NRA MACHINE? POST CARDS DON'T WRITE; READERS DO

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 24, 1993                   TAG: 9302240423
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
NRA MACHINE? POST CARDS DON'T WRITE; READERS DO
THE NATIONAL Rifle Association gets a bum rap from the media - including from the Roanoke Times & World-News - according to some friends and members of the NRA who've written to us.
Amid the struggle over Gov. Wilder's one-handgun-per-month legislation, for example, this newspaper has received numerous post cards sent by Virginians concerned about the NRA's image.
On one of the post cards, a Roanoke correspondent asked: "Why don't you tell it like it is? Quit portraying the NRA as some lobbying machine."
Apparently agreeing with him was another Roanoker, who wrote: "Why don't you tell it like it is? Quit portraying the NRA as some lobbying machine."
A reader from Hardy felt the same way. "Quit portraying the NRA as some lobbying machine," he said.
Urged another reader, from Pilot: "Quit portraying the NRA as some lobbying machine."
And from a Salem reader came this sentiment: "Why don't you tell it like it is? Quit portraying the NRA as some lobbying machine."
Well, you get the idea.
And this is only a sampling of the spontaneous outpouring of popular concern registered with our newspaper in just one week.
We've published a lot of letters from NRA members and opponents of even the most modest gun-control measures in recent months. Some missives were more semi-automatic than others.
We did not publish the post cards quoted above. (The editors here maintain a fussy preference for letters to the newspaper written by the people who sign their names to them.)
Still, we wonder why anyone might imagine that we'd try to portray the NRA as some sort of lobbying machine.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB