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The NRA Isn’t that Powerful. Its Creed Is.

The National Rifle Association will put on a show at its annual leadership forum in Houston on Friday. Senior Republicans will parade through the event. Gun industry executives will fill the VIP seats wearing the coveted gold jackets of the NRA Golden Ring of Freedom. The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas will put a damper on some of the festivities — Don McLean, who sang the 1970s-anthem “American Pie,” withdrew from the event — but other lesser-known acts will perform.

It’s a remarkable show of force, particularly for an organization that has been battered in recent years by litigation, plummeting revenue and a failed coup. Indeed, Friday will be the first time that Republican leaders have spoken at an NRA annual meeting since 2019 in Indianapolis, after a struggle for power broke out within the NRA leadership. The still-hot civil war started after Oliver North, the Reagan-era conservative hero and then-NRA president, accused longtime CEO Wayne LaPierre of embezzlement.

A lot has changed since then. Understanding this metamorphosis may help explain the nation’s failure to act in the face of so many recent heartbreaking gun tragedies. The unspeakable loss, this time of 19 young children in Uvalde, following soon after the 10 adults killed in a racist attack in Buffalo, and shootings in Chicago and Laguna Woods over just the past few weeks, underscores the frightening level of gun violence that is the new American norm. Meaningful gun reform, meanwhile, despite nationwide pleas for change, is not even on the horizon.

Ultimately, the NRA is a profoundly weaker and more divided organization than it once was. But its legacy, even if it fails to survive, will be the culture and ideology of gun rights it helped cultivate, and that is a potent thing for many conservative voters and the Republican politicians who chase them.

Apart from McLean, who said it would now be “disrespectful and hurtful” to perform for the NRA, few appear to be fleeing. Former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), along with LaPierre and other NRA officials, remain scheduled to speak. (Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shifted course and plans to send videotaped remarks instead, while holding a press conference in Uvalde.)

NRA members comprise a thick part of the base of what could be called the American gun rights movement. The speakers, in response to these tragedies, are certain not to concede to fresh demands for gun reform; they’ve long vowed to protect gun owners from being penalized for the actions of criminals or the mentally ill. In fact, they’re just as likely to point to the corresponding calls for reform as evidence that gun rights are squarely under siege.

The man on the stage with arguably the weakest credentials on gun rights but who might get the biggest applause will be Trump. He is still the leader of the Republican Party, which has long entwined itself with the NRA. Cruz will no doubt flag that last month he introduced a resolution with 21 other Republican senators opposing the Biden administration’s proposed crackdown on homemade or “ghost guns,” saying registration of gun parts would be the start of national firearms registry. Abbott can boast that he recently allowed Texans to carry handguns with neither training nor a permit.

The gun lobby’s celebration of its ongoing clout comes at a time when the nation’s polarization over gun rights mirrors our divides over abortion as well as the rule of law and the future of our own constitutional republic. But another divide could end up on display in Houston, and it could reveal more fissures.

The fight to oust LaPierre isn’t over.

NRA board director, Phil Journey, who is a Kansas state district judge, is leading the effort to, in his words, “Restore the NRA.” He said in a video that LaPierre is “plundering” the organization. He and his allies have chosen Allen West as their torchbearer to replace him.

West, of course, is the fiery former Republican congressman from Florida who later moved to Texas and for a year was chair of the state party. He made the QAnon phrase, “We are the storm,” the mantra of the Texas GOP and put it on fundraising mailings as well as on T-shirts and hats. Then he ran for governor of Texas, trying to outflank Abbott from the right in the GOP primary. He lost. West, who also writes for the Christian News Service, now seems focused on usurping LaPierre.
West joined the NRA board of directors in 2016, and, within three years, he joined North in accusing LaPierre of the massive embezzlement scheme.

A former NRA president, David A. Keene, defended LaPierre in Ammoland.com, while calling West all talk and no action and “a show horse” as opposed to a “work horse” like LaPierre.

LaPierre’s recent tenure has been characterized by a series of scandals, and New York Attorney General Tish James has sought to dissolve the organization. But LaPierre still has the support of most of the NRA board.

In Indianapolis in 2019, two prior NRA presidents spoke out in his defense: Marion P. Hammer, the first woman president, and the daughter of a soldier who died in Okinawa during World War II, and Jim Porter, the son of a prior president who held the gavel during the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977 that turned the NRA into the gun lobby.

These NRA elders pointed out how LaPierre was the first leader in decades to finally deliver an American president, Trump, to speak at an NRA convention (Ronald Reagan was the first). So whatever LaPierre did or didn’t do doesn’t matter. Trump’s tenure advanced gun rights — along with some of the country’s darkest forces. He opened the door to the rise of white nationalism within the Republican Party, where it merged with an “absolutist” vision of gun rights. The rise of racial tension combined with fear surrounding the pandemic further contributed to ongoing, record sales of firearms since 2020, and an unprecedented ammunition shortage that is expected to last at least until 2023.

No one should forget that the first time an NRA official was given the stage at a political party’s national convention came at the 2016 Republican National Convention that nominated Trump. In 2020, after the NRA began to implode under the embezzlement accusations, the GOP chose the McCloskeys to speak to gun rights. They’re the St. Louis couple who pointed their semi-automatic pistol and rifle, respectively, at passing Black Lives Matter protesters.

Prospects for gun reform anytime soon are nil. While no doubt many Americans clamor for greater gun safety regulations, the ideology of gun rights pulses stronger today than ever. What many Democrats and reformers still don’t realize is that what is stopping them from achieving even one gun reform law is not the NRA’s money, but its ideology. The creed of gun rights.

From this view, even the most heartbreaking losses of either children or adults are “the price of freedom.” Or so the disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly said in 2017, after nearly 60 people were killed in the Las Vegas shooting. It’s a viewpoint that only seems to have grown.

