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The Early NRA Had Nothing to Do with the KKK: Neo-Nazis and others only got closer later.

The protesters who recently carried semi-automatic rifles into capitol buildings in different states were hardly the first to do so. Back in May 1967, a group of Black Panthers led by Bobby Seale in Sacramento carried firearms into the California state house. Within less than three months, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the open carry of weapons in the state.

This swift change in California law showed the role of race in gun politics, and the National Rifle Association (NRA), back then, quietly supported its passage. But the era was also a time—long since forgotten—when the NRA favored gun control. A year later, the NRA supported a federal law banning mail-order guns like the one tied to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, among other measures. The law ended up both radicalizing the NRA and giving rise to the gun rights movement that is active today.

The role that race has played in the NRA is actually different from what many people may think. There was no evidence of any ties between the NRA, founded in 1871, and any white power groups for more than a hundred years, and it has only been in recent decades that such groups have moved closer to the NRA, despite its leaders’ efforts to keep their distance.

The NRA began hiring minorities in the mid-1970s, when a black attorney, Peter S. Ridley, who had earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam, joined its lobbying wing. The Washington College of Law at American University still has an award for African-American students demonstrating leadership qualities in his name.

A few figures have peddled misleading myths. Michael Moore in his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, insinuated that the NRA and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) might be linked since they both were founded after the Civil War, six years apart. But nothing could be further from the truth. The NRA was founded by veteran Union officers, who rarely ventured much further south than their shooting range on Long Island. They supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to crush the KKK during Reconstruction.

The NRA itself recently peddled the opposite myth. Last year, Allen West, an NRA board member, Army veteran, and former Florida congressman, told NRA members in Indianapolis, “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights.” This claim, however, is equally unfounded, as the writings from the period—including one by NRA co-founder William Conant Church—undeniably show.

A former war correspondent, editor, publisher, and writer, Church was also aware of, and sympathetic to, the plight of freed slaves. “The negroes had ceased to be slaves, but they had not yet become free men, and there was no [guarantee] that they might not be subjected to some new form of oppression,” he wrote in his 500-page tome on Grant’s policies in the South. “Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold anyone responsible for their murder.”

A product of his age, Church resorted to a racial stereotype for freed slaves by singularizing them as “Sambo” in one piece about their electoral potential. But he still stands out as the earliest figure on record to advocate that the military remove the racial epithets of “nigger” and “dago” from its vocabulary, more than fifty years before it finally integrated troops.


By 1957, however, shortly after the start of the civil rights era, there was a case involving the NRA and the KKK. A returning black veteran named Robert F. Williams organized a group in Monroe, North Carolina, that received a local charter from the NRA. It eventually was attacked by the local KKK in a firefight that made press as far north as Norfolk, Virginia. But the NRA, not far away in Washington, D.C., neither did nor said anything to help its first black chapter.

Another black armed group, Deacons for Defense and Justice, was formed in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The NRA sold to this group, as it did with others, surplus military ammunition available to the NRA through a government program. The same year, white power groups like Minutemen and Rangers appeared in a number of states. Nationally syndicated columnist Inez Robb, a former war correspondent, called these groups “private armies of the extreme right.”

Fearing they could possibly spoil their own image, the entire leadership of the NRA in 1964 said the “NRA vehemently disavows” any link to any “private armies or group violence,” making a statement that sounds nothing like what NRA leaders say today.

In 1977, the NRA finally embraced gun rights as its “unyielding” aim, shifting the life arc of the association. Following the lead, in fact, of two other groups, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Gun Owners of America, which were formed in opposition to the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 that had been backed by the NRA. It was only after all three of these groups embraced gun rights that white power paramilitaries gravitated to their coalition.


NRA leaders have tried to keep their distance from violent extremists. In 1992, a botched, fatal federal raid on a family of white separatists over two illegal, sawed-off shotguns in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, galvanized white power paramilitaries along with other gun rights activists. The NRA’s American Rifleman magazine waited a year, however, before even mentioning the raid, and the organization’s CEO Wayne LaPierre waited even longer, knowing the group would lose political clout if it was perceived as being allied with extremists.

