"NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns"

[applegrove]

NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns

By Tom Hamburger and Sari Horwitz at WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nra-lobbyist-arms-dealer-played-key-role-in-growth-of-civilian-market-for-military-style-guns/2013/05/03/4ee1945a-b268-11e2-baf7-5bc2a9dc6f44_story.html?hpid=z2

"SNIP.........................



Rene Carlos Vos, an arms dealer in Alexandria, began hanging around the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association in the mid-1980s. The NRA’s staff was intrigued to see the garrulous, backslapping Vos in the group’s seventh-floor suite, home to its lobbying operation and the chief congressional lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre.

Vos and LaPierre struck those who saw them huddle together as an odd couple. Vos took to cowboy boots and neatly pressed western wear.

“He came off like something of a dandy and a hustler, glad-
handing with everybody,” recalled Johnny Aquilino, a former NRA communications director.

LaPierre, by contrast, was remote and quiet, a hand-wringer with an obsessive interest in the intricacies of the legislative process who wore wrinkled suits and carried sheaves of paper — the Congressional Record, vote counts, handwritten notes — around the organization’s 16th Street NW headquarters.



........................SNIP"

[ellisonz]

1. ...

LaPierre later told his boss, Cassidy, that he had been asked to join Blue Sky by Vos “and that he did sign some papers, but he said he did not really know anything about it,” Cassidy recalled. LaPierre said in the 1988 Post interview that he thought Blue Sky Productions was set up to organize rock concerts.

When the investigation became public, LaPierre came into Cassidy’s eighth-floor office at NRA headquarters near tears, according to Cassidy. “He told me, ‘I had nothing to do with this thing,’?” Cassidy recalled. He added, “He did tell me he resigned from Blue Sky.”

Hmmm....

[Pullo]

2. The biggest contributer to the popularity of military-style weapons was the '94 ban

It's just human nature. The best way to sell a product is a high-profile campaign to ban such products.