WASHINGTON — The IRS official responsible for tax exemptions refused to testify to a House oversight panel investigating the agency’s treatment of conservative groups Wednesday.

Citing her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Lois Lerner would not answer questions about how the IRS developed the “be on the lookout” list for Tea Party groups, what she did when she discovered it, and why she failed to tell Congress about it when asked directly.

In asserting her Fifth Amendment rights, she said, “I know some people will assume I have done something wrong. I have not,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules and regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.”

Lerner said she was following the advice of her attorney, who has cited the criminal investigation into the IRS’s decision to target Tea Party groups for greater scrutiny beginning in 2010.

Republicans protested. “She just waived her Fifth Amendment right to privilege. You don’t get to tell your side of the story and then not be subject to cross-examination. That’s not the way it works, ” said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. “She ought to stand here and answer our questions.”

But Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., dismissed Lerner, saying she could be recalled if committee lawyers determine that she waived her rights by delivering an opening statement. At the end of the hearing, Issa said he is “considering” recalling Lerner because “she made assertions, under oath, in the form of testimony” in her opening. He struck the gavel saying the hearing was in recess, not closed.

Though Lerner would not testify, she did provide written answers to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration last November. Those answers were provided to the committee Tuesday night, and Lerner verified for the committee Wednesday that the answers they had appeared to be hers.

“To the best of my knowledge, no individual or organization outside the IRS influenced the creation of these criteria,” Lerner said in the written answers.

She wrote that when she first learned of a “be on the lookout” — or BOLO — list that included Tea Party groups in June 2011, she immediately directed that the BOLO list be revised to eliminate the reference to “tea party” organizations and refer instead more generally to advocacy organizations.

IRS e-mails released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee show that earlier in June 2011, a manager asked for criteria to determine whether an applicant is a “tea party” case

“Do the applications specify/state ‘tea party?’ If not, how do we know applicant is involved with the tea party movement?” asked Program Manager Cindy M. Thomas.

A response, from Group Manager John Shafer, indicated the criteria to be used to indicate a “tea party” group that should be sent for “secondary screening.” They included “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in the group name, an interest in government spending or debt issues, advocacy activities “to make America a better place to live,” and “statements in the case file that are critical of how the country is being run.”

“Unbeknownst to me,” Lerner told the inspector general last year, the Cincinnati office changed the criteria again in January 2012 to include “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement.”

As Lerner refused to testify, one of her employees is cooperating with the committee’s investigation.

Holly Paz, who was the director of Rulings and Agreements, spoke to committee staffers behind closed doors Tuesday, Rep. Issa said.

Paz told the investigators that the IRS conducted its own internal review of its handling of Tea Party cases and came to the same conclusion as the inspector general’s audit a year ago.

But Issa said he was also troubled to learn that Paz was so involved in the inspector general’s review, sitting in on interviews with subordinates even as they were asked if higher-ups were responsible.

An inspector general’s report last week found that the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which processes all applications for tax exemptions, put any group with the words “tea party,” “patriot” and “9/12 project” into a separate process where they languished for more than a year. A USA TODAY review of applications processed during that time found that many groups with “progress” or “organizing” in their names were routinely approved in the same time frame.

Lerner played a pivotal role in the operation. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said she failed to tell Congress about the targeting of Tea Party groups when asked 14 times by members of Congress over the past year — even as recently as this month. Then, when the inspector general’s report was about to be released, she came up with a plan to plant a question at a conference, which allowed her to publicly apologize, IRS officials have testified.

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WASHINGTON — Former Internal Revenue Service commissioner Douglas Shulman told a Senate panel Tuesday that he was “dismayed and saddened” by revelations that his agency targeted conservative political groups for extra scrutiny but that he had been unaware of the problem until after it was fixed.

In his first public remarks on the issue, Shulman said he regretted the targeting and acknowledged that it happened on his watch. He demurred as members of the Senate Finance Committee repeatedly asked for an apology, saying he never got involved in individual tax cases and was not personally responsible.

Shulman and his successor, acting Commissioner Steven Miller, came under pointed questioning about why they did not inform Congress of the targeting last year, when members first started asking about it.

“What I knew was not the full set of facts in this report,” said Shulman, who left as commissioner last November.

“I did not lie,” Miller said. “I answered the questions I thought were being asked, and I answered them truthfully.”

Miller said he knew there was a “be on the lookout” list that included Tea Party groups but did not know what other keywords were on that list. He said he didn’t believe that list was politically motivated. “I did not agree with that (last) May. I do not agree with that now,” he said.

Questioning by senators Tuesday took two parallel tracks: What happened at the IRS throughout the affair, from the moment the Cincinnati office started subjecting applications from Tea Party and similar groups in March 2010? And how is it that the IRS has, for decades, interpreted the law to allow certain tax-exempt organizations to engage in political activity despite a provision that requires them to be “exclusively for the promotion of social welfare?”

That interpretation has allowed groups to engage in politics while keeping their donor lists secret, Democrats on the panel said.

“The line is blurred, and you all haven’t seemed to done anything about that, so why not?” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

“The law is very complex,” Shulman said. “The Treasury regulations that the IRS staff in Cincinnati was wrestling with in this case were long-standing regulations. … All I can say is that this is a very hard task given to the IRS.”

Even if social welfare groups can’t engage in any politics, Miller said, “we might have a hard time parsing what’s politics and what’s not? What’s an issue ad, and what’s education?”

Miller said there were “ongoing discussions” about disciplinary action over the affair, but he won’t be a part of them. President Obama has tapped Danny Werfel, controller of the Office of Management and Budget, to take over as acting commissioner Wednesday.

As he did last week before a House committee, Miller apologized for the agency’s treatment of conservative groups but characterized it as “poor customer service.” Miller said the agency was trying to sort through a rush of new applications for tax-exempt status — despite statistics showing that surge didn’t come until later — and chose to screen the applications for politically loaded terms to make the job easier.

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WASHINGTON — The nation’s top tax official apologized for the agency’s treatment of conservative groups, denied he lied to Congress about it and insisted that politics did not motivate the agency’s decision to give Tea Party groups extra scrutiny.

“Partisanship or the perception of politics has no place in the IRS,” acting commissioner Steven Miller said in a brief opening statement to the Ways and Means Committee, which is investigating the affair.

“I do not believe partisanship motivated the actions,” of the tax-exempt organizations office in Cincinnati. He said. Rather, “foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.”

But from there, Miller was grilled about who was responsible for the targeting, what the agency has done to hold them accountable and why he and other IRS officials did not disclose it when they first became aware of it.

Many of those questions were derailed by disagreements about the definitions of words like “targeting” and “mislead.”

“When you talk about targeting, it’s a pejorative term,” he said. Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., later noted that the term appeared 16 times in an inspector general audit of the matter released this week.

Miller said former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s testimony failing to disclose the activity — in response to specific questions –was “incorrect,” but not misleading.

And Miller also admitted that the first public apology for the scandal — which came from Tax Exempt Director Lois Lerner at an American Bar Association conference a week ago — was in response to a question planted by the IRS. That was two days after Lerner testified to a congressional committee and again failed to acknowledge there was any targeting.

Miller said only two employees were disciplined: One, who sent inappropriate follow-up questions to Tea Party groups, was reassigned. Another was given “oral counseling” for compiling the list of keywords that were used to hold up applications of political groups.

“With all due respect, this systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said committee Chairman Dave Camp, R. Mich. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”

“It looks like the truth was hidden to the American people just long enough to make it through an election,” Camp said.

The panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Sandy Levin, D-Mich., said he, too, wanted to find out why the IRS targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny, and that IRS officials responsible should be fired. But he took exception to the injection of campaign politics into the hearing.

