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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.

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.

The NRA’s 40-year problem: It chose its leadership and gun-rights zealotry over integrity and a simpler mission

The original article is here.

The financial improprieties alleged by New York’s attorney general in her lawsuit against the National Rifle Association remind me of a scandal nearly a century ago. NRA leaders back then, however, handled it differently from the way leaders do today.

Back in 1925, the NRA secretary, who had accumulated unchecked power, was dismissed over evidence of embezzlement. The NRA reorganized its board and created the office of the executive vice president, choosing the title out of respect for the traditions of the Reconstruction-era-founded association.

In other words, the group cleaned its own house and implemented controls so no one could easily either accumulate power or divert funds again.

The first EVP was a highly decorated Maryland national guardsman named Milton A. Reckord. Reckord served in the Mexican Expedition against Pancho Villa and in World War I. The Military Police commander for Europe in World War II, he was responsible for all prisoners of war.

In 1974, Brig. Gen. Reckord, at 94, was interviewed by NRA officials in his home for an NRA oral history. In it, he described how a 1934 law supported by him and the NRA and inspired by the Tommy Gun days of Prohibition that outlawed automatic firearms (still on the books) was “sane, reasonable and effective.”

But the NRA oral history was never published, and his legacy, too, seems forgotten.

The NRA didn’t used to take sides then like it does today. “Take an active interest in politics, Mr. Shooter,” read an editorial in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine before the 1936 elections. “But keep your political interest and activity on a high plane of honest, frank discussion; and remember that there is neither rhyme nor reason in splitting open a good rifle club over a bum political argument.”

But splitting open a good rifle club is exactly what the men who later took over the NRA did. Today EVP Wayne LaPierre and other NRA leaders claim the NRA is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. But the NRA did not raise gun rights until 1922, in an editorial warning about the possible spread of a New York State gun law passed in 1911, and the outlawing of civilian ownership of guns in Russia after its 1917 Bolshevik-led Communist revolution. The NRA did not raise “the Second Article of the Bill of Rights” until 1952, and it did not describe itself as an organization defending “civil liberties” until 1968.

The split in the NRA resulted in an internal revolution rarely mentioned out loud anymore but still known within the lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.” That’s when, in 1977, the NRA under Harlon Carter transformed literally overnight from America’s largest firearms sporting organization into the nation’s largest gun-rights vanguard.

It was Carter who ended the policy of publishing the NRA’s annual financial reports in NRA member magazines, and who centralized control, hand-picking three men under him to run the organization; everyone, including magazine editors had to report up the new chain of command.

In 1981, the New York Times reported that Carter had changed a vowel in his first name, according to his birth certificate, to help conceal that, as a juvenile, he had been once convicted of murder and later had his conviction overturned on appeal. After the news broke, NRA members changed the by-laws to elect him to an unprecedented five-year term.

The leadership soon led another change of the by-laws to transfer power away from the membership and back to the board. NRA leaders themselves have since compared their own board to a Communist politburo.

LaPierre, who calls Carter a “great leader,” was made EVP in 1991, and he fended off one rebellion in the late 1990s. A bigger insurgency arose against him last year through leaked accusations of his alleged financial malfeasance by dissident board directors led by Oliver North.

But we’re missing the bigger picture if we think the NRA has suddenly gone off the rails. Its current troubles began more than 40 years ago.

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

Five myths about the National Rifle Association: No, the NRA did not start out as a civil rights organization.

“Never is the Second Amendment more important than during public unrest,” a National Rifle Association video claimed in March. Rhetoric about owning, wielding and using guns has grown especially heated in recent weeks. In response to protests against police brutality, President Trump tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” echoing a Miami police chief from the 1960s — and an NRA article published after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. “You loot — we shoot,” wrote Marion Hammer, the organization’s first female president. Meanwhile, armed protests against state health measures, such as those that shut down the Michigan Legislature last month, seem rooted in an ideology promoted by the modern NRA: that only firearms in civilian hands can safeguard the nation from government overreach. Here are five myths about the group’s mission and history — some told by critics, others told by the NRA itself.

Myth No. 1

The early NRA was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.

Michael Moore, in his 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” insinuated that the NRA and the KKK were linked, because they were formed six years apart. The New Republic drew a similar connection in a 2013 article on the history of gun control. In a recent review of my book (which reported no ties between the organizations), the New York Times wrote that the NRA “came to the rescue of Southern members of the K.K.K.,” before issuing a correction.

Documents from the era, including an exhaustive tome by NRA co-founder William Conant Church, show that this isn’t true. The early NRA, founded at the peak of Reconstruction in 1871, never went much farther than its shooting range outside Manhattan, and played no role in the South during Reconstruction or for years thereafter. Church and other early NRA leaders, nearly all of whom were veteran Union officers, unequivocally supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan.