Gun reform, going nowhere fast: After Oxford High, there’s no appetite for legislative change

Please read the original here: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-has-gun-reform-hit-a-wall-20211214-km2dccqk6vgr3hvxrid7nqhc24-story.html

The response to Michigan’s Oxford High School shooting proves what I’ve long suspected: Gun reform has hit a wall. Within hours, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy asked for unanimous consent to reintroduce a universal background check bill. It was blocked by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, and this time there was not even much of an uproar.

Reformers face a deeper reckoning in a pending Supreme Court decision on a New York State law limiting the concealed carrying of guns mainly to those who can demonstrate their specific self-defense need to do so. Its decision could expand the legality of civilians carrying hidden guns in not just New York but nationwide.

For decades, different right-leaning groups have organized to restrict abortion access and to expand access to guns, and their efforts are now showing results. Left-leaning groups have been more reactive, organizing when they feel threatened but without any long-term strategy.

Gun reformers need a new approach, one which considers how we got we got here as a nation so we can find a way out. Instead of ignoring the gun lobby and its messaging, reformers need to step up to challenge the myths and lies promoted by the gun industry and the National Rifle Association that are blocking gun reform. Instead of deferring to politicians who rarely focus more than a few years ahead, reformers need to reach out themselves to gun owners to find common ground.

Those who want a change in American gun laws should dig in and build a gun reform movement to match what the NRA and the gun industry built up together for more than four decades, beginning after new hardline leaders took over the NRA in 1977.

Today, the modern NRA faces its first existential crisis since 1977. Lately gun reformers have gloated over the NRA’s self-inflicted embezzlement scandal that could yet bring it down. But they miss that the pro-gun movement is stronger today than it’s ever been, certain to endure now as a central plank of the GOP even if the NRA that helped nail it in place collapses.

Gun reformers must rethink what they want and learn how to talk to gun owners. Unless they can start the conversation by credibly saying no one is ever going to come for your guns, they will likely continue to fail. The gun lobby’s most successful myth has been to convince many Americans and nearly all of today’s GOP leaders that gun ownership and gun control simply cannot co-exist. They can. This claim ignores how they do co-exist in other advanced nations as well as in six states plus the District of Columbia, in which residents are required to register many or most newly purchased weapons.

Most reformers don’t realize that the measures they advocate for — like stronger background checks, red flag laws, anti-trafficking measures, anti-violence measures and more — would still only make a slight dip in bringing our gun violence down to that of other wealthy nations even if they all one day were to pass. President Biden, when under pressure, has intermittently said he would try to reimpose a new assault weapons ban. But this is something that has backfired in the past, and that today’s Supreme Court, as the legal scholars have pointed out, would likely overturn.

Few reformers seem to know that the one thing that separates our nation from every other wealthy nation, besides us having 25 times, on average, more gun violence, is that these nations all have a national system of licensing gun owners and registering their weapons, while we alone leave it up to our states. Democrats seem to have concluded that trying to implement national licensing and registration might encounter even more resistance. Yet easy access to guns is the common denominator in our gun violence, and, unless we find some way to check it, the carnage will continue.

Reformers need to talk with gun owners about regulations that would respect gun ownership but that also raise the threshold to purchase new guns, especially, to match the responsibility that comes with keeping them. New guns sold in states with weak gun laws is what fuels our ongoing gun tragedies, as up to more than half of guns seized from criminals have traveled across state lines.

Biden needs to appoint a commission to ask how we got here and options for moving forward. It should finally examine our own history of gun control, showing the passage of federal gun laws from the 1930s through the 1960s in response to gun violence from organized crime to political assassinations. And ask why that progress not only stopped, but, if anything, has only since been rolled back, and why we barely talk about any of this anymore.

Given the state of affairs today, meaningful fixes to our gun laws could take years, if not a generation. And they’ll never happen unless advocates rethink their approach.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

The NRA turns 150: The organization has a rich history. Most of it has been buried.

On Nov. 17, 1871, the National Rifle Association was chartered in New York using the address of the Army and Navy Journal in lower Manhattan. Its publisher and editor, William Conant Church, had been a New York Times special correspondent during the Civil War. Once slightly wounded, he reported under the pseudonym Pierrepont, the name of a street in Brooklyn where he lived. Church later became a Union brevet officer in charge of the militia organized to defend Washington, D.C. in case of a Confederate invasion.

Church co-founded the NRA with another Brooklynite and Civil War veteran, George Wood Wingate. He was a New York national guardsman who was promoted amid fighting in Carlisle near the battle of Gettysburg. Wingate would go on to become the NRA’s master rifle trainer. Within six years of the NRA being founded, American riflemen would become the undisputed champions of the (English-speaking) world. They beat first the Irish and then the British-led Imperial Team on the NRA’s range called Creedmoor in Queens County on Long Island.

Church and Wingate had followed how Prussia in Europe had prevailed against two larger empires, Austria and France, using both better rifles and riflemen. They founded the NRA six years after the Civil War ended as a private initiative, during the peak of Reconstruction, to train soldiers in better riflery in anticipation of future wars. They began by training New York guardsmen at Creedmoor range using state funds introduced by their Brooklyn representative in Albany.

Wingate traveled to London as a lawyer and there toured the Wimbledon range of the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom. After granting it a Royal charter, Queen Victoria herself fired its inaugural shot. The NRA in New York copied the British Royal NRA’s name, the distances to its targets on Wimbledon range, and even their solid iron designs weighing up to 400 pounds each – shipped by steamer across the Atlantic.

Few NRA members today know this history. Why not? It’s as if their leaders have buried the NRA’s past. New leaders took over the group in 1977, when they “shifted” the NRA on a new, “unyielding” course for gun rights. Today’s embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, joined them a year later as a junior lobbyist. Later, during President Obama’s years, he and other leaders rolled out a new origin story claiming the NRA was founded in support of the Second Amendment and is “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization.” This claim is untrue.

A shift in history

The leaders of the “Cincinnati Revolt,” as the shift was called, incorporated into the effort affiliated gun clubs across the nation that the NRA had built up over more than a century. To further it, they buried the NRA’s Brooklyn and British roots and founding mission of better marksmanship. And how its leaders since Prohibition had come, until 1977, to weigh gun ownership against public safety to support what they called “reasonable” gun control.