“If instead this hearing becomes an effort to score political points, it will be a disregard of the duties of this committee,” he said.

And many Democrats turned to what they saw as the bigger issue: A tax code that doesn’t make clear what kinds of political activities a tax-exempt social welfare organization can participate in. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said the Democrats should defend the right of the Tea Party to “be as wrong as it wants to be” but should guard against anonymous “dark money” being funneled into political campaigns through tax-exempt groups.

The agency’s chief watchdog testified Friday that the Internal Revenue Service has not fully addressed the problems that led it to improperly subject Tea Party and other conservative groups to extra scrutiny.

“We do not consider the concerns in this report to be resolved,” Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said.

It was George’s report that uncovered the practices in the IRS’s tax exempt office, which began in 2010 and continued until media reports and congressional questions prompted his audit last year.

George said there was “no evidence” of political motivations on the part of IRS officials in Cincinnati, where all applications for tax-exempt status are processed. But it did blame “a lack of managerial review, at all levels.”

The report has already led to the resignation of two top IRS officials and launched a criminal investigation by the FBI.

The House’s tax-writing committee is one of three congressional committees promising hearings on the affair. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday requested to interview five low- to midlevel IRS employees.

Among them: Holly Paz, the director of rulings and agreements in Washington, who made $155,500 in 2011. She contributed $2,000 to President Obama’s campaign committee in 2008, campaign reports show.

President Obama announced this week that Miller will resign next week, to be replaced by Office and Management and Budget official Danny Werfel.

A Treasury Department spokeswoman who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter said Secretary Jack Lew asked Werfel to prepare a report within 30 days on what steps have been taken to hold staff accountable and what systematic changes have been made to prevent a recurrence of this episode.

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WASHINGTON — An inspector general report into the Internal Revenue Service’s heightened scrutiny of Tea Party groups blames “ineffective management” at the agency, but does not address whether the policy was politically motivated.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s report, released Tuesday, was an audit — not an investigative report. It made recommendations about how tax-exempt applications should be processed in the future. It did not blame specific employees or suggest disciplinary action.

The report found the IRS office in Cincinnati, which processes all applications for tax-exempt status, singled out “Tea Party,” “Patriot” and “9/12″ groups based solely on their names. The applications were singled out for further review of whether they were involved in political campaign activity. The groups were applying for tax exempt status reserved for groups that conduct “social welfare” activities as the bulk of their work.

The IRS’s special treatment of Tea Party applications led to long processing delays, the inspector general said. For 13 months beginning in October 2010, the Cincinnati office stopped working on potential political cases entirely.

The report said 170 groups received IRS letters asking for additional information, and in 98 of those cases the questions asked were later determined to be inappropriate or unnecessary. Those questions included the names of donors, the political affiliation of officers, and their employment outside the organization.

In a response to the draft report, the IRS defended its decision to separate out groups involved in potential political activities. “While centralization was warranted, the manner in which we initially designated cases for centralization was inappropriate,” wrote Joseph H. Grant, the acting commissioner for tax exempt and government entities.

He also said determining which groups are engaged in prohibited political activity is difficult: “There are no bright line tests for what constitutes political campaign intervention … or whether an organization is primarily engaged in social welfare activities,” Grant said.

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Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service official responsible for tax-exempt organizations was briefed in 2011 that her unit was targeting Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny, according to a draft timeline of events compiled by the agency’s inspector general.

That chronology cast doubt on a statement to reporters Friday by IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner that she only learned of the enhanced reviews through news reports last year, and that only low-level employees were involved in the decision. The scandal broke Friday when Lerner apologized for how the agency handled Tea Party-related groups’ tax-exempt applications. Her apology was first reported by the Associated Press.

The apology came in advance of the expected release of the critical report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which has been investigating the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups at the request of Congress. That report is expected this week, but excerpts obtained by USA TODAY provide a timeline investigators compiled through e-mails and interviews with IRS officials.

