I caught Ray Schoenke in the car on his way home from Lancaster, where he’d presented Mayor Rick Gray with a check for $1,000 from his fledgling organization to help fight gun crime in Lancaster.

Which, while nice, might not seem too significant. Until you consider that Schoenke heads a gun group called the American Hunters and Shooters Association. And gun groups aren’t usually donating money for plans that might in any way be construed as “anti-gun.”

Which makes AHSA controversial; the National Rifle Association, in fact, authored a hit piece titled “Sometimes the Enemy Wears Camoflage,” accusing the organization of merely being a front group that is trying to “fool hunters and gun owners” and actually want to end hunting. Among other, nefarious things.

Schoenke sounded a little defensive, but game. It’s true, he said, that AHSA was founded in response to what many of its organizers, and 5,000 or so members, see as the NRA’s uncompromising extremism. “We really felt they were giving hunters and shooters a black eye,” said Schoenke, a former Washington Redskins football player and a lifelong hunter.

An example would be that of Jim Zumbo, former hunting editor for Outdoor Life magazine and host of the Outdoor Channel’s Jim Zumbo Outdoors who, five months ago, dared to criticize the use of AR and AK automatic rifles - that is, military-style weapons - in hunting. The reaction from the gun community was swift and severe; Zumbo lost his magazine job and his television program.

In other words, says Schoenke, the mere suggestion that it might be a bit much to blow away Bambi with an AK-47 is enough to work the NRA types into a full lather. But not all gun owners feel that way. “There are 66 million gun owners who don’t belong to the NRA,” said Schoenke. American Hunters and Shooters seeks to represent those who think “common sense” steps aren’t such a bad thing after all.

And one such step is what Gray seeks to do here in Lancaster, establishing a reward fund for information leading to an arrest for illegal gun possession.

“Gun owners are very suspicious” of his organization, Schoenke admitted. “They want to make sure we’re a real gun rights organization. We say, we’ll fight to make sure [the government] won’t take people’s guns.”

But when it comes to illegal guns, “We’re trying to do the right thing.”