Please put me on the NRA blacklist

Dear National Rifle Association,

Please put me on your super-duper blacklist, which… Dear National Rifle Association,

Please put me on your super-duper blacklist, which details anyone and everyone that has ever “lent monetary, grassroots or some other type of direct support to anti-gun organizations,” as your Web site says. I will love you forever, and promise not to laugh when Charlton Heston anachronistically quotes Judah Maccabee in “The Ten Commandments,” if you do me this one teensy favor.

Thank you,

Sydney Bergman

The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action – the lobbying arm of the NRA, an organization dedicated to preventing what it sees as infringements upon the Second Amendment and what others see as promoting a pro-gun agenda – has compiled a blacklist naming organizations, celebrities, companies and media outlets devoted to gun control legislation.

It’s quite an impressive list, as blacklists go. And when I first read through it, my initial reaction was to ask if this was a joke. The list, which can be found at www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=15, includes such known radical organizations as the American Association of Ambulatory Care Nursing, and such firebrands as actress Estelle Getty. That’s right – the NRA has blacklisted Sophia from “The Golden Girls.”

But this list, apparently, is not a joke, hoax or parody. As The Seattle Times’ Nicole Brodeur wrote on Nov. 4, 2003, she found that NRA members knew of its existence, though the ones she interviewed didn’t seem to take it too seriously. One even posited that he would only be afraid of the people on the list if one came after him with a hammer. (Though, I must say, being anti-gun does not necessarily mean being anti-backhoe or -Catherine Wheel, so perhaps he’s underestimating his foes.)

This list has engendered enough anger to produce a counter-Web site, www.nrablacklist.com, where people can write in and request to be blacklisted, which I did.

Gun control issues aside, at least for the moment, I question the purpose of blacklists. Blacklists – whether made by the late Sen. Joe “Have you no sense of decency?” McCarthy, or by the NRA – serve only to polarize. They paint the world in, forgive the pun, white and black. There are no such things as gray-lists or “shaded around the edges” lists, or even “my political views are nascent and amorphous, and therefore shouldn’t be quantified” lists.

But is the Us vs. Them mentality so wrong, especially when here the Them includes The Christian Science Monitor, the American Civil Liberties Union and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau?

One of my father’s friends told me a story about growing up in one of the poorer sections of Philadelphia – forgive me, Joe, if I mangle this. He, as a young boy, would visit a relative’s house, when they would sit on the porch and said relative would tell him about the Us and the Them. In this case, the Them included people with education and fairly radical political beliefs, who valued the arts and didn’t use the phrase “liberal media conspiracy.” He said, from that point on, he dedicated his life to escaping the Us and becoming one of the relatively demonized Them, which he has.

So, upon reading the NRA’s list, I resolved to become one of the Them – a person of enough note to be worth blacklisting. It’s extraordinary narcissism, I know. Plus, wanting to see my name next to those of Jimmy Breslin and Art Buchwald has always been a secret fantasy.

And it’s also because I question the constant flogging of the Second Amendment by people who have not read the Supreme Court’s decision on the case of United States vs. Miller – the last substantive reinterpretation of the Second Amendment – in the same way I question the constant flogging of certain verses in Leviticus by those who haven’t read the later rabbinic interpretations of biblical cleansing laws.

I have neither the time nor the space for an extended discussion here. Gun control, that great political bear-trap, cannot be addressed in these few short lines. But if anyone at the NRA is reading this – and I hope you are – please put me on your blacklist.

Read the decision of United States vs. Miller at cornell.law.edu – just follow the links to the Supreme Court decisions and search for “Second Amendment.” E-mail Sydney Bergman at sbergman@pittnews.com.