The timeline shows that on June 29, 2011, Lerner received a briefing on how IRS officials in Cincinnati were dealing with applications for tax-exempt status for Tea Party groups. The briefing paper showed that the IRS was subjecting certain groups to further investigation based on politically loaded terms in the tax-exempt application file. Groups were singled out for enhanced scrutiny if:

• The words “tea party,” “patriots,” or “9/12 project” appeared anywhere in the group name or case file;

• The group’s stated issues included government spending, government debt or taxes;

• The organization had a goal of educating of the public via advocacy or lobbying to “make America a better place to live;”

• Any statements in the case file critical of how the country is being run.

Under those criteria, 100 groups had their applications sent to a dedicated team of specialists for further investigation — adding months to the approval process, according to the report.

During the 2011 briefing, Lerner raised concern about those criteria, according to the inspector general’s report. So in January 2012, the office sent out a new set of criteria in a BOLO memo — meaning “be on the lookout” — for “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement.”

The additional scrutiny for Tea Party groups often delayed approvals of their tax-exempt status for months, and the IRS said Friday that about half of all applications affected are still pending.

The Tea Party groups were seeking tax-exempt status under a provision of the tax code for social welfare groups — so called 501(c)(4) organizations. Unlike other charities, these groups are allowed to engage in political advocacy as long as it’s not their primary purpose.

The additional information requested of Tea Party groups often included requests for donor lists, which the IRS later admitted was inappropriate and “troubling.” Tea Party groups who protested were told they didn’t have to submit the information, and those donor lists that were submitted have been destroyed, IRS officials told the inspector general.

IRS officials could not be reached for comment late Saturday. But on Capitol Hill, calls for an investigation intensified.

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax laws, said the committee will hold hearings soon. “We will hold the IRS accountable for its actions,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich.

The inspector general’s draft timeline also raises questions about the repeated denials by IRS officials that they were singling out Tea Party groups.

In a March 2012 Ways and Means subcommittee hearing, IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman gave explicit assurances that the IRS was not targeting Tea Party groups. “What’s been happening has been the normal back-and-forth that happens with the IRS,” he said. “And so, there’s absolutely no targeting.”

In an April 2012 letter to the House Oversight Committee, Lerner said the IRS’s questions to Tea Party groups were “in the ordinary course of the application process.”

Tea Party groups said the government’s activities were “criminal.”

“The IRS lied. They lied before Congress in 2011 and they lied again yesterday. We must know how many more lies they have been telling and how high up the chain the cover-up goes,” said Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, in a statement.

Follow @gregorykorte on Twitter.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service official responsible for tax-exempt organizations was briefed in 2011 that her unit was targeting Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny, according to a draft timeline of events compiled by the agency’s inspector general.

That chronology cast doubt on a statement to reporters Friday by IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner that she only learned of the enhanced reviews through news reports last year, and that only low-level employees were involved in the decision. The scandal broke Friday when Lerner apologized for how the agency handled Tea Party-related groups’ tax-exempt applications. Her apology was first reported by the Associated Press.

The apology came in advance of the expected release of the critical report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which has been investigating the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups at the request of Congress. That report is expected this week, but excerpts obtained by USA TODAY provide a timeline investigators compiled through e-mails and interviews with IRS officials.

The timeline shows that on June 29, 2011, Lerner received a briefing on how IRS officials in Cincinnati were dealing with applications for tax-exempt status for Tea Party groups. The briefing paper showed that the IRS was subjecting certain groups to further investigation based on politically loaded terms in the tax-exempt application file. Groups were singled out for enhanced scrutiny if:

• The words “tea party,” “patriots,” or “9/12 project” appeared anywhere in the group name or case file;

• The group’s stated issues included government spending, government debt or taxes;

• The organization had a goal of educating of the public via advocacy or lobbying to “make America a better place to live;”

• Any statements in the case file critical of how the country is being run.

