LEE IACOCCA ONCE SAID that if you manufacture 50,000 cars a week you had better make sure you sell 50,000 cars a week or you will soon be up to your hindquarters in cars.
The same can be said of guns. With so many guns already in circulation, the firearms manufacturers are worried about market saturation. They need new customers, fresh faces with fresh dollars. They need young people. Children.Listen to one of the industry's top trade magazines:
"There's a way to help ensure that new faces and pocketbooks will continue to patronize your business: Use the schools. This is where most of your potential, down-the-line shooters and hunters now are. Kids can't buy guns, you say? Well, yes and no. It's true that most students from kindergarten through high school can't purchase firearms on their own. But it's also true that in many parts of the country, youngsters . . . are shooting and hunt-ing. Pop picks up the tab."
That's from the "Community Relations" column of S.H.O.T. Business, the magazine of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is the leading trade association of the firearms industry.
The foundation, known as the NSSF, goes out of its way to portray firearms as benign, but members of the foundation include manufacturers of assault weapons and cheap handguns known as Saturday night specials. Those are guns designed with homicide in mind.
The last line of the column in S.H.O.T. Business said, "Schools are an opportunity. Grasp it."
The columnist needn't have worried; the industry was already on the case. The Violence Policy Center, a research organization in Washington, has issued a report describing how the National Shooting Sports Foundation has "been using public and private schools to introduce youth to firearms via NSSF educational materials for grades four through 12." The materials, primarily videos, focus on hunting and "wildlife management."
The report said, "The NSSF reasons that an increased acceptance - or lack of antagonism - toward hunting can lead to an interest in, and subsequent purchase of, firearms."
While others worry about the quality of education (and the rising levels of violence) in the nation's schools, the firearms industry sees the schools as incubators for gun purchasers.
Like cigarette manufacturers, who have to replace 400,000 of their customers every year, the gun and ammunition people have turned their eyes toward the young.
There's more. When the foundation found how easy it was to don an educational disguise and infiltrate the school system, it came up with another great idea. Why not get the federal government to help pay for this effort?
Of course the government said yes. "In 1993," according to the Violence Policy Center, "the NSSF received a grant totaling more than $229,000 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of the Interior, for its `Wildlife Education in Schools' program." The grant had been approved by the Bush administration.
With the government's help, the foundation's plans are to offer its videos free to schools with enrollments of 300 or more. The grant proposal said:
"Following the strategy it employed previously, the foundation will make the initial offering to the largest schools in the nation. This strategy not only reaches the most students per dollar but also reaches those students in large cities and suburban areas where the approval of hunting is the lowest."
Can't you see it? Teachers in some of the nation's biggest schools can spend first period disarming the students and second period explaining the virtues of the wonderful new videos sponsored by the firearms industry.
The nation is so saturated with violence that even distributors of toy guns are exercising restraint. But the firearms industry, oblivious to the concept of respon-sible behavior, insists we need more real guns and that we need to begin using them at ever-younger ages.
This is not a tough call. The Clinton administration should pull the plug on federal funds for this foolishness as soon as is humanly possible. And anyone with an ounce of sense should join in an effort to run the firearms industry out of the schools altogether.