By THOMAS KAPLAN
TONAWANDA, N.Y. — Harold W. Schroeder’s first gun was his late father’s prized Winchester 12-gauge shotgun, bequeathed to him when he turned 16. In college, Mr. Schroeder and his classmates kept guns in their fraternity house so they could hunt pheasant.
On Friday night, Mr. Schroeder, now 77, gathered with friends at the Mohawk Rifle and Pistol Club, slipping .22-caliber rounds, one after another, into the magazine for his Smith & Wesson Model 41 pistol. He fixed his eyes on a quarter-sized bull’s-eye hanging 50 feet away and pulled the trigger.
Mr. Schroeder, known to all as Budd, is an accomplished shooter; for decades he has been a regular at pistol competitions in western New York. And for just as long, he has devoted himself to protecting gun rights in New York State, joining a grass-roots organization in 1966 to fight measures proposed in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and fighting gun control laws ever since.
Now, in the aftermath of last month’s massacre of first graders in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Schroeder is pleading with lawmakers, in what he acknowledges is an uphill battle, to block what his group has deemed the biggest threat to New York gun owners since the 1960s. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, propelled into action by recent mass shootings, has proposed what he says would be the nation’s toughest package of gun laws, including an expanded ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The Legislature appears prepared to go along, perhaps as soon as this week. Aides to Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, and state lawmakers continued to negotiate on Sunday.
Mr. Schroeder’s efforts are emblematic of those by gun rights advocates around the country, who are desperately trying to head off what they view as ill-advised restrictions that they do not believe would solve the problem of gun violence. Mr. Schroeder, a retired park superintendent who teaches gun-safety instruction and is a former board member of the National Rifle Association, said that gun owners felt demonized in the wake of the shooting and that they looked upon what happened in Newtown in the same way as those who had never fired a gun.
“I’m every bit as angry as they are,” he said. “It’s an atrocity that these things happen — I mean, a real atrocity. But somewhere along the way the system broke down. Now, this kid obviously had mental problems, but it wasn’t brought to the attention of people who could help him or put him away.”
Mr. Schroeder is more than 250 miles and a world away from the State Capitol, but he has been meeting with lawmakers from western New York, many of whom he has known for years, in an effort to persuade them to stand firm against Mr. Cuomo’s proposals. He writes a weekly political column for two local newspapers that emphasizes the Second Amendment.
He is chairman of the board of directors of the Shooters Committee on Political Education, or SCOPE, which has about 3,000 members and 200 affiliated gun clubs across the state. The group is one element of the loose coalition of groups and individuals that make up the gun lobby in Albany — there are also the professional lobbyists who represent gun manufacturers; the N.R.A. and its state affiliate, the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association; and bloggers, talk show hosts and local groups all trying to influence the debate. And there are sympathetic lawmakers, many of them from rural parts of the state.
“Downstate, we’re a bunch of criminals,” Mr. Schroeder said. “Upstate, it’s a different story.”
Mr. Schroeder traces the movement back to the fight over the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, enacted after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
“Ever since that bill passed, which was supposed to be the be-and-end-all of gun control, that was just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Schroeder said. “And from there on we’ve been doing the fight ever since.”
Every legislative session brings a new fight: he has battled year after year with the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, whose chamber has passed numerous new gun controls, and clashed bitterly with Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, who won a package of gun laws in 2000 (and, Mr. Schroeder said, “sold out the gun owners for a 15-minute press conference.”)
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a pro-gun governor in our lifetimes,” he said. Mr. Schroeder used his first Winchester shotgun for bird hunting. An uncle gave him a .22-caliber rifle, perfect for shooting rats at a nearby railroad dump. In college, he joined the Army Reserve as a bandsman, playing the alto saxophone, and was later called into active duty and sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where he made the pistol team. (“It saved me from digging foxholes,” he said.) Some of Mr. Schroeder’s concerns are practical: he says New York already has enough restrictions on guns, and pulls out a plastic binder containing Article 265 of the State Penal Law, on firearms and dangerous weapons, to demonstrate how voluminous the existing laws already are. Some concerns are more philosophical: he argues that an expanded ban on assault weapons is simply a wrongheaded approach to reducing violence.
He said Mr. Cuomo and others were using the Newtown violence to push measures that would take them toward a goal they held long before any recent mass shootings — banning guns altogether. He also said upstanding, taxpaying, legal gun owners were being punished for the actions of a few madmen. “It’s like saying you shouldn’t have any politicians because we got a couple of crooks we caught,” he said.
He also argued on constitutional grounds, recalling the American colonists who resisted the British at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He says of the Second Amendment, “The sole purpose of that was to prevent a dystopic government from taking over the population.” He added, “Sometimes you get accused of being paranoid, but if you watch history, no republic or democracy has ever gone to a totalitarian form of government without first disarming the populace.”
Mr. Schroeder’s fellow gun enthusiasts at the pistol club, located near Buffalo, shared his outrage over the proposals, but were pessimistic about stopping them.
They said politicians needed to focus on keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill; making sure that people who have illegal guns and use them to commit crimes are properly punished; and improving security in schools. They said Mr. Cuomo’s proposal to ban more guns would not address the problem.
“It would outlaw most of the guns we shoot,” said Frank Bialy, a retired chemist who used to coach a high school rifle team. “What’s so frustrating is the people who are here obeying the law are the ones who pay all the prices when these crazy things happen.”
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