Under those criteria, 100 groups had their applications sent to a dedicated team of specialists for further investigation — adding months to the approval process, according to the report.

During the 2011 briefing, Lerner raised concern about those criteria, according to the inspector general’s report. So in January 2012, the office sent out a new set of criteria in a BOLO memo — meaning “be on the lookout” — for “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement.”

The additional scrutiny for Tea Party groups often delayed approvals of their tax-exempt status for months, and the IRS said Friday that about half of all applications affected are still pending.

The Tea Party groups were seeking tax-exempt status under a provision of the tax code for social welfare groups — so called 501(c)(4) organizations. Unlike other charities, these groups are allowed to engage in political advocacy as long as it’s not their primary purpose.

The additional information requested of Tea Party groups often included requests for donor lists, which the IRS later admitted was inappropriate and “troubling.” Tea Party groups who protested were told they didn’t have to submit the information, and those donor lists that were submitted have been destroyed, IRS officials told the inspector general.

IRS officials could not be reached for comment late Saturday. But on Capitol Hill, calls for an investigation intensified.

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax laws, said the committee will hold hearings soon. “We will hold the IRS accountable for its actions,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich.

The inspector general’s draft timeline also raises questions about the repeated denials by IRS officials that they were singling out Tea Party groups.

In a March 2012 Ways and Means subcommittee hearing, IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman gave explicit assurances that the IRS was not targeting Tea Party groups. “What’s been happening has been the normal back-and-forth that happens with the IRS,” he said. “And so, there’s absolutely no targeting.”

In an April 2012 letter to the House Oversight Committee, Lerner said the IRS’s questions to Tea Party groups were “in the ordinary course of the application process.”

Tea Party groups said the government’s activities were “criminal.”

“The IRS lied. They lied before Congress in 2011 and they lied again yesterday. We must know how many more lies they have been telling and how high up the chain the cover-up goes,” said Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, in a statement.

Follow @gregorykorte on Twitter.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

HOUSTON — The board of the National Rifle Association will elect as its president Monday a hard-line culture warrior who has worked for decades to make the NRA a more aggressive political force.

The election of James Porter — ensured after the endorsement of outgoing President David Keene last week — is one of many defiant signals to come out of the NRA’s annual meeting in Houston over the weekend. The organization vowed to continue to fight any compromise on gun-control legislation in Congress.

“Revenge is what’s motivating the president’s unrelenting attacks on gun owners today,” Porter told the group’s meeting Saturday amid news that the NRA’s membership had grown to a record 5 million.

“Millions of Americans are becoming first-time gun owners,” Porter said. “The media calls it fear. That’s not it. It’s a sense of natural outrage that’s been building for quite some time.”

Porter, 64, a lawyer from Birmingham, Ala., who defends gun manufacturers, has been building that outrage his whole life. His father, Irvine C. Porter, was president of the NRA in 1959 — when the son says the NRA was “a glorified shooting society.” At a breakfast Friday, Porter told grass-roots organizers that they are on the front line of a “culture war.”

“He seems to come out of a mold that’s much closer to the base than David Keene,” said Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Whereas Keene was a “steady hand” for the NRA amid controversy, Porter is “a complete wild card,” Horwitz said. “The world’s changing around them, and they’re hunkering down.”

The weekend also featured speeches from politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — who challenged Vice President Biden to a debate on gun violence — and the NRA’s crowd-pleasing executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre.

“We will never surrender our guns. Never,” LaPierre said. “The media and the political elites can lie about us and demonize us all they want, but that won’t stop us.”

Observers said the tone of the convention wasn’t surprising, given the debate over universal background checks in Congress, which the NRA has fought bitterly. “The rhetoric has been ramped up,” said Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center. “They’ve doubled down on their absolutism.”