In 1995, one month after the Oklahoma City bombing, members of the National Alliance, the nation’s then-largest neo-Nazi organization, whose literature inspired the bomber, quietly passed out trifold fliers on the floor of the NRA convention in Phoenix. “There is hardly a more significant difference than that which exists between the people who want gun control and those who don’t,” read the pamphlet, concluding, “The day for a great cleansing of this land will come.”

NRA leaders did not dispute that Nazis were in the room. “People have passed out literature, they could pass out literature for the communists. It doesn’t mean we support communism,” NRA chief lobbyist Tanya Metaksa told me for an article in The Village Voice.

At the same meeting, LaPierre addressed anyone on the floor “who supports—or even fantasizes about—terrorism [or] insurrection,” saying there is “a difference between 3.5 million united NRA members, and some scattered band of paranoid hatemongers,” telling them, “if someone in this room doesn’t know the difference, then there’s the door!”

White supremacist paramilitaries reappeared during President Donald Trump’s first year in office in Charlottesville, Virginia, mounting a larger presence than seen for decades. The year before, NRA board member Ted Nugent had posted a meme on Facebook accusing prominent Jewish leaders of being Nazis for supporting gun control, which the Anti-Defamation League called anti-Semitic.

In 2018, after the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, LaPierre addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference, singling out Jewish philanthropists for backing gun control. Two writers at the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz called his remarks anti-Semitic as well.

The NRA of today, unlike the organization of more than fifty years ago, has not denounced any armed groups among the recent protestors, despite the presence of Confederate flags and even a few Nazi symbols. Much like the President and his advisors, NRA leaders know these extremists comprise a loyal part of their coalition.

Frank Smyth is the author of the new book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).

“The Price of Freedom”: For the Gun Lobby, Mass Shootings Cannot Be Avoided

http://progressive.org/dispatches/price-of-freedom-for-the-gun-lobby-mass-shootings/

“The Price of Freedom”: For the Gun Lobby, Mass Shootings Cannot Be Avoided

by

October 6, 2017

 

The Dangerous Movement Behind Donald Trump

http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/10/189005/dangerous-movement-behind-donald-trump

It makes sense to worry that Donald Trump’s recent comments about the Second Amendment could encourage an assassination attempt against Hillary Clinton. But, as a long-time follower of the gun-rights movement, I think Trump’s words mean something else.

His controversial statement in a speech that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges and cracking down on gun rights fits in with a familiar National Rifle Association message to members—that gun owners should prepare for an armed insurrection against the state. Trump is stoking the coals of an extremist movement that in the long run may prove more dangerous than any crazy would-be assassin inspired by Trump.

“He pointed out that an armed populace is a check on lawless politicians,” wrote a commenter about Trump’s Second Amendment remarks on the pro-gun ar15.com forum, adding, “I wonder if anybody else ever thought of that? Or codified it in a document of some type?”

While Trump and his supporters claim he is upholding the Constitution, these latest comments are an escalation of his ongoing attack against the credibility of our constitutional democratic process. Since he started losing ground in the polls, Trump began claiming without evidence that “the system” and the elections are rigged. Now he seems to be suggesting that some kind of collective act of resistance may be necessary to stop an overreaching government should Clinton win the November election.

This is a message that resonates with the hardline base of the gun lobby and the NRA, which this year, for the first time, had an official speak from the stage of a Republican National Convention. It also appeals to people like the small group of armed men who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. And it’s a message that strikes a chord with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have never felt so comfortable with a major party presidential candidate as they do now.

Americans should not forget that Timothy McVeigh was a gun-rights absolutist who was following the plot of a novel, The Turner Diaries, written by a neo-Nazi leader, in 1995 when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Nor should we forget that he did so on the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas.