During President Trump’s years, NRA leaders added a second claim about Reconstruction. “When faced with the threats, coercion, intimidation, and yes, violence of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, it was the NRA that stood with and defended the rights of blacks to the Second Amendment,” wrote Allen West, an NRA board member, in 2018 for Conservative News Service. A year later, he repeated the same claim as LaPierre applauded on the dais before NRA members in Indianapolis. At the same meeting, West, now running for governor of Texas, joined other NRA board members Ted Nugent and then-President Oliver North in accusing LaPierre of embezzlement.

Not a word about arming freed slaves is true. In 1877, the same year that Reconstruction ended, Church publicly complained that the NRA, despite its global, Victorian-era triumphs, had yet to expand rifle training beyond New York and so was still not improving riflery nationwide. The longest trip taken by the NRA during Reconstruction was by steamer to Dublin to win a rematch against the Irish at their Dollymount range.

Church wrote a lengthy history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and he made no mention of anyone helping to arm freed slaves, and no reference to the NRA at all. Even as he noted that “Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold any one responsible for their murder.”

Scarce transparency

By burying so much NRA history, its modern leaders have buried the legacies of generations of war heroes. Most NRA leaders, until 1977, were decorated veterans like Milton A. Reckord. Medaled in both world wars, he was the NRA’s longest-serving leader until LaPierre. Reckord cleaned up an embezzlement scandal in 1925, when he also began a practice of publishing the NRA’s annual financial reports. This transparency stopped in 1977.

Their successors led by LaPierre have forgotten more history. Wingate was also a co-founder of the New York Public Schools Athletic League. Today the top senior boy as well as girl athlete in every sport across the five boroughs of New York City still receives the Wingate Award. He led New York public schools to start offering sports to girls in 1905.

Church was the first figure on record to exhort the military to disallow use of the n-word and d-word for African Americans and Italian Americans, respectively, writing by the early 1890s that undermined morale – over 50 years before the military integrated Black soldiers with others.

NRA leaders have noted some of the NRA’s history, like its members’ role in organizing shipments of rifles and gear to the British Home Guard before America’s entry into World War II. But they’ve rarely said much else. This might help explain why they’ve said so little about it even on the NRA’s sesquicentennial.

Frank Smyth is the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The NRA is 150 years old: A look at how the organization has evolved

Yahoo posted a free version of the same article.

MLB vs. NRA: Compare and contrast

MLB vs. NRA: Compare and contrast

A police vehicle is seen across from Nationals Park, Sunday, July 18, 2021, in Washington. A baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Washington was suspended in the sixth inning Saturday night after a shooting outside Nationals Park.
A police vehicle is seen across from Nationals Park, Sunday, July 18, 2021, in Washington. A baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Washington was suspended in the sixth inning Saturday night after a shooting outside Nationals Park. (Nick Wass/AP)

The gunfire that suspended a game between the San Diego Padres and the hometown Washington Nationals was a first for Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, it’s hardly surprising in 2021 America.

This year the nation has endured a mass shooting, or the wounding or killing of at least four people, more than once a day. We have about 25 times more on average than in other advanced nations. Every day a new gun tragedy, each with its own loss of life and lifelong toll, seems to replace a prior heartbreak.

Major League Baseball and the National Rifle Association are each a century and a half old. But while MLB celebrates its history, the NRA buries and rewrites its own, likely because an exhumation could illuminate our nation’s pickle over gun violence.

Baseball’s roots are long. Amateur clubs emerged in many states after the Civil War. The first “professional” game where all players were paid occurred in Mansfield, Ohio in 1869, and the first “major league” game was played nearly two years later in Indiana. The hometown Fort Wayne Kekiongas, named for the capital of a local Native American tribe, beat the Cleveland Forest Citys, in an association that in 1903 became the Major League Baseball we know today.

Six months after the Fort Wayne game, the NRA was founded in New York City. Two Union Army veteran officers founded the group to improve marksmanship in anticipation of future wars. They copied its name, the layout of its gun range and even the design of tons of iron targets, shipped by steamer across the Atlantic, from the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom.

The MLB celebrates its history. From retiring numbers of baseball legends, to players donning uniforms to celebrate the Negro Leagues, to honoring surviving legends by bringing or assisting them into stadiums to be cheered by fans, to archiving scores and statistics in publicly accessible databases dating back to 1903 — the year of the first World Series.

The NRA at least appreciates its history, having built a climate-controlled room to preserve documents, blueprints, trophies, ephemera and movie reels of shooting competitions dating back to the 1930s, in the basement of the National Firearms Museum at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Va. But it is closed to both rank-and-file NRA members and the public. Why? The NRA underwent a change in 1977, more than a century after it was founded, and its new leaders wanted a reboot. The “Cincinnati Revolt,” as it is known, shifted the group from a gun club to the unyielding gun lobby we know today.

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s longtime and now embattled CEO, joined NRA a year later. He and other modern leaders don’t want anyone to know about the NRA’s British Royal roots, lest the disinterment belie their claims that the NRA was founded to support gun rights and the Second Amendment.

The NRA’s museum illustrates much about firearms but nothing about NRA history, apart from a large bronze bust of Harlon B. Carter, the leader of the Cincinnati Revolt whom LaPierre recently called a “great leader.” Carter had changed his first name from Harlan to conceal for 50 years that he was once convicted and jailed of murdering a fellow juvenile, Ramón Casiano, with a shotgun before his conviction was overturned upon appeal.

Today’s NRA leaders have more to hide. Like how the NRA took no position on gun control over its first 50 years, then supported national gun control legislation from the 1930s until the 1977 revolt. Or how the NRA ended a 50-year practice of financial transparency, also in 1977.

Recently NRA leaders have told new lies. In Indianapolis, in 2019, an NRA board member named Allen West claimed that the early organization had “stood with freed slaves.” West is a former Florida congressman and chair of the Texas Republican Party, who is now running against Greg Abbott in the Texas gubernatorial primary.

