’ve died from guns?” she asked. Another protester’s sign read “A loaded gun in the home is 22 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” He said he had been called a faggot ten times that day: “I’ll have to tell my wife.”
Two men in their forties, each wearing convention badges, approached and began a conversation with him. “Basically,” the first summarized, “it boils down to this: You need to trust you and your family to protect yourselves. You can’t trust the government. If you have an intruder or a run-in with unsavory people, you can’t depend on the government. So you have to be prepared to take care of your family.” To Abdmoulaie he asked, “Who’s going to take care of you when you have a problem?”
She replied, “I trust the police.” The man made a face. She tried another tactic: “Besides, Jesus doesn’t want you walking around with a bunch of guns.”
The second man chuckled. “He doesn’t say that to me.”
The first man continued. “Do you know what happened in England and Canada when they outlawed guns?” His voice took on a slightly mocking tone. “How do you spell ‘kumbaya’? ‘Let’s all love each other.’”
Abdmoulaie said, “We’re all good Christians.”
“Yes, we’re all good Christians,” agreed the man. “But we’ve got to protect ourselves.”
Later, on Saturday night, about a hundred more protesters showed up, but they weren’t there about the guns. They had come to protest Tom DeLay, who was giving the keynote address at the Members Banquet at the Hilton, next to the convention center. It was the event everyone was waiting for, the climax of the weekend. DeLay, one of the NRA’s biggest allies, was under siege, and as attendees arrived on the fourth floor of the hotel, they were given adhesive buttons that read “I’m for NRA & Tom DeLay.”
I sat on a couch in the reception area next to a group of people drinking, chatting, and watching the protesters four stories below. “They’re trying to Gingrich him,” said a man sitting next to me. I asked if he thought they’d succeed. “I don’t know. He’s tough.” A woman turned and looked down. “If they can’t get a better protest than that,” she said, “it’s pretty pathetic.” A couple of young men came to the window. “I got a good shot at one,” joked the first. “Get rid of liberals!” yelled the other.
The man next to me, Phillip Meabon, was a retired schoolteacher from Magnolia, a bedroom community thirty miles northwest of Houston. He said he had three master’s degrees and five pistols, all .22’s. He was a lifetime member of the NRA. “There are kooks on both sides of the issue,” he said. “I’m a little right of center, but not too far.” Why, I asked him, is it so important to carry a gun? “Well,” he said, “it’s important, first, because it’s one of my rights. And second, it’s really a whole lot of fun. It’s something to do with my retirement time. It’s my hobby—going hunting, going out with my buddies to the shooting range. You meet the kind of people who think like you do. I really enjoy the people. If you meet each one of those guys,” he said, motioning to the growing crowd waiting for the banquet, “you won’t find a terrible jerk. You’ll find some rednecks, maybe find some felons. But most are good, upstanding citizens.”
Of course, he said, there was also the self-protection angle. I asked if he had ever been in danger. “No. We were vandalized once. But my wife can protect herself now. I taught her. She knows that if she hears someone in the house and she knows it’s not me—she won’t shoot him, but she’ll fire the gun.” At the ceiling? “Through the door. I told her fire through the door. I can always replace a door. The police are there for the after.”
THE BIG GUNS WERE brought out for the banquet. John O’Neill, a spokesman for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, was introduced, and President Bush was there too, at least on video. After his short greeting was played, LaPierre asked the audience of 2,550, “Isn’t it great to have a friend of freedom in the White House?” Then Kay Bailey Hutchison said a few words. “Before I start,” she began, “I wanted to tell you that the AP has reported the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert from ‘run’ to ‘hide.’” The crowd laughed. “Higher levels in France are ‘surrender’ and ‘collaborate.’”
When DeLay finally spoke, he received an extended standing ovation. He called being the keynote speaker at the NRA convention in his hometown the highlight of his career and made a couple of references to his troubles. “When a man’s in trouble or in a good fight, you want all your friends around you—preferably armed.” The audience laughed. “So I feel really good.” And then DeLay, the feared attack dog of the right, gave the most even-tempered speech of the entire weekend. “We don’t always understand each other,” he said, “and when we disagree, we have a tendency to question the sincerity of our opponent’s position. This is especially true in the debate about the right of the American people to keep and bear arms.” He talked about how people who grew up hunting see guns as a part of life, a way for fathers and sons to spend time together, not a tool for violence. “Our fellow countrymen,” he said, “have no point of reference that gives them any insight to understand why we feel so strongly about the right to bear arms. We certainly don’t have to agree with those who seek to deny us our Second Amendment rights, but we do have to remember that while our opponents’ policy initiatives may be bad, that doesn’t mean our opponents are bad people.”
This moral relativism—from the Hammer, no less—sounded positively Clinton-esque. DeLay launched into his remarks on the Second Amendment. He had been talking smoothly and calmly up to this point, but now, as he read the actual text of the amendment, he began to stutter and misread the words he knew so well. Then he tried three times to pronounce the name of an eighteenth-century Italian jurist named Cesare Beccaria whom Thomas Jefferson had once quoted on the foolishness of gun control. DeLay gave up and moved on. The rest of his short talk revisited the same NRA talking points—“people aren’t killed by guns, they’re killed by people”—spoken haltingly as if read from a piece of paper with really small type. He finished with, “Freedom. God gives it, the Constitution guarantees it, and together we will defend it.” DeLay was given one final standing ovation and then presented with an old flintlock rifle, which he raised high above his head, just like Heston used to do.
An hour later the banquet was over, and a couple thousand NRA members spilled out into the spring darkness. Some had guns in their cars, some had them in their purses, and some had them down their pants. It was downtown Houston. It was Saturday night. Anything could happen.
