Within the month, Sheriff Dooley folded, and Glocks were legal on all of Long Island. “Richie Feldman got it done,” Speir recalled.
Feldman did his job as a gun lobbyist with a zeal the NRA famously inspires in its employees and members. Over the years, though, he grew to resent the organization’s top officials. NRA management, Feldman concluded, cared just as much, if not more, about getting members to make financial contributions as it did about protecting gun owners’ rights. “That was one reason that we were all pleased when the anti-gun groups and their media and congressional allies made so many embarrassing technical errors in the protracted ‘plastic gun’ controversy,” Feldman wrote in his spirited memoir, Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist . The NRA used the controversy, he continued, “to spread the incipient fear that the gun grabbers were not just after the Glock 17. Once they used their bogus information to outlaw Glocks (a well-made and expensive pistol), all handguns—revolvers and semiautos alike—would be threatened. Emergency alerts flooded the nation from the [NRA’s] Institute for Legislative Action, and contributions to fight this potential ‘unprecedented’ gun grab poured back into the NRA’s mailroom.”
The NRA’s leaders, Feldman realized, “don’t really want us to educate people on this issue. The association wants to use it as a club to beat the antigunners.” The NRA “had no interest in compromise. It would have been relatively easy to demonstrate to the public that the Glock pistol was no more dangerous than any other weapon. But educating the public—either through elected officials or the media—was not the association’s paramount goal. Its overriding aim was preserving its dominant position as protectors and guardians of the faith, a sort of Knights Templar extraordinaire, of the Second Amendment.”
Opinions like that did not endear him to the NRA’s inner circle. They were weighed with suspicion against the victories he won for the gun lobby. Feldman, for example, had orchestrated an imaginative media campaign on behalf of Bernard Goetz, the New York “Subway Vigilante” who shot four black young men armed with sharpened screwdrivers after they threatened him. Acquitted of serious felonies, Goetz was convicted of a single firearm charge for which he served just eight months in jail. But for every pro-gun public relations triumph, Feldman had two run-ins with his NRA bosses. Forced off the full-time NRA payroll in the late 1980s, he continued to work from time to time as a paid consultant for the organization, finding other employment defending the interests of gun manufacturers and firearm owners.
Part of what made Feldman a bad fit within the NRA was his upbringing in a politically moderate middle-class Jewish family on Long Island. He understood that many patriotic Americans—like his parents—felt little affinity for hunting or guns. As a young man, Feldman supported strong gun control. His views began to shift after college, when he took a job as a deputy tax collector and auxiliary police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The city issued him a .38 Smith & Wesson for making his rounds. He met store owners and other working-class people who kept guns to protect themselves. Feldman decided that their down-to-earth desire for self-defense seemed reasonable.
The American Shooting Sports Council, or ASSC, was a quirky trade group—a rump caucus of firearm wholesalers, retailers, and importers uneasy about the NRA. Its members worried that the NRA’s take-no-prisoners strategy didn’t always promote their best interests. The ASSC advised against incessantly provoking paranoia among gun owners and urged its members to avoid the “annual crises so dear to the NRA.” When Feldman was hired to run the group in 1991, he set up an office in Atlanta, near Glock, Inc., and far from the NRA’s Washington stronghold.
Eager for the membership of any company that would pay dues, Feldman presided over a decidedly mixed constituency. In addition to some of the country’s largest gun-distribution and retail businesses, the ASSC included Intratec, manufacturer of the TEC-9 made famous by crime lords on Miami Vice , and Action Arms, importer of the feared Israeli Uzi. Feldman didn’t discriminate. He also catered to well-established foreign manufacturers, including Heckler & Koch of Germany and Sig Sauer of Switzerland, whose executives were more committed to expansion in the United States than to Second Amendment absolutism. For much the same reason, Smith & Wesson signed on, as did Glock. The latter two, focused as they were on selling to the police, saw a political advantage in crafting a more moderate image.
One point of contention was the availability of federal firearm sales licenses. The NRA ceaselessly fought to make the licenses as widely available as possible. The more people who retailed guns, in the NRA’s view, the more people would buy and own guns—and potentially join the NRA. Feldman, in contrast, argued that the gun industry should try to restrict the number of licenses to include only businesses that owned brick-and-mortar storefronts, paid taxes, and charged full retail prices. Some at-home dealers skimped on recordkeeping and sold to criminals. But that wasn’t Feldman’s or his constituents’ main concern. For purely competitive reasons, the better-established gun dealers who helped pay Feldman’s salary sought to eliminate less formal operators.
He called his group “the kinder, gentler gun lobby,” a clever slogan that helped win favorable press coverage. As a rule, he avoided the NRA’s demonization of the “liberal media” and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He didn’t suggest that government agents dressed in black were plotting to confiscate firearms as part of some larger conspiracy to impose United Nations sovereignty on the United States. Feldman established a reputation as a less extreme voice for business interests, in contrast to the NRA’s bullhorn for continual culture war.
When Bill Clinton was elected president in November 1992, along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, federal gun-control proposals that had been dead on arrival under Republican administrations suddenly became viable. Sensational shooting incidents continued to inject emotion into the firearm debate: In August 1992, FBI agents and deputy US marshals faced off against a family of gun-trafficking white extremists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. In February 1993, federal forces began a violent months-long siege of the heavily armed Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. And in July 1993, a client with a grudge against his former attorneys shot up their tony San Francisco firm, Pettit & Martin.
These events, and the perception that ordinary violent gun crime continued to increase, helped seal the success of the federal Brady Bill, named for James Brady, the White House press secretary grievously injured by gunfire in the 1981 attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Signed by Clinton in November 1993, the law imposed a five-day waiting period and background check for all handgun purchases (thirty-two states until then lacked background check requirements). The Brady Bill obliged the federal government within five years to replace the waiting period with a computerized “instant check” system overseen by the FBI.
NRA purists declared Brady a dire threat to individual liberty, tantamount to the repeal of the Second Amendment. Feldman took a calmer position. He bemoaned the temporary waiting period but embraced the instant-check system, which would apply to all firearms, handguns and long guns. A quick records check should only inconvenience criminals and nuts, Feldman argued. It would not seriously interfere with lawful sales. To mollify the NRA, he cried some crocodile tears in public about a section of the law that increased firearm sales license fees, but, in fact, Feldman’s retailer members quietly applauded the change. The higher fees helped reduce the ranks of kitchen-table dealers.