“When faced with the threats, coercion, intimidation, and yes, violence of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, it was the NRA that stood with and defended the rights of Blacks to the Second Amendment,” West previously wrote.

Not one word of this is true. Five years before, a book whose research was partly financed by the NRA claimed that gun control helped enable the Holocaust. That’s also false. But it shows how far the modern NRA will go to keep making it easy for Americans to buy guns, sustaining earnings for gun industry and NRA executives alike.

The MLB has seen its share of scandals from accusations of throwing the World Series in 1919, to widespread steroid use, to pitchers today allegedly doctoring the ball. But the MLB has survived each one by using transparency, even if commissioners were slow at first, to regain trust. One American pastime, gun-toting, could learn a lot from the other.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

 

 

 

Holocaust, guns and the truth

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Holocaust, guns and the truth

Prisoners posing with guards outside the prison building in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto during World War II in 1943.
Prisoners posing with guards outside the prison building in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto during World War II in 1943. (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)

Republican Party leaders finally called out Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a supporter of QAnon and the big lie about the 2020 election — after she compared health measures requiring facemasks, to Jews in the Holocaust forced to wear Stars of David. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the parallel “appalling,” while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it “absolutely outrageous and reprehensible.” They and other GOP leaders have given no indication, however, that they will sanction Greene.

But the freshman congresswoman is hardly the only figure in the nation to have manipulated the Holocaust. The National Rifle Association, or at least its modern leaders led by its now embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, have long searched for “proof” that gun control is nothing more than a slippery slope to genocide. And in recent years, the NRA has manipulated the Holocaust to claim they finally found it, funding research that has allegedly discovered a new link between gun control and the Holocaust that generations of scholars have yet to find.

In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League said “Nazi Analogies Have No Place In Gun Control Debate” after a half dozen commentators including Sean Hannity and Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News out of the blue all raised the matter of gun control and the Holocaust.

“If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust,” claimed Napolitano.

It’s as if they were all laying the groundwork for the book, “Gun Control in The Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State,’” published later that year by the Independent Institute, a small think-tank in Oakland. Research for this book was partly funded by the NRA. Its author, Stephen P. Halbrook, is the nation’s best-known pro-gun lawyer. Several years before, during the watershed gun rights case Heller vs. District of Columbia that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, Halbrook filed a successful amicus brief on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and the president of the Senate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Halbrook’s thesis about gun control and the Holocaust is novel at best. Most Holocaust scholars, like Alan E. Steinweis, director of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, say that the idea that gun control was a factor in the Holocaust is “simply a nonissue.” But Halbrook claims that prior gun control laws during the Weimer Republic, or Germany’s democratic years before Hitler took power, were used to seize firearms from Jews, enough to have helped enable the Holocaust.

Never mind the weak evidence, the NRA’s house organ crowed about the book’s supposed breakthrough.

“Based on newly discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries and newspapers of the time,” the book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read the NRA’s American Rifleman in the most glowing review. “While voluminous scholarship has documented the Third Reich and the Holocaust, this is the first thorough examination of the laws restricting firearm ownership that rendered Hitler’s political opponents, as well as the Jews, defenseless.”

The very same language is repeated by the Independent Institute in its website’s blurb for the book. The Washington Times also reviewed it, but notably hedged the book’s claim that gun control was a significant factor in the Holocaust. “There is no way to prove it,” Robert VerBruggen wrote of the book’s thesis, sidestepping whether the book’s evidence is sound, only noting that it provided an “extensive history” of the matter.

Halbrook even buried near the back of his book that he never found the evidence to prove his case. “Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate,” he wrote. He added that “such records may have been destroyed during the war,” which is hard to believe, as records of nearly every aspect of the Holocaust survived.

This thesis resonates more loudly today than many may realize. Taken at face value, it suggests that gun control laws like those the Democrats are trying to pass now could one day be used to confiscate arms, just like the Nazis allegedly did. If this same thesis fails to hold up, however, the best evidence gun rights advocates would have left to stop gun control would be the 1984 Hollywood movie “Red Dawn,” where Communist invaders use prior gun control lists to seize guns as they take over. But that, of course, is fiction.

Leaders of both parties have rightly spoken out against Rep. Greene’s disturbing comparison. But no one should get a pass for spinning the Holocaust to advance gun rights, either.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History,”

The slope is not so slippery, actually: Dems must tackle disinformation about gun control head-on

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President Biden’s gun plan includes mandatory registration of “assault weapons” for anyone wishing to keep those they already own. He is the first president to raise the issue of gun registration in more than 50 years since President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He’s the first ever, too, to propose banning new sales of “assault” or tactical, semiautomatic weapons.

The Biden administration is responding to pressure for gun reform led today by survivors of the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The plan has finally put on the table what gun reform advocates including surviving parents and others have long demanded, seemingly in vain until now. The House just passed major gun control bills on Thursday.

Gun rights advocates, however, a group that seems to include nearly every leader of the Republican Party, are readying for a fight. If there is one issue that could reunite the GOP, from Sen. Mitch McConnell to former President Trump, not to mention every group from Three Percenters to neo-Nazis who joined in the Jan. 6 Capitol takeover, it is gun registration. Against it, that is.

It is impossible to imagine how Biden could succeed in healing the nation, as he has promised, and still enact all of his gun plan. Many if not most of the 74 million people who voted for Trump’s reelection would also oppose this plan. Not to mention many elected officials, from governors to constitutional sheriffs, who might refuse to comply. Or the new Roberts Supreme Court, which will one day no doubt rule on gun laws.

Millions of people, today, see gun control itself as an existential threat.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” as President Trump said in 2018 when he reversed himself on background checks after the back-to-back weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton. He did so after speaking with the National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre, who, like the NRA, has long promoted this theory.

Biden has yet to address the details of his own gun plan. Throughout his 48-year career, moreover, he is not known to have ever addressed the issue of gun registration. Gun groups have been circulating for months what they call the “Biden plan to destroy the Second Amendment,” filling the vacuum left by his silence with fear. They claim that this is the fateful step, after background checks, that could start the slide to disarmament, and then genocide.

