Dwight Van Horn: North Idaho's own NRA director

COEUR d'ALENE - Not all communities have a National Rifle Association director as a neighbor but Hayden resident Dwight Van Horn has been on the NRA board since 1998 and has been reelected four times since. He is up for reelection this spring. At-large elections of directors are held annually for three-year terms with a third of the board up for election each year. That means new or returning directors are chosen irrespective of where they live.

Van Horn grew up in a suburb of Trenton, N. J., not known as a hotbed of gun enthusiasts. His father owned a side-by-side shotgun but rarely used it. When Van Horn joined the USAF in 1966 he had still never shot a gun and his first training was on the M-16, whose semi-automatic civilian cousin is known as the AR-15. He found shooting the M-16 to be fun and hoped to own one someday. Returning veterans since the War of Independence have yearned to keep or obtain the arms they carried in service to their country and many vets own firearms from their tours of duty.

"When you carry a firearm in defense of your life and your country, it becomes something that you develop a bond with," he said.

Van Horn became familiar with a variety of firearms in the Air Police and later in the Trenton Police Department where he started to shoot with the department pistol team. He joined the NRA in order to participate in a regional championship match in Maryland and began to read the organization's monthly magazine, "The American Rifleman." That's how he found out about ongoing attacks on his Second Amendment freedoms.

In 1979, he moved to California, became a deputy on the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, continued his competitive shooting and became an NRA Life Member. Through his friendship with NRA Field Representative Bob Grego, who was promoted to NRA Director of Field Services in Washington, D.C., Van Horn was appointed to the NRA Law Enforcement Assistance Committee. As a representative of "rank and file" street officers, he personally advocated for the gun rights guaranteed in the Second Amendment following the Patrick Purdy Stockton School Yard shooting in 1989 when gun haters, who could not let a crisis go to waste, started calling for an assault weapons ban. They trotted out the "political police," the chiefs, including his own sheriff, who decried those evil rifles.

Following this series of events, Van Horn kept upgrading his NRA membership to finally become a Benefactor Member. After over 20 years in competitive shooting and after retiring from the LAPD in 1999 and working on a variety of NRA issues, he moved to North Idaho in 2001 where he took up bird and elk hunting. He had finally moved "back to the United States."

After witnessing the poor marksmanship of Union soldiers in the Civil War, officers Col. William Church and Gen. George Wingate founded the NRA in 1871 with Gen. Ambrose Burnside as its first president. Ever since, the NRA has been the foremost firearms training organization in the country, promoting marksmanship and firearm safety. As war approached in the late 1930s, the NRA made its ranges, clubs and instructors available to help train the military in the fundamentals of marksmanship. After the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, NRA members sent several thousand personal arms to England whose citizens had been largely disarmed through a series of anti-gun laws following World War I. In 1949, the NRA started the first Hunter Education courses in the U.S.

The passage of New York's Sullivan Law in 1911 and the National Firearms Act of 1934 caused the NRA to form the predecessor to today's Institute for Legislative Action, which solidified in 1975 after the onerous Gun Control Act of 1968, Van Horn said.

"(It is) why we have ranges to shoot on, land to hunt on and gun stores where we shop for the guns and ammunition that we want," he said. "Not what some elitist politicians think we need.

"The Bill of Rights is about our rights."

Today the NRA forms a huge umbrella: Competition shooting, collecting, hunting, reloading, recreational shooting and political activism, while forming partnerships with the Boy Scouts, 4-H clubs, veterans groups and more.

He is proud of the NRA as the foremost civil rights organization in the world.

"If there is a more basic right than self preservation, I certainly don't know what it is," Van Horn said. "In order to pursue life, liberty and happiness, as the Declaration of Independence memorializes, you must first feel secure and safe in your person and your property."

The Second Amendment, as recently decided in the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court cases, clearly upholds that right and that right guarantees all other rights.

It should be patently obvious to the most casual observer who can read the English language that the Second Amendment isn't about duck hunting, recreational shooting or gun collecting, he said. It is about self defense against those who would wish to harm you in your home, your town or Washington, D.C. It is also about keeping an armed populace, otherwise known as a militia, to balance the power of a government that the Founders could never trust completely.

"The old statement that I love my country but fear my government is truer today than at any time I can remember," Van Horn said.

Many violent government actions against its own citizens are well documented. In July 1932 about 17,000 World War I veterans, wives and children living in a so-called bonus camp outside Washington, D.C., protesting for early payment of their bonus from that war, were attacked on orders from President Hoover, with poison gas and fixed bayonets by troops under Major General Douglas MacArthur including Major George Patton and Major Dwight Eisenhower. Repeatedly, the U.S. Department of Justice failed to find any wrongdoing.

In August 1946 a thoroughly corrupt sheriff in McMinn County Tennessee confiscated the ballot boxes and barricaded himself and deputies in the jail house. What followed is known as the Battle of Athens when returned World War II veterans surrounded the jail, blew the door and recovered the stolen ballots. Independent ballot counting confirmed that the corrupt sheriff and his cronies had been voted out.

More recently the Ruby Ridge attack on Randy Weaver's family in North Idaho by the FBI and the Branch Davidian Compound assault by the ATF and the FBI in Waco, Texas, resulted in multiple civilian deaths including women and children. Subsequent DOJ investigations found no wrongdoing on the government's part.

The last time that a militia took action in the U.S. was on 9/11/2001 when the unarmed passengers on Flight 93 banded together and fought back against Islamic terrorists with the war cry, "Let's Roll." It became clear to this quickly formed militia that the hijackers' intent was a homicide-suicide crash into a populous area and the resulting crash in an empty field possibly saved hundreds or thousands.

Today's AR-15s, high capacity magazines and semi-automatic firearms are just the result of technological advancement. The Bill of Rights was not about technology but rather about human nature.

"The notion that the Founders would have been shocked by semi-automatic firearms ownership today is no more valid than to say they would be shocked by typewriters, word processors and the Internet to advance the First Amendment," he said.

The Founders' sense of shock might instead be the firepower disparity between the country's civilian militia and its standing professional army.

Van Horn is also very opposed to Universal Background Checks, which could require going through a dealer (and a government blessing) to give a firearm to a relative, to sell one to a neighbor or to trade your Remington 870 shotgun for your uncle's Winchester Model 12 shotgun. He is also concerned that some government officials would make it illegal to buy or own guns should someone make an honest, innocent statement about mild depression or anxiety to his or her doctor. He is particularly incensed that returning veterans who go to a foreign land to defend us could be disarmed when they come home.

"I have no doubt that this administration would like to have as many people in the prohibited class for firearms ownership as they could," he said.

That a Universal Background Check could very easily lead to universal gun registration is not a stretch at all and many fear what comes after registration.

"History has shown us time and again that a tyrannical government requires you to register your firearms and eventually comes to seize them," Van Horn said.