As more than 70,000 people visited the weekend event — primarily for the gun trade exhibits on the floor of the Houston convention center — about 70 protesters held vigil across the street, reading the names of 3,863 victims of gun violence since the shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. The last name on the list: Carlos Serrano, 48, shot in a robbery while going to work Friday 6 miles from the convention.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

HOUSTON — The political speeches get the headlines but most of the 70,000-plus people attending the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting are here to see an eye-popping extravaganza of guns and gun culture.

Nine acres of exhibits at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston show off guns, scopes, grips, holsters, targets, magazines, cabinets, safes and antiques.

And that’s just the beginning.

Zombie Industries sells $90 bleeding zombie targets. The human-scale targets can take thousands of rounds, and come in terrorist, Nazi, alien and zombie kangaroo varieties.

“The zombie is America’s folk monster,” said Roger Davis Jr., president of the San Diego-based company. “For myself as someone in his mid-30s — or even people in their 20s or 40s who grew up playing video games, it’s just a good time. A lot of the media don’t cover the fun-time aspect of the shooting sports industry.”

The best seller? “Probably the clown. People really seem to hate clowns.”

The company makes zombies of all different kinds of people, and Davis emphasizes that there’s no political message behind its products.

“The zombie virus doesn’t discriminate,” he said.

Over in booth 4855, Magpul Industries showed off a tricked-out 1963 Volkswagen microbus — that hippie emblem of peace and flower power — with a Dillon Aero Gatling mini gun mounted on the roof.

The showpiece is street legal but not for sale — it comes from company owner Richard Fitzpatrick’s personal collection.

“It’s an expression of the company culture more than anything else,” said Magpul marketing director Duane Liptak Jr. “We should all be able to agree on individual freedom and personal responsibility.”

Magpul makes a variety of accessories that, its marketing says, give gun owners an “unfair advantage.” The company is based in Boulder, Colo., but is looking at other locations — including Texas — after the Colorado Legislature passed gun-control legislation.

Flashbang Holsters showed off a bra with a concealed holster. T-shirt vendors hawked slogans such as “Deport Piers Morgan” and “Ted Nugent for President.”

What’s not for sale at the NRA exhibits? Guns. That’s mostly because of logistical concerns about inventory, cash and background checks, said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam.

Then there are products with only a tangential cultural connection to guns, like camping gear, outerwear and gold bullion. (Universal Coin and Bullion, with one of the largest booths at the show, is the official gold dealer of the NRA.)

An entire aisle was set up for safari and big-game hunting excursions. Hertz had a booth to give NRA members rental car discounts. Hillsdale College in Michigan, which has shotgun classes and a shotgun team, recruited high schoolers.

Kubota Tractor Corp. had tractors and front loaders on display.

“This is our kind of audience. They’re people who own property. They own tractors,” said Susan Holmes, marketing support manager for the Torrence, Calif.-based company.

Project Appleseed combined a revolutionary war history experience with marksmanship training, with the idea of exposing more people to America’s inherited gun culture.

“The old market is rural white dudes. But rural America is declining,” said the non-profit group’s Joshua Streiff. “A lot of people say there are pro-gun people and anti-gun people, but really, there are people who have had a positive firearm experience and those who have not.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

HOUSTON — Wearing a black hoodie on an unseasonably cold Houston morning and speaking in a loud, clear voice, a single protester read the names, ages and hometowns of the thousands of victims of gun violence in the United States since the Newtown tragedy.

“The NRA needs to hear about the consequences of their actions,” explained Heather Ross, a 27-year-old from Austin, who read the names from her iPhone in front of a red, white and blue abstract sculpture.

By Saturday afternoon, Ross was joined by perhaps a hundred more protesters at a park across across from the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. They represented Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Texans for Smart Gun Regulation and an ad hoc group calling itself Occupy the NRA.

The protests were organized, civil and — when NRA board member Todd Rathner wandered across the street looking for a bank — often spirited.

“How many of your members supported universal background checks?” asked Aaron Black, an activist who flew in from New York to protest. He cited polls showing the number as high as 92%.

