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Tucson lawyer puts woman's touch on NRA
By Joe Burchell
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Twenty years ago an intruder tried to break into Sandra Froman's Los Angeles home.
He didn't get in, but he did start her down a path that will reach the president's office of the 4 million-member National Rifle Association, the nation's most powerful interest group, in 2005.
With the end of Charlton Heston's five-year run as NRA president last week, Froman, a Tucson attorney since 1985, has moved up from second vice president of the organization to first vice president, essentially becoming the president-in-waiting, according to past practice.
Now Froman, 53, has a goal of softening the image of that once-male bastion, acknowledging that women are the fastest-growing segment of NRA membership and encouraging that trend to continue.
"A lot of women are led to believe they are too weak or too stupid to own guns," she said. "Part of my job is to let women know that it's an option for them."
Froman, elected without opposition last weekend, is one of three Tucsonans prominent in the NRA. Todd Rathner was elected to the 20-member executive committee and Don Saba retained his seat on the 76-member board of directors.
Froman, first elected as the NRA's second vice president in 1998, originally was expected to move up to the top spot last year. The normal progression has been two years as second vice president and two more as first vice president before becoming president.
But 1998 is also when Heston was elected, and he was such a successful advocate for gun rights that the NRA bylaws were waived twice, allowing him to remain in office until Alzheimer's disease forced him to step down this year, meaning Froman and new president Kayne Robinson had to wait.
"He stayed a long time, which was great for the NRA," Froman said, "but that means I've been the caboose for a long time."
As second vice president, she spent most of her time looking over the business and financial aspects of the organization and helping develop policies.
Becoming first vice president means more of the same, plus a lot more travel representing the NRA at events. That could put a crimp in her law practice on the Northwest Side, where she is the sole practitioner specializing in employment law, business litigation and mediation.
After graduating from Harvard, Froman practiced law in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1983 before becoming a professor at Santa Clara University College of Law. She came to Tucson in 1985 when her husband, Bruce Nelson, retired from the California Department of Justice. Nelson died in 1995.
Froman's introduction to guns, and eventually the NRA, came toward the end of her tenure in Los Angeles, as the result of an attempted break-in.
"I didn't grow up around guns," Froman said. "My dad didn't hunt or own guns that I was aware of."
But when she tried to call neighbors for help, nobody answered, and when she called the police they told her to hide in the bedroom.
"I decided I wasn't going to be a victim, so that's when I learned how to shoot."
"I did well, right from the start," she said. "You tend to like what you do well … so it became more and more a part of my recreational activity."
She progressed to NRA membership after someone made a negative comment about gun ownership and she started learning more about efforts to restrict gun ownership.
Although she was an NRA member, Froman said that's as deep as her activism went until a friend invited her to speak at a rally in Phoenix in 1991. "I think he just wanted a woman's voice," she said.
It was there that she caught the attention of the state's then-attorney general, Bob Corbin, who went on to become NRA president the following year.
"I'd never heard of her," Corbin said. "But she made quite an impression, so I told her she ought to get involved, and one thing led to another."
The next year, when Corbin was elected NRA president, Froman was elected to her first term on the organization's board.
"She's a dedicated pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment person," Corbin said. "She's the kind of person who, when she tells you something, she means it. She won't play games with you, and she's very intelligent."
"She'll make a great president," he said.
Rathner said he originally got to know Froman through her late husband, a noted holster-maker who was the "mentor who got me started in the NRA."
Froman, he said, is "one of the smartest people I've ever met, and she's one of the nicest."
The NRA was named by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful lobbying group in the country for the second straight year in 2002, having supplanted the AARP at the top of that list.
That makes Froman's election and anticipated move into the NRA presidency "huge," said Rathner. "It's a very big deal" for Tucson and the NRA.
Dr. Scott Weiss, a gun owner and NRA member, said he believes having Froman and the other NRA board members in Tucson gives residents here an "incredible opportunity" to influence the direction of the organization.
"I believe it will benefit the NRA tremendously when she steps up to be president," said Weiss, who knows Froman slightly. "The face of the NRA is going to change dramatically."
She's a great speaker, he said, and her diminutive size - she's 5 feet, 2 inches tall - defies the macho NRA image.
"Women and the country will see it's not just a bunch of right-wing Republican men," he said.
Gun control advocate Sean Hammond, however, said he doesn't expect Froman's prominence or Tucson's emergence as a force in the NRA to affect the controversy over gun rights, because "we're already a really conservative state."
While NRA leaders are gaining in visibility, there are still a lot of people in Tucson willing to challenge them, said Hammond, a member of the Arizonans for Gun Safety board.
But he hopes predictions about the changing face of the NRA hold true.
"I hope these people take the NRA back to what it was, championing hunting and outdoor activity, not like the right-wing group that's been in control," Hammond said. "If anything, I'm hoping the leadership here in Tucson can moderate their positions and find some common ground."
Whether Froman will lead the organization in that direction is hard to predict, Hammond said. She's something of an "unknown quantity," he said, because usually it's Rathner who is quoted in the news media.
Froman said she prefers it that way, and has pushed Rath-
ner "to do as much of the media stuff as he can. He has a talent for it and it frees me up to do other things, to see to other issues."
One of those other issues, she said, was encouraging the creation of "Women's Outlook," a monthly publication that started in January and looks at shooting and hunting from a woman's perspective, including women's clothing styles, recipes and "what wine to serve with the duck you just shot," Froman said.
Another is the "Refuse To Be A Victim" program, which she helped start. The personal safety program teaches women to analyze their lifestyles, recognize risks and learn how to avoid or manage them. While self-defense is discussed, there is no gun component, she said.
Froman said she prefers not to talk about how many or what types of guns she has, as a matter of personal privacy and security.
While most of her involvement has been target shooting, she recently started learning how to hunt. Not long ago, she said, she shot her first turkey on a hunt in Missouri and picked wild mushrooms to cook with it.
* Contact reporter Joe Burchell at 573-4244 or at
[email protected].
© 2003 AzStarNet, Arizona Daily