This kind of cowardice has long led reformers astray. The nation has not passed any comprehensive and lasting national gun laws in more than a half-century. In 1994, during the Clinton years, Congress passed the “Assault Weapons Ban,” which outlawed, for just 10 years, select semiautomatic firearms based on their cosmetic features, like both a pistol grip and a flash suppressor. But this only led gun manufacturers to design weapons to bypass the ban, which, since it expired, has resulted in more sales of more AR-15 rifles and other tactical, semiautomatic weapons than ever before.

The Biden plan would give existing owners of semiautomatic weapons (like me) the choice of either selling their weapons back to the federal government, or registering them under a prior gun law, backed in 1934 by the NRA, along with paying a tax of up to $200 for each weapon. This would put hardship on working-class gun owners, noted the former NRA commentator and independent merchandiser Colion Noir.

The plan would limit, too, although no one has yet suggested the cap, the number of weapons one may own, along with banning high-capacity magazines. All these steps are opposed by the NRA and others who share the belief that firearms in civilian hands are a necessary check on the power of federal as well as state governments, and that they are also necessary for self-defense against not just lone criminals but also armed mobs. Firearms sales spiked last year after the death in police custody of George Floyd as the uprising began of Black Lives Matter protests.

Biden said he would also reverse the immunity granted under President George W. Bush to hold gunmakers civilly liable, again, for the potential misuse of their weapons to commit harm. He would eliminate the “gun show loophole” to require background checks on private sales. It remains to be seen whether this proposal might include an exception for, say, the passing down of a firearm heirloom to the next generation.

The president left out one measure in his recent remarks, on the third anniversary of the Parkland shooting, still posted online: to ban online sales of ammunition. The nation has experienced an unprecedented, ongoing shortage of ammunition from both over-the-counter and online retailers, according to both the trade press and the NRA. It’s been fueled by ever-rising demand, as manufacturers have been producing ammo at “above-normal capacities” throughout the pandemic. Demand spiked again to worsen the shortage after first CNN, and then Fox News, announced that Biden had won the presidency.

No doubt any attempt to end commerce in the firearms industry’s fastest-growing sector would meet opposition. Most of the outrage already smoldering in resistance to the gun plan, however, is based on speculation, not facts. This shows how much the NRA, in particular, has shaped how we as a nation look at guns and their regulations. The NRA wasn’t always like this. The NRA backed gun control from the 1930s into the 1970s, as its leaders long sought to balance the needs of gun owners against public safety.

Despite what today’s NRA may suggest, gun registration is the norm in every other advanced nation, and not one of them has deteriorated into either a totalitarian or genocidal state. Canada, the nations of Western Europe and Japan all control guns by strictly licensing owners and registering each weapon, to the degree that they permit civilian ownership at all.

A few more, like Australia and New Zealand each confiscated semiautomatic weapons after a mass shooting. Yet, rather than falling into tyranny, each of these two nations still gets the very highest rankings for their political and civil rights on the Freedom Index compiled by the watchdog Freedom House.

Six blue states, too, including New York and New Jersey, require mandatory registration of some or all semiautomatic guns. New York also requires registration of all handguns, which must be kept in the home. Most states, today, also issue permits for the concealed carry of handguns. This generates registries of gun permit holders that the NRA and others also conveniently ignore.

Resistance to gun registration runs deep. During the Reagan years, LaPierre was dubbed the “Captain” by Sen. Orrin Hatch after he guided, on behalf of the NRA, passage of a 1986 law that weakened two prior national gun control laws. The same law also prohibited “any system registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions.”

Fear of gun registration remains strong. In 2013, when a bipartisan pair of senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, wrote a bill for “universal” background checks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in two first-grade classrooms, they included language adding criminal penalties to any government official found to have compiled gun registration lists, saying it would make the bill more palatable.

Yet, even with this redundant language, the bill still fell short of garnering the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster. Today, even though the Democrats now have a slim majority in the Senate, the threat of a filibuster to block gun reform remains. Majority leaders have discussed the possibility of taking the “nuclear option” to eliminate it. But they are hesitant, as it could lead to other ways for the Republican minority to block legislation.

To support their theory of the slippery slope, the NRA helped fund research for a book called “Gun Control in the Third Reich” by the gun rights litigator and scholar, Stephen P. Halbrook, published by a small think tank in 2013. This book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read its own publisher’s blurb parroted verbatim in a review in the NRA’s flagship American Rifleman magazine, which omitted mention of Halbrook having received NRA funds.

Few if any Holocaust scholars support this claim. It ignores that European Jews had no tradition of either gun ownership or resistance, as the scholar Raul Hilberg, author of “The Destruction of the European Jews,” documented. The director of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, Alan E. Steinweis, wrote that the idea that gun control played a role “is a simply a nonissue.”

Halbrook in his book also cited evidence that seems to disprove his own thesis, burying it near his conclusion: “Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings.” The Nazis went door-to-door searching for Jews and confiscating their property. But, when it came to firearms, they found little more than hunting rifles and antique guns, as the surviving records Halbrook did manage to find show.

These are the kinds of myths and disinformation that is filling the gap left behind by Biden and his advisers’ silence over their own gun plan. If they and others want to pass meaningful reforms, they need to finally address these tough issues head-on. They might want to pace themselves, though, as anything more than expanded background checks will probably take years, and nothing less than changing the nation’s conversation about guns.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

The Myths Fueling Today’s Armed Right How the NRA seeded the storylines animating the violent groups that will be patrolling this year’s election

Please see the original article here including photos by Mark Peterson/Redux.

The 13 men charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen, a possible reference to the white supremacist vigilante militia in the HBO series Watchmen. The suspects began planning their kidnapping this summer, with live fire exercises and explosives, according to the charges. Not long before, gangs of armed men, many of them carrying AR-15s, and defiantly not wearing facemasks, protested inside the state capitol in Lansing against strict health measures imposed by Whitmer. Similar armed right-wing groups across the nation are planning to privately police polling sites on November 3, as President Donald Trump called for in the presidential debate in late September.

