High-Caliber Kids: The NRA convention takes aim at the next generation of member
Date: Apr 21, 2005 7:21 PM
http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2005-04-21/news.html

High-Caliber Kids

The NRA convention takes aim at the next generation of members

BY JOSH HARKINSON

The Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun is the darling of the Navy SEALs
and of special forces around the world. It fires up to 600 rounds a
minute, attacking human flesh like it’s hurling a chain saw. Regular
citizens can’t buy it because it’s too dangerous. Eight-year-old Judah
Matthews can’t reach it atop a gun rack because he’s too short. So his
brother Micah hands it down. Judah wraps his small arms around the
buttstock and flips the switch from safety to full auto. His brother
grabs an even larger assault rifle. That’s when the boys are blinded by
a flash.

It comes from their father’s camera.

At the 134th national conference of the National Rifle Association,
which ended earlier this week in Houston, young people aren’t just
exposed to guns. They’re encouraged to handle some of the most powerful
weaponry in the republic. It’s all in service of the NRA’s efforts to
attract and educate a new generation of members — people who will blow
away all opposition to the right to bear arms, but who won’t blow away
classrooms full of their peers.

“The conference is very much a family event,” says NRA spokesman John
Robbinson. The NRA counts about 35,000 youth members, many of them
participants in its shooting-safety seminars. In the wake of the recent
massacre in Minnesota, in which a teenage gunman killed two
grandparents, five classmates and himself, the NRA is promoting such
training sessions as antidotes to violence. “That’s what we can do to
keep gun accidents down,” Robbinson says.

At a minimum, the conference keeps kids engaged. “It’s awesome,” says
Micah Matthews, who is 16. “I love guns. I love looking at them. I
actually have a shotgun and two rifles, so it’s just a blast to see all
the military guns and rifles.”