Bush loses the NRA

It seems that the NRA's membership has had enough of the Bush administration's support for oil companies at the expense of pristine, road less hunting areas.

SEATTLE -- After years of close association with the Republican Party and hard-nosed opposition to federal land-use regulation, the National Rifle Association is being pressured by its membership to distance itself from President Bush's energy policies that have opened more public land for oil and gas drilling and limited access to hunters and anglers.

"The Bush administration has placed more emphasis on oil and gas than access rights for hunters," said Ronald L. Schmeits, second vice president of the NRA, a member of its board of directors and a bank president in Raton, N.M.

The new emphasis on the issue of access to public lands, which Schmeits said is at the "discussion" level among the NRA's directors, would represent a strategic shift for the NRA, whose leadership in Washington has long maintained that its 4 million members were not complaining or even asking questions about access to public lands.

But, during the past six years, an increasing number of the country's 46 million hunters and anglers, including Republican-leaning shooting organizations such as the Boone and Crockett Club, have been grumbling about the Bush's administration fast-tracking of oil and gas drilling leases on public lands.

"We find that our members are having a harder time finding access to public land," said Schmeits, who recently pushed the NRA to lobby for congressional protection of the game-rich Valle Vidal forest on federal land in New Mexico. "Gun rights are still number one, but there will be more time and effort spent on this issue [by NRA leaders] as we move forward."

Such a change in policy could undercut a key argument that the NRA uses to raise money, sway voters and help elect candidates. It has long warned its members that many environmentalists are advancing a subversive gun-grabbing agenda masterminded by liberal Democrats.

Andrew Arulanandam, the group's spokesman in Washington, said he agrees with Schmeits that members are voicing increasing concern about access to hunting land and that the NRA is focusing on the problem.

This comes at a politically challenging time for what has long been one of the most feared lobbying groups in Washington. The NRA is increasingly being criticized as out of touch by some members of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. A new gun ownership group is trying to win the support of disaffected hunters. Also, there is some complaining within the gun industry that NRA policies might be bad for business.

"The core, the dream, the passion that drives gun ownership is hunting and getting out on the wide open spaces," said a senior gun company executive who did not want to be quoted by name for fear of retribution from the NRA. "In the same way the Bush administration has overreached on Iraq, the NRA has overreached on gun rights. We are losing our grip on this green environmental thing."

It's amazing how bad the Bush administration has been, not just for the country -- hell, the world -- but for the groups that have reflexively supported it all these years as well.