At first blush, it may seem hard to connect the various themes that crop up in recent stories about the armed right. There is, of course, the adamant assertion of their right to bear arms, but also a penchant for white supremacy (evidenced by their baleful presence at Black Lives Matter protests, and the online contempt they routinely hurl at the movement), a resistance to common sense public health measures meant to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic, and the specter of voter intimidation. But at a deeper level, what connects this powerful, and dangerous, set of attitudes and reflexes is a collection of myths that have spread like coronavirus mutations through social media, allowing the different groups of the armed right to perceive themselves as good guys fighting various historic evils.

Many of these myths can be traced back to the National Rifle Association, the once-powerful and now-waning guns rights organization that is in the midst of tearing itself apart. The NRA is in decline and in debt, laying off staff and losing members. The New York Attorney General’s office is seeking “to dissolve” the NRA over credible charges of massive embezzlement first raised by the NRA whistleblower Oliver North, the Reagan-era White House official at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal. North, identified as “Dissident No. 1” in court documents, was backed by other NRA board directors, including the rock star Ted Nugent.

But even as the NRA teeters, its mythical spirit lives on, entering a welter of new right-wing groups, some of which are neo-fascist—such as The Proud Boys, whom the president notoriously told to “stand back and stand by” at the first debate—or openly white supremacist, and some of which are not. They are united in their paranoia, and in their anti-government agenda, by one of the NRA’s grand theories: the “slippery slope.” The idea is that even a little gun control, like background checks, can start a dangerous slide in disarmament leading all the way to white genocide. Trump himself fuels the myth. “They call it the slippery slope, and all of sudden everything gets taken away,” he told reporters last summer, explaining his own reversal on background checks.

Even as the NRA teeters, its mythical spirit lives on, entering a welter of new right-wing groups.

For these armed groups, the slippery slope’s primary example is the Holocaust. In 2016 Nugent posted a graphic on his Facebook page featuring photos of prominent Jewish American leaders, each one next to an Israeli flag, calling them “punks” who “hate freedom” over their support for gun control. Within hours the Anti-Defamation League denounced Nugent, saying that “anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate.” Nugent then posted in response, “What sort of racist prejudiced POS [piece of shit] could possibly not know that Jews for gun control are Nazis in disguise?” Nugent was referring to the belief amongst gun activists and other conservatives across the country that the Nazis used gun control to disarm Europe’s Jews before they killed them.

Another example marshalled to bolster the slippery slope argument comes from the Reconstruction era. “I’m a Black American and I know that the NRA was started as a civil rights organization training Black Americans to arm themselves and defend themselves against the KKK,” said Candace Owens in 2018 on Fox News, announcing her membership in the NRA.

These gun myths about Reconstruction and the Holocaust are both the work of the NRA. The first is a fabrication wholly invented by its modern leadership, while the second is an old trope that the NRA has endorsed and amplified. The NRA’s messages have spread through social media to animate gun activists nationwide. The work of one NRA-funded scholar, David B. Kopel, has appeared in newspapers like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, arguing that gun laws don’t work, usually without disclaimers reflecting the millions of dollars in NRA funding Kopel’s think tank, the Independence Institute, has received. The NRA’s rewriting of history continues to feed viral memes that appropriate the epic struggles of two historically persecuted minorities. These fantasies have saturated the Republican electorate to the point that the “slippery slope” is now embraced as gospel truth on the American right.

 

The NRA wasn’t always like this. For over a century, it was dedicated to riflery and the shooting sports. It was founded in New York City in 1871, during the peak of Reconstruction. Union Army veterans, most of whom were New York National Guard officers, formed the group to improve riflery among soldiers and able-bodied men in anticipation of future wars. They modeled their organization upon the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom, inaugurated 12 years before by Queen Victoria, and borrowed its namesake and target designs for their shooting range. In 1876, during the American centennial, the NRA added “of America” to its name to prevent “any international confusion.”

In 1977, in an internal uprising that today’s NRA leaders pretend never happened, the NRA literally shifted overnight into America’s largest gun lobby in what is still quietly known within its lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.” This internecine mutiny was over the NRA’s prior support for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which outlawed, among other things, mail-order rifles like the one tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, bought through an ad in the NRA’s own flagship magazine American Rifleman. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” explained the NRA’s old guard before it was overthrown. The modern NRA has since embraced an “unyielding” and “absolutist” take on gun rights, and over the past 43 years it has helped expand access to guns across most of the nation.

The NRA’s Royal British roots hardly make for a good story for the modern NRA to tell. It has come up with a new origin story more than once, most recently as 2013, after the re-election of a Black president, Barack Obama. “We are the largest civil rights organization in the world, and we have been part of the fabric of America ever since 1871,” wrote LaPierre in February 2013 in an article that appeared in the American Rifleman. The idea of the NRA being the world’s largest civil rights organization planted a new notion that soon morphed into another. “As members of the oldest civil rights organization in the nation, NRA members know tyranny when we see it,” wrote LaPierre six months later on the conservative news website The Daily Caller.

Wayne LaPierre and NRA chief spokesman Andrew Arulanandam each declined to comment for this story.

Since then, the NRA has made this specious claim—that the NRA is the nation’s oldest (or longest-standing) civil rights organization—its new mantra, repeated by leaders, lawyers and the group’s website. Just last year the NRA laid down the keystone of its new genesis story by falsely claiming that the early NRA “stood with freed slaves” during Reconstruction. This is a canard that tries to turn the history of gun ownership in America from one dominated by white men armed to help maintain an unequal social order into a mythical one where white gun owners and the NRA itself were on the frontlines of America’s earliest struggles for racial equality. “Those Who Call The NRA Racist Don’t Know Our History,” wrote LaPierre in 2017. “In our [149-year] history, open doors for minorities, and defense of our common rights, has been at the center of the NRA’s existence.”

