Cease Fire
Page 3 of 3
|
|
Metaksa worked for the NRA from 1977 to 1979 as director of state and local affairs for the Institute for Legislative Action, and then served for a year as its deputy executive director. According to the Washington Post, she was ousted in 1980 by then-President Harlon Carter for being too aggressive.
After a decade out of the NRA leadership, Metaksa returned in 1991 as a member of the NRA board of directors. She was the object of an internal controversy in 1993, when her computer company, Bullet Communications, was, in a no-bid contract, awarded a $90,000 consultancy fee for establishing the Institute's electronic bulletin board, GunTalk. But she triumphed, overwhelming her critics. In 1994, she became head of the ILA. Her climb was swift and silent: In Osha Gray Davidson's authoritative 1993 book, Under Fire: The NRA & the Battle for Gun Control, the woman who would soon become director of one of the most powerful single-issue lobbies in America is given one slight mention.
Eighty-four people work for her, in eight divisions; four division directors are women. (Close to 80 percent of the NRA membership is male.)
The unpaid president of the NRA, Marion Hammer, is also a woman. Yet, although she has been given much more publicity than Tanya Metaksa, hers is clearly the subordinate task. Hammer has revived and presides over the NRA's youth-training and safety programs. She provided the inspiration for Eddie Eagle, the NRA's goofy sneaker-clad mascot. Eddie Eagle is not where the power is. Metaksa's Institute is where the power is.
We are talking again of her enemies.
"Tanya, you are ice," I tell her.
"Fire," she says.
"Do you think you are tough?" I ask.
"I am tough," she says. "Why are women who complain or make waves called bitches, while the men are called tough and uncompromising? Because I've gotten into this line of business, I'm a bogeyman to a lot of women on the left. I find that sort of strange." She says of Gloria Steinem: "I think we probably have more in common than we have apart."
"I am not a victim," Tanya tells me. "I have not been raped, assaulted, or anything else, and I have never had to defend myself. I'm lucky. But if you look at the stories of women who've defended themselves because they have been stalked or attacked -- I'm very interested in the stories of women -- you'll find these women were pushed to the wall and had nowhere to go. How can I get you to believe this?"
But what about assault weapons; why should I have to have an Uzi?
"You don't have to have one any more than you have to have a Rolls. You should have one if you want one."
Metaksa regards Clinton's assault weapons ban as an example of how "semantics is everything in politics.... There is a military definition of an assault weapon -- a fully automatic firearm used in time of war by the ordinary soldier. The problem is that the term has been taken by a very clever man named Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center and made into a buzzword for any gun you want to ban. So an assault gun is one thing in New Jersey and another in California. One gun may have one little decorative hickey on it, 1/4 inch long, and another may not; and that cosmetic difference is the difference between an assault gun and a gun that is not banned. Stupid. Our enemies must stay up all night dreaming up these things."
"Listen," she says, "there are about a quarter of a million Americans who legally own machine guns. They don't use their machine guns for criminal activities. They have shoots. Machine guns are fun to shoot. I mean, you really can waste that ammo."
What about "copkiller" bullets, bullets that can pierce armor? "Soft body armor," she says, "vests. Semantics again. Most bullets will penetrate a vest. If you take a hunting rifle, which is designed to shoot at a large animal -- a deer -- it will penetrate a vest. Most cops have been killed in the head. You don't wear body armor on your head."
And why does the NRA oppose "taggants," particles mixed in with gunpowder that can be used to trace explosives used by terrorists? "They haven't been adequately tested. If there is a credible study, I'll accept them. But only in commercial explosives. Many of our people make their own ammunition from bulk powders, you know."
Why do they? This brings us inevitably back to terrorism.
Tanya Metaksa bristles when I ask her about Timothy McVeigh. (On the envelope of a letter to his congressman ranting about the necessity for self-defense was a decal proclaiming I'M THE NRA.) "There's no ties between the NRA and anybody," she tells me. "It's an association.... People join.... People leave...."
She asks me if I have considered that the real terrorists are the government thugs who brought apocalyptic devastation to Waco and to Ruby Ridge, "infringing on other people's human rights."
"I am a civil libertarian," she says. "I do not understand the ACLU's reluctance to believe that the Second Amendment is just as important as the First Amendment. They wiffle-waffle. I believe the Bill of Rights is a seamless fabric. They should be on our side.
"You think you had it hard in the '60s when you were protesting the Vietnam War? Look at us in the '90s."
Later, she asks: "What kind of an article are you going to write? It will be fair, won't it? Are you going to be fair? I never hear back from the people who write about me, and, having read their articles, I can see why."
The next time I see Metaksa after our meeting in New York is in her nondescript office at the NRA's brilliant-blue glass building in Fairfax, Virginia. In the lobby, a plentitude of stuffed deer heads; in the hallways, sepia prints of past presidents of the NRA, the men Charlton Heston calls "our beloved dead old white men."
I have come from the office of NRA President Marion Hammer. Blue-eyed, her hair cut like that of the boy on a can of Dutchboy paint, her voice rusty and low, Hammer presides over an office that is personal, eccentric, and kitschy: plaster models of eagles with bright yellow beaks; pictures of her blond daughters, Rhonda, Colleen, and Sally (hair big and Texas-wild); a bronze sculpture by Eddie Dixon called "Buffalo Soldier"; an American flag; bowls of candy.
Tanya sits alone in her office, which, compared to Hammer's, is plain. All the energy in the office seems to reside in her computer.
She is frothing because President Clinton wishes to add perpetrators of domestic violence and spousal battering to the list of those disallowed the purchase of a handgun by the Brady bill. "Domestic violence," says Tanya -- whose own logic is a source of refreshment to her -- "is a misdemeanor in some states and a felony in others. If they want to go ahead and make domestic violence a felony, OK; but you can't have different standards for different states. It's stupid."
She takes me down to the shooting range, a kind of cement bunker, which, with an absence of irony, she proudly calls "ecologically friendly." I walk to the rear of the range with her, where running water, a kind of diabolical waterfall, rinses away the detritus of expended bullets. My back, as we walk away from the shooting gallery and the guns she has brought with her -- a rifle, a .22 semiautomatic, and a .38 revolver -- feels naked and unprotected. "Is your back prickling?" I ask. "No," she says.
She has made a calculated decision not to have me practice shooting at a paper figure of a man, sheets of which the range is liberally equipped with. I shoot, first with the .22 semiautomatic, then with the rifle, at conventional, circular targets.
I find myself unable even to hold her .38 revolver. It is loathsome to me. I go back to the .22. It jams. Either the magazine or the ammo is defective. "So tell me, Tanya, what happens when some motherfucker walks toward you with a gun in his hand and your goddamn gun jams?"
"You drop the gun and run like hell," Tanya says, unfazed. "Look at the nice small holes this gun makes," she says. "Very nice, symmetrical holes."
It is after the shoot. We are sitting in a cool, dark Tex-Mex restaurant.
"Why do people hate me?" Tanya asks.
"Hate you?"
"Hate me. Hate the NRA. Hate me."
After a long pause, so uncomfortable as to be excruciating, she starts to answer her own question: "We are the only bulwark...." Her eyes are squeezed tight against the murky light.
"I don't take it personally," she says.