For most people, the death of seventy-six people at a compound in Waco was the result of a tragic standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians, a messianic cult. For gun rights absolutists, Waco remains a galvanizing example of federal abuse of power. Most important to gun advocates, the original reason for the raid was the presence of illegal, fully-automatic weapons.

Seen in that context, Trump’s recent remarks are potentially more treasonous than encouraging Russian agents to hack into Democratic National Committee emails. They are a more serious threat than Trump’s remarks that riots might break out if he did not receive the Republican Party nomination. Trump’s appeal to “Second Amendment people” is the kind of claim you might hear from a failing candidate in an underdeveloped nation prone to coups.

For the first time in modern history, a major U.S. presidential candidate seems to be promoting a possible armed insurrection against the U.S. government.

Trump’s words, as usual, were sketchy and ambiguous. Clinton wants to essentially revoke the Second Amendment, Trump falsely contended, adding:

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

A Trump spokesman claimed he meant that “Second Amendment people” would act before the election by “voting in record numbers” to defeat Clinton. A Trump spokeswoman later said he meant “Second Amendment people” would act afterward, exerting their clout to stop Senators from approving Clinton’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Neither explanation is what countless gun-rights absolutists heard. For them, the Second Amendment is about their right to keep arms in order to fight an insurgent war against our own government, should one ever become necessary to keep tyranny at bay. This may sound ludicrous. But go to Twitter and search terms like #2A, #NRA and #MolonLabe, an ancient Greek expression of defiance that means “come and take them.” Or spend any time on websites like InfoWars.com. Or read NRA statements.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” said NRA chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre in 2012 before a United Nations arms control panel in New York City. “When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

This view has nothing to do with hunting or sports shooting, which is where the NRA—until hardliners took over the organization in the late 1970s—had its roots. In fact, NRA hardline advocates today deride hunters who don’t share their Second Amendment views as “Fudds,” short for the bumbling cartoon character Elmer Fudd who never managed to shoot Bugs Bunny. The late President Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s most famous Fudd for supporting gun control both during his tenure and after.

Gun rights absolutists don’t entirely trust Trump, either. “Never trust a Fudd,” wrote “waltdewalt” on a gun politics page on Reddit, suggesting Trump is not as committed to the Second Amendment as he claims.

The gun lobby is playing a long game. They have managed to withstand the fallout from one horrific mass shooting after another, including the heartbreakingly tragic loss of first-grade children in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and the largest such tragedy in our nation’s history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Gun reformists, meanwhile, have managed to make progress in just a handful of states, while they have failed to pass even token legislation in Congress. In the long run, the gun lobby faces the same demographic challenges as the Republican Party. But no one should count them out anytime soon.

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the NRA’s transition from a sports shooting club to a gun lobby, the group’s vision for an armed America is becoming a reality. The change was led by a small group of determined advocates who, through some parliamentary jockeying using the NRA’s own bylaws, assumed control in 1977 at the NRA annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. (I attended NRA meetings and reported on the machinations of extremists controlling the NRA board for The Village Voice.)

Since then, the NRA has grown into the nation’s most powerful single-issue lobby, and has managed, through both transparent and shadowy means, to dramatically expand Americans’ access to guns across the nation.

In 1986, just nine states required the granting of concealed-carry-weapon permits; now at least forty-one states allow concealed carry, some without the need for permits. A majority of states also allow the open carrying of firearms. When gun reformists talk about passing federal gun reform legislation in Congress, they need to remember that these gun-permissive state laws are already nearly a fait accompli.