By then the NRA had already helped boost a novel theory about the Holocaust: that German gun control laws were “essential elements” leading to the genocide of six million Jews, the idea being that Jews could have defended themselves from Nazi fascism if the Gestapo had not first seized their guns. Needless to say, this claim has no basis in any prior scholarship. “For whatever reason, historians have paid no attention to Nazi laws and policies restricting firearms ownership as essential elements in creating tyranny,” as one NRA-funded scholar himself lamented. This theory turns the worst atrocity of the modern era from one with many documented factors leading to the Nazis’ consolidation of power, into a myth where the Holocaust itself is the cautionary tale of gun control.

 

The NRA’s attempts to identify itself with the Black struggle for equal rights can be seen in the case of Roy Innis and the award named after him.

In 1968, around the time of the start of the gun rights rebellion within the NRA, Innis emerged as the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, running on an independent “Black Nationalist” agenda. His predecessors had helped establish the “Freedom Rides” and led them through the deep South in the early 1960s. By the early 1990s, after Innis had seen first one and then another of his sons “murdered,” in his words, “by young, Black thugs,” he joined the NRA’s board of directors, among the first African Americans to do so.

In 2017, after Roy Innis died, the NRA established a memorial award in his name. The first recipient was honored posthumously in 2019. Otis McDonald was an Army veteran and retired maintenance engineer from the South Side of Chicago. It was McDonald who brought the pivotal Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, decided in 2010, that extended the right to keep arms in one’s home throughout the nation.

This ceremony last spring was the high point of the NRA’s convention in Indianapolis—a weekend marred by breaking news of the embezzlement scandal. The commemoration was led by NRA board director Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel whose mock execution of an Iraqi policeman had led to him receiving a fine but keeping his rank. He also served in Congress as the first African American representative from Florida since Reconstruction. He rose in the Tea Party Caucus until, after redistricting, he lost his seat. West is now the chairman of the Texas Republican Party. He made the QAnon phrase, “We are the storm,” the new slogan of the Texas GOP, putting it on fundraising emails, social media, T-shirts, and hats.

The NRA had helped boost a novel theory about the Holocaust: that German gun control laws were “essential elements” leading to the genocide of six million Jews.

West joined fellow board members Oliver North and Ted Nugent in making accusations of financial improprieties against LaPierre, and it was West who called for him to resign. Yet West and LaPierre still managed to maintain a united front when it came to the ceremony for McDonald, which led to the NRA announcing that its founding fathers had armed freed slaves.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to Otis W. McDonald for his courage, his commitment and his sacrifice to take a stand and be steadfast in his belief in the United States Constitution,” West said from the stage, with LaPierre and his staff sharing the dais. Close to 1,000 NRA members, many wearing NRA gear or MAGA hats, were in the hall. West went on to fold McDonald’s action into the myth of the early NRA’s role during Reconstruction. “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights,” he said. Everyone in the room rose and applauded, in the longest standing ovation of the meeting.

“As an American black man, the history of the National Rifle Association has a special meaning for me, and I often reflect on it,” West wrote in a 2018 column for the Conservative News Service. “At a time when recently freed slaves were transitioning to being American citizens, they came under assault during the Reconstruction Era. When faced with the threats, coercion, intimidation, and yes, violence of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, it was the NRA that stood with and defended the rights of blacks to the Second Amendment.”

Is there any actual historical link between the NRA and the Black struggle? In the six years after it was founded in 1871, the NRA kept busy. It took the organization two years, after lobbying for funding from Albany, to finally open its first range, known as Creedmoor, in what is now Queens in 1873. Over the next four years, NRA shooters honed their skills, defeating first the Irish and then the “Imperial Team” of their Royal role models, both times at Creedmoor, to become the undisputed rifle champions of the (English-speaking) world in 1877. It was an American triumph in the Victorian Era, and the early NRA’s greatest accomplishment. Yet, like most of the NRA’s actual history, this is something that the modern NRA would prefer to forget.

It is also true that co-founder William Conant Church and other early NRA leaders, all based in New York, supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts during Reconstruction to crush the Ku Klux Klan, in order to put an end to ongoing Southern resistance. The filmmaker Michael Moore’s insinuation in his 2002 film Bowling for Columbine that the NRA and the KKK were somehow linked, because they were founded five years apart, is another canard, one flying in the other direction.

The use of Black Codes to outlaw gun ownership by freed slaves in the South was painfully real. But even this important issue was not raised by the early NRA or the men who founded it. Church, an unabashed Grant admirer, wrote one of the first books about the Civil War and its aftermath, titled Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction. In it, Church dealt explicitly with the challenges faced by freed slaves, including violence by Southern groups and authorities:

The negroes had ceased to be slaves, but they had not yet become free men, and there was no guaranty that they might not be subjected to some new form of oppression …[O]ne Southern State after another passed laws designed to perpetuate the scheme of enforced labour by establishing a system of apprenticeship, more heartless and cruel than slavery had ever been, and lacking the ameliorating features of the ‘patriarchal institution.’ . . . Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold any one responsible for their murder.

Church made no mention whatsoever of any group, whether private or governmental, coming to the aid of freed slaves by helping to arm them. (Although he did mention the Union Army’s decision during the war to start “arming the negro” to add “a powerful ally” and “make good soldiers.”) Nor did he mention any need to arm freed slaves, or even any discussion about the matter. As a matter of fact, Church did not mention the National Rifle Association at all.

Eighty years after Reconstruction, however, at the start of the Civil Rights era, there was a case that involved the NRA and the KKK. A Black man named Robert Williams, who had served as a Marine in a segregated unit during World War II, became the president of the local NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. He helped integrate the town library, but trouble started when he and other activists tried to desegregate the town’s swimming pool after several Black children drowned in nearby swimming holes. The local KKK mobilized in response. “So we started arming ourselves,” said Williams. “I wrote to the National Rifle Association in Washington which encourages veterans to keep in shape to defend their native land, and asked for a charter, which we got. In a year we had 60 members.” They called themselves Monroe’s Black Armed Guard.