“I’ve told you three times today, I don’t believe there’s a 92% —” Rathner said.

“You have not told me three times,” Black said.

“It’s a bogus number,” Rathner said. “If you explain to people that universal background checks require registration, that number would plummet.”

“What endgame do you see?” asked Jeff Hunter of Houston. “Is the NRA going to form militias when the government comes to get your guns?”

“If there’s no registration, we don’t have to worry about it,” Rathner said.

Black gave credit to Rathner for engaging the protesters. “This guy thinks he’s representing gun owners? He’s not representing gun owners. He’s representing gun manufacturers.”

He tried to confront Rathner with autopsy photos of 16-year-old Brishell Jeffries, one of three teenagers killed in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C., in 2010. “Gun violence is so sterilized, and dumbed down and Disneyfied, that no one cares. It didn’t even faze this guy.”

Rathner acknowledged a problem with violence in America, but said he doesn’t blame the guns. Protesters, he said, have been misinformed by the media.

“I’m comfortable debating it, but I’m not going to change their minds, and they’re not going to change mine,” said Rathner, a gun lobbyist from Tuscon, Ariz., and self-described “Jewish redneck.”

As the NRA announced that its rolls had reached a record 5 million members, the gun control groups said they, too, were growing. Michelle Green, a leader of the Houston chapter of Moms Demand Action, was collecting signatures on a petition to Texas congressmen and senators.

She said the chapter’s membership is up 60% since conservative Senate Republicans — led by Texas’s own Sen. Ted Cruz — blocked an attempt to expand background checks to cover gun shows and the Internet.

“We’re ballooning since the background check bill failed,” Green said. “Newtown is what did it for me. I think every mother knows where she was when that happened. It was like 9/11.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

HOUSTON — Efforts to pass gun-control legislation have only made the National Rifle Association stronger, as the membership rolls now surpass a record 5 million, NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre told the gun rights group’s annual meeting Saturday.

“The state of the NRA is stronger and larger than it has ever been,” LaPierre told more than 3,000 NRA members. “Our commitment to freedom is unwavering and our growth is unprecedented. … By the time we’re finished, the NRA must and will be 10 million strong.”

About one-tenth of the members have joined in the past six months, the NRA says.

LaPierre’s defiant speech echoed many of the themes of the weekend’s convention: Political elites and their allies in the media are pushing a gun-control agenda that will lead to a more dangerous America.

The NRA, LaPierre said, is “at the middle of the river of America’s mainstream, and what we want is exactly what most Americans want,” he said.

Alluding to the recent Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt and lockdown, LaPierre said: “How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?”

The NRA’s annual meeting Saturday was the business portion of a weekend including concerts, a prayer gathering, seminars and a convention floor with 9 acres of guns and accessories.

The business meeting revealed no split within the NRA membership. Members unanimously or overwhelmingly approved three resolutions: supporting the group’s leadership; urging the government to approve its National School Shield program to protect children with armed guards; and urging a no-compromise stance on gun-control legislation.

The last resolution sought to repudiate public opinion polls suggesting 74% of NRA members actually support universal background checks for gun purchases.

“The members at large need to know that the members here gathered solidly and soundly oppose any new restrictions of our Second Amendment rights,” said Jeff Knox, a member from Buckeye, Ariz., and director of the Firearms Coalition. The only real controversy was whether the NRA should publish its resolution of support in its journal at a cost of more than $50,000; (Members voted not to.)

The members also elected 25 members to its board of directors. Top vote-getters: Retired lieutenant colonel Oliver North, rocker Ted Nugent, past president Sandra Froman, Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, and past president Marion Hammer.

The organization will also have a new president when the board meets Monday. David Keane, the outgoing president, said he would hand over the reins to James Porter, a 64-year-old Alabama attorney.

“Millions of Americans are becoming first-time gun owners,” Porter told the members. “The media calls it fear. That’s not it. It’s a sense of natural outrage that’s been building for quite some time.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.