The patchwork of gun laws across the nation is precisely what allows weapons to flow unchecked across state and city lines. States with permissive gun laws are the main suppliers of guns used in crimes in states and cities with stricter laws. Of 3,806 crime guns confiscated in New Jersey last year, more than 86 percent came from other states. Of the 12,390 crime guns confiscated in Illinois, more than two-thirds came from out of state. These statistics are from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which now, due to an executive order by President Obama, is once again allowed to compile data on guns used in crimes (a simple law-enforcement practice previously outlawed thanks to successful NRA lobbying in Congress).

few pundits have boldly predicted the NRA’s demise. But the gun lobby continues to endure, for a number of reasons. First, it controls the message, including running a script designed to deflect debate away from gun reform after every mass attack. Second, it uses “independent experts” like lawyers David Kopel and David T. Hardy, each of whom testified after Sandy Hook on national television in the Senate without anyone disclosing that Kopel in particular had by then received $1.39 million from the NRA.

Third, the NRA sets up shell organizations like the Law Enforcement Alliance of America to claim more support from police than actually exists. And, finally, the group intimidates politicians by wielding funds from its gun-industry-filled coffers, less to make donations to the candidates it supports than to finance attack ads against opponents, usually on nongun issues (like Benghazi).

The racial tensions that have exploded over the past two years since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have only bolstered the gun lobby. Yet the sniper attack on police in Dallas, Texas, led some law enforcement officers to challenge policies long championed by the NRA. After the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attacks, the head of the Cleveland police union raised the safety of police officers to try to get Ohio to ban both concealed and open-carry of weapons in downtown Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. The effort failed, but it shows that law enforcement is not lined up behind the gun lobby as the NRA claims.

Since Sandy Hook, a number of new gun reformist groups have emerged, including one funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But all of them combined still pale in comparison to the kind of deep-rooted national and local voter networks painstakingly built over decades by the NRA. One Pennsylvania gun-rights blogger mocks these gun reform efforts as little more than astroturf, meaning you can buy it and lay it down but it still won’t grow into a grassroots movement.

This year, the gun rights movement is enjoying a higher national profile than ever before. Meanwhile, the gun reform movement, despite the very good work of groups going back decades like the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center, is in many ways just getting started. Gun reformists need to pace themselves for the struggle ahead.

The gun lobby will outlast Trump. But his campaign has helped bring far-right gun enthusiasts and white supremacist groups into the mainstream.

“We have a wonderful OPPORTUNITY here folks, that may never come again, at the RIGHT time,” wrote Rocky Suhayda, the chairman of the American Nazi Party last fall, as was recently reported by Buzzfeed. “Donald Trump’s campaign statements, if nothing else, have SHOWN that ‘our views’ are NOT so ‘unpopular’ as the Political Correctness crowd have told everyone they are!”

Mainstream pundits and the Clinton campaign are right: Trump’s talk is inciting violence, and America has a tragic history of political assassinations. We have a history of homegrown terrorism, too.

Frank Smyth is an award-winning investigative journalist and gun owner who covers the gun lobby the The Progressive. He has written about the NRA for more than twenty years for outlets including The Village Voice and The Washington Post. 

Why Trump’s Second Amendment Comments are More Dangerous than You Think

Read the original article here: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/08/188903/why-trump{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-second-amendment-comments-are-more-dangerous-you-think

It makes sense to worry that Donald Trump’s most recent comments about the Second Amendment could encourage an assassination attempt against Hillary Clinton. But as a long-time follower of the gun rights movement, I think Trump’s words mean something else. Hiscontroversial statement in a speech that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges and cracking down on gun rights fits in with a familiar NRA message to members–that gun owners should prepare for an armed insurrection against the state. Trump is stoking the coals of an extremist movement that in the long-run may prove even more dangerous than any aspiring assassin inspired by Trump.

“He pointed out that an armed populace is a check on lawless politicians,” wrote the “FuriousYachtsman” this week about Trump’s Second Amendment remarks on the pro-gunar15.com forum, adding: “I wonder if anybody else ever thought of that? Or codified it in a document of some type?”

While Trump and his supporters like to claim he is upholding the Constitution, his latest comments are an escalation of his ongoing attack against the credibility of our constitutional democratic process. Since he started losing ground in the polls, Trump began claiming without evidence that “the system” and the elections are rigged. Now he seems to be suggesting that some kind of collective act of resistance may be necessary to stop an overreaching government should Clinton win the November election.

