NRA and Outdoor Writers Have Falling-Out

Head of Gun Group Rebuked For Attack on Sierra Club

SEATTLE, July 9 -- In a spat that could have implications for the presidential campaign, the National Rifle Association has angered a group of opinion makers among America's 50 million hunters and anglers.

The president of the National Rifle Association warned a convention of outdoor writers last month that it should not be seduced by environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, which promise to protect hunting habitat but actually are scheming to ban guns.

"It's pretty hard to hunt without guns," Kayne B. Robinson, president of the NRA, told the Outdoor Writers Association of America at its annual meeting in Spokane, Wash.

At the convention, the Sierra Club had offered to join forces with hunting groups to protect wildlife habitat, a proposal that generated considerable support. But Robinson said the NRA, which has 4 million members, half of whom are hunters, would never cooperate with the Sierra Club, which he suggested was trying to "hoodwink hunters into voting for gun ban candidates."

Robinson's remarks have prompted an unprecedented rebuke from the Outdoor Writers, a 77-year-old group of newspaper, magazine, radio and TV commentators who for decades have had a somewhat fawning relationship with the NRA. Many are longtime NRA members and contributors to its publications.

The writers' board of directors voted 11 to 4 to send Robinson a letter "expressing our disappointment in your harsh criticism of fellow OWAA supporting member Sierra Club." The June 30 letter described his comments as "inappropriate."

Since the late June convention, several outdoor columnists, writing in their own newspapers, have lambasted Robinson's speech. They also have said his accusation that environmental groups have a stealth plan to ban hunting guns was alarmist and false.

"The National Rifle Association locked, loaded and fired its best shot at the Sierra Club . . . only to have the blast explode in its face," wrote Tom Stienstra in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"The NRA continues to blindly advocate 'Vote your gun.' So narrow. So sad," wrote Rich Landers, outdoors editor of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane. Landers observed that Robinson's "bull-headed polarizing rhetoric" occasioned "a good deal of eye-rolling" at the convention.

Asked to comment on the criticism, Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the NRA, said that Robinson "provided reasonable commentary in an honest, factual and civil manner. The glaring anomaly here is individuals with journalism backgrounds wanting to choke off the oxygen of free speech."

Also fueling the anger in Spokane -- and injecting presidential politics into the argument -- was Robinson's assertion that hunters are being denied access to 26 million acres because of a Clinton-era policy that limits road construction on federal land.

The Bush administration, which has the backing of the NRA in the Nov. 2 election, has moved to limit the roadless rule in national forests. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), President Bush's Democratic challenger, has said he would reinstate all roadless areas.

The Bush and Kerry campaigns are courting hunters and anglers, whose numbers are large in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania and who tend to turn out to vote. In the 2000 election, the "hook and bullet" vote went mostly to George W. Bush and gun rights were a decisive factor, according to several major hunting and conservation groups. But according to these same organizations, resource extraction efforts by the Bush administration on prime hunting and fishing habitat have upset many outdoorsmen.

In Spokane, many of the outdoor writers said they disputed Robinson's statement that roadless areas are closed to hunters. In fact, roadless areas are open to hunting and fishing, if sportsmen are willing to get out of their cars and ply these areas on foot or horseback.