All Things in Moderation

In the course of my job, I often travel past an icon of gun culture. Visible from I-66 at the back of an 80s era office park is the headquarters of the National Rifle Association. It would be indistinguishable from all the other Beltway buildings but for the large NRA logo on the outside.

After passing it dozens of times I finally had time to kill between appointments and decided to tour their museum. Admission is free and it takes up one wing of the ground floor of the building.

As you might expect, the primary artifacts are firearms of all varieties. But the sheer quantity is a bit overwhelming.

There are several thousand weapons, mostly rifles with plenty of pistols and a smattering of machine guns.

Each case is stuffed to overflowing with plaque noting the semi-famous collector who donated them. There are so many in each display that even the numbered keys aren’t very helpful in distinguishing the distinctive feature of one gun from the nearly identical version just above or below it.

The galleries are arranged in roughly chronological order running from colonial times to our various Gulf Wars. The largest segments are devoted to the Wild West days with another display devoted to the sport hunting trophies and weapons of Teddy Roosevelt.

The modern era weapons case had plenty of weapons nearly identical from the ones in the “modern sporting rifle” case except for the affixed much recently maligned bayonets.

The current exhibit in their rotating gallery is a tribute to Hollywood movie weapons. They have the actual prop gun used in the movie along with a poster or still from the movie. The oeuvre of noted Republican stand-up comic Clint Eastwood is well represented.

The items which caught my attention were the blaster and lightsaber from Star Wars. As I stood there taking a photo of them with my cell phone one of the other guests that sparsely attended weekday afternoon chuckled that I must have a kid at home if in this enormous display of weaponry those were the items I wanted to photograph. No, I thought to myself, I’m a nerd. Just a little different for the type that usually tours the NRA museum.

Like any decent museum, and plenty of crappy ones, they have a gift shop full of coffee mugs and tee-shirts and trinkets for kids. And on the way out they have a newsrack with the most recent issue of their magazine and a catalog of their wares.

The museum isn’t much different from all sorts of narrowly defined special interest organizations. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is stuffed full of gold records and rock star costumes. The Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian has more beaded blankets than you knew existed. And the NRA museum has guns. And as I mentioned, it sure has plenty of guns. Really way more than is needed for any sense of historical context. The museum fetishizes its collection with highly technical descriptions of each item.

But what it lacks is perspective. It is all about the role of guns in American history. Each gallery tells how guns were used to gain our independence, resolve the issue of slavery, and settle the West. Perhaps we need at least one display about how they are being used today in our schools and malls and post offices.

Filed under: Second Amendment | Tagged: 2nd Amendment, guns, national rifle association, star wars | 49 Comments »