This is a message that resonates with the hardline base of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association, which last month had a representative speak from the stage of a Republican National Convention for the first time. It also speaks to people like the small group of armed men who occupied of an Oregon National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. And it’s a message that strikes a chord with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have never felt so comfortable with a major party Presidential candidate as they do now.

Americans should not forget that Timothy McVeigh was a gun rights absolutist who was following the plot of a novel, The Turner Diaries, written by a neo-Nazi leader, when in 1995 he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Nor should we forget that he did so on the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas, which for most people was a tragic standoff between the government and the Branch Davidians, a messianic cult. For gun rights absolutists, Waco remains a galvanizing example of federal abuse of power. Most important to gun advocates, the original reason for the raid was the presence of illegal, fully-automatic weapons.

Seen in that context, Trump’s recent remarks are more potentially treasonous than encouraging Russian agents to hack into Democratic National Committee emails. They are a more serious threat than Trump’s remarks that riots might break out if he did not receive the Republican party nomination. His appeal to “Second Amendment people” is the kind of claim you might hear from a failing candidate in an underdeveloped nation prone to coups. For the first time in modern history, a major U.S. presidential candidate seems to be promoting a possible armed insurrection against the U.S. government.

Trump’s words, as usual, were sketchy and ambiguous. Clinton wants to essentially revoke the Second Amendment, Trump said, and then added:

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

A Trump spokesman claimed he meant that “Second Amendment people” would act before the election by “voting in record numbers” to defeat Clinton. A Trump spokeswoman later said he meant “Second Amendment people” would act afterward if she wins through the clout of the National Rifle Association to stop senators from approving her pick for a justice.

Neither explanation is what countless gun rights absolutists heard. For them, the Second Amendment is about their right to keep arms in order to fight an insurgent war against our own government, should one ever become necessary to keep tyranny at bay. This may sound ludicrous. But go to Twitter and search terms like #2A, #NRA and #MolonLobe, an ancient Greek term for “Come and Take Them” away. Or spend any time on websites like InfoWars.com. Or read NRA statements.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” said NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre in 2012 before a U.N. arms control panel in New York.

“When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

This view has nothing to do with hunting or sports shooting, which is where the NRA —until hardliners took over the organization in the late 1970s— has its roots. In fact, NRA hardline advocates today deride hunters who don’t share their Second Amendment views as “Fudds,” short for the bumbling cartoon character Elmer Fudd who never managed to shoot Buggs Bunny. The late President Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s most famous Fudd for supporting gun control both during his tenure and after.

Gun rights absolutists don’t entirely trust Trump, either. “Never trust a fudd,” wrote “waltdewalt” on a gun politics page on Reddit last month, suggesting Trump is not as committed to the Second Amendment as he claims. The gun lobby will outlast Trump. But his campaign has helped bring far right gun enthusiasts and white supremacist groups into the mainstream.

“We have a wonderful OPPORTUNITY here folks, that may never come again, at the RIGHT time,” wrote Rocky Suhayda, the chairman of the American Nazi Party last fall, as was recentlyreported by Buzzfeed.

“Donald Trump’s campaign statements, if nothing else, have SHOWN that ‘our views’ are NOT so ‘unpopular’ as the Political Correctness crowd have told everyone they are!”

Mainstream pundits and the Clinton campaign are right: Trump’s talk is inciting violence, and America has a tragic history of political assassinations. We have a history of homegrown terrorism, too.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and gun owner who won the Society of Professional Journalists National Magazine Investigative Reporting Award for his Mother Jonesexposé,“Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook shooting. He has also written about the gun lobby in The Village Voice and The Washington Post, and writes often about the NRA in The Progressive.

In the Line of Fire

We have not yet transcribed this article. The Village Voice archives available online also do not got back to 1995, either.

However, you may read a copy of the original article at the look. We suggest using the magnifier tool to read the copy.

IntheLineofFire-VVoice-June6-1995