In 1957 a group of hooded Klansmen fired shots at the home of a Black doctor who was another local NAACP leader. They were surprised when “Williams and the black men of Monroe fired back from behind sandbags and covered positions,” wrote Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham University law professor and the nation’s leading African American scholar on gun rights. The firefight was covered by newspapers as far away as Norfolk, Virginia, with the headlines “Citizens Fire Back at Klan” and “Shots Exchanged Near Residence of NAACP Head.” But the American Rifleman said nary a word, and the NRA did nothing subsequently to support its Black Monroe chapter, either.

The NRA did support at least one African American group in the South during the Civil Rights era. A half century ago it sold surplus government ammunition to the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The group “provided their own guns.” Yet today’s NRA falsely claims that “the NRA was their arsenal of democracy.”

 

The NRA’s use of the Holocaust myth began, as so many things do in the world of conservative politics, with a think tank.

Stephen P. Halbrook, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, has been described by the UCLA law professor Adam Winkler as “the nation’s leading expert on the right to keep and bear arms.” Halbrook filed an amicus brief in Heller vs. District of Columbia, the watershed Supreme Court case that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and president of the Senate, Vice President Dick Cheney—all without making any mention of having received nearly $300,000 in NRA funding. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller cited Halbrook’s brief twice. Halbrook was later one of the attorneys representing the NRA in the McDonald v. Chicago, which extended the Heller ruling throughout the nation.

In 2013, The Independent Institute published Halbrook’s book Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the States.’ “Based on newly discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries and newspapers of the time,” the book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read the review of the book in the NRA’s American Rifleman. “While voluminous scholarship has documented the Third Reich and the Holocaust, this is the first thorough examination of the laws restricting firearm ownership that rendered Hitler’s political opponents, as well as the Jews, defenseless.”

The Washington Times, the conservative daily controlled by the Unification Movement (associated with the late Sung Myung Moon), also reviewed it, but notably hedged the book’s extravagant claim that gun suppression was pivotal in setting the Holocaust in motion.  “There is no way to prove it,” Robert VerBruggen wrote of the book’s thesis. But he did note that the book provides an “extensive history” of the matter.

Halbrook’s book glosses over evidence that prior scholars like Raul Hilberg have established that would seem to counter, if not disprove, his thesis. “Preventive attack, armed resistance, and revenge are almost completely absent in two thousand years of Jewish ghetto history. Instances of violent opposition, which may be found in one or another history book, are atypical and episodic,” Hilberg wrote in his 1961 book The Destruction of The European Jews. “The critical period of the 1930s and 1940s is marked by that same absence of physical opposition.”

The biggest hole in Halbrook’s research is one he admits himself, albeit in the pages near the back of his book. Halbrook notes that, “Police were required to list all weapons taken from Jews and to send the weapons seized and listing to the Gestapo.” Yet he has failed to locate any significant records of seizures of weapons from Jews, and no large caches of any weapons at all. As Halbrook writes:

Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings. Routine police reports mention arms and seizures along with other incidents. For example, a report to the commander of the municipal police in Leipzig dated November 29, 1938, noted: “Based on the decree regarding the surrender of weapons in possession of Jews, three Jews surrendered their slashing and thrusting weapons and one Jew surrendered his hunting rifles. Two bayonets and a 85 mm grenade were reported found and surrendered.”

If this all seems rather cracked, which it is, consider that this issue came up in the last election cycle when Ben Carson, now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, suggested on CNN that gun control led to the Holocaust. His claim prompted a response from Alan E. Steinweis, a professor of history and Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, that this argument “is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into a historical situation where it was not seen as important. I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor.”

 

The “slippery slope” and its theoretical underpinnings are fueling today’s armed right. They disagree over matters from hate speech to the rules of engagement for use of force, with some openly advocating opening fire on BLM marchers. But what unites them is the shared notion that they are on the right side of history. The NRA-boosted myths about Reconstruction and the Holocaust reinforce their claim that it is not them, but gun control itself that is racist. “Thank God that the NRA was able to come to the black community’s defense” during Reconstruction, posted Old North State Patriots on Facebook in 2019. “There’s a reason that Hitler did it,” said former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka on Fox News the same year, referring to the Fuhrer’s alleged gun control to disarm the Jews. “This isn’t a theory–It’s history.”

The Oath Keepers/Patriot Movement in 2008 adopted the “Hitler took guns away” argument to Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “Imagine that Herr Hitlery is sworn in as president in 2009. After a conveniently timed ‘domestic terrorism’ incident (just a coincidence, of course) … she promptly crams a United Nations mandated total ban on the private possession of firearms.” The idea has become a fixture on Fox News, with host Andrew Napolitano extending the example to include Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones took up a similar line, telling Piers Morgan in 2013, “Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chavez took the guns, and I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!”

Many of today’s paramilitary groups keep a low profile. Instead of their own banner, many fly the Gadsden flag, a yellow militia banner of the Revolutionary War with a coiled green snake over the words “DONT TREAD ON ME.” Cadres greet each other online and in person through shared phrases, insignias, and other signs, creating a rich environment for racist extremists to operate. What else unites the armed right is their ongoing support for President Trump. He has called forth a movement bigger than himself, one that seems likely to outlast him.

America’s pro-Trump armed right would not be the first to invent a new ideology to justify  in advance their violence against others. Genocidaires developed propaganda ahead of the mass violence in late-1930s Germany and early-1990s Rwanda. The modern NRA’s whitewash of history today helps armed right-wing gangs from neo-Nazis to Three Percenters rationalize their intimidation and violence against others, including fellow Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech. Many of the same pro-Trump paramilitaries, who will be self-policing voters on election day, may grow more aggressive after the votes are tallied, especially if the top of their ticket comes up short.

It no longer matters to many of them, either, that the same NRA that helped inspire them is now nearing the previously unthinkable possibility of default. Unlike the NRA, which worked largely within the system, these armed gangs—with or without Trump—say they are ready to overthrow it.

Research for this article was supported by a Logan Nonfiction fellowship.

Frank Smyth is the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History.