But, contrary to claims by NRA board director Allen West, who has said that the group “stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights,” the organization didn’t play a major role in opposing white supremacists, either. The NRA was so provincial at the time that, in 1877, Church had to remind the board that New York City and its environs “are only a part of the great rifle movement in America.”

Myth No. 2

The NRA originated as a champion of gun rights.

The group calls itself “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization,” a claim constantly repeated by its leaders and lawyers, and by media outlets including NPR.

But the NRA did not raise gun rights at all over the first half-century of its existence. It focused instead on improving marksmanship in anticipation of future wars. In 1922, an editorial in the NRA’s first official journal flagged gun rights as an area of concern for the first time, citing both a 1911 New York law and Russia’s recent outlawing of civilian ownership of guns. The Second Amendment came up only as the Cold War set in: The NRA first asserted what it called “the Second Article of the Bill of Rights,” along with the “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” in a 1952 American Rifleman editorial.

In 1977, the NRA finally embraced gun rights as its “unyielding” aim, in the words of its leader Harlon B. Carter. At that year’s national convention, Carter, a former Border Patrol chief, led the “Cincinnati Revolt,” an internal rebellion that transformed the NRA into the nation’s largest gun rights organization.

Myth No. 3

Armed Black Panthers led the NRA to support gun control.

“When Black Folks Armed Themselves The NRA And Republicans Suddenly Supported Gun Control,” read a headline on NewsOne. “Back in the 1960s, even the NRA supported gun control” when it came to disarming the Black Panthers, says the History Channel. Indeed, in 1967, mere months after a group of Black Panthers entered the California State Capitol with long guns and holstered sidearms, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the open carry of firearms. The NRA helped write that legislation and monitored its passage in American Rifleman without comment; race no doubt influenced the bill.

But this event was not a turning point for the NRA. By the 1960s, it had disavowed the “private armies” of white supremacists that arose during the civil rights era, and it broadly supported greater regulation of firearms, such as those tied to recent political assassinations. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” said its chief executive, Franklin L. Orth, three weeks before the Black Panthers protested at the California capitol. “We recognize that the dynamism and complexities of modern society create new problems which demand new solutions.” The following year, the NRA supported a federal law banning, among other things, mail-order guns, adding to a 1934 NRA-backed law sharply restricting “machine guns.”

Myth No. 4

The NRA is just an extension of the gun industry.

People often declare that the group is a mere “front for gun makers,” as one HuffPost article put it. It’s true that the NRA was born at the gun industry’s hip: All seven editions of the “Manual for Rifle Practice,” by co-founder George Wood Wingate, were packed with firearms ads. Today, large donations from gun manufacturers make up a substantial portion of the NRA’s revenue, as membership dues have declined.

But the NRA has still operated relatively autonomously over the past 149 years. In 1937, its leadership even labeled a new, powerful Magnum revolver by Smith & Wesson a “ ‘freak’ class of weapon” that should be restricted to police.

More important, the modern NRA is a political force in its own right, commanding outsize influence that can’t fully be explained by the deep pockets of the companies that fund it. Since 1977, when the group started to back the notion that civilians are entitled to nearly the same level of firepower as police, it has helped to roll back federal gun laws it once supported and to block almost all new federal regulations, while working to expand concealed-carry laws in most states.

Though money is important to its operations, “the real source of its power, I believe, comes from voters,” law professor Adam Winkler told the Guardian. In recent elections, especially primary contests, the NRA has mobilized voters at every level, attacking opponents and rewarding “pro-gun” candidates. That electoral following helped chief executive Wayne LaPierre persuade President Trump last summer to reverse himself on expanding background checks.

Myth No. 5

The NRA isn’t threatened by its current troubles.

The NRA is in turmoil. A 2019 tax investigation by the New York attorney general prompted a billing dispute between the group and the advertising firm Ackerman McQueen, its chief vendor and longtime communications partner. What ensued was a crossfire of charges of financial improprieties, pitching LaPierre against the group’s president, Oliver North, who eventually stepped down. Its top lobbyist was forced out. Several board members resigned. Still, members insist that the organization’s leadership remains strong. “It’s going to take a big revolt to get them out of power,” John Crump, an NRA member and firearms instructor, told the Chicago Tribune. The NRA has endured “these sorts of internal discussions, debates, and changes without losing a step,” board director J. Kenneth Blackwell said in the Washington Times.

The NRA also faces significant financial issues. Already in debt from the more than $30 million it spent on Trump and other candidates in 2016, its recent legal troubles have cost an additional $100 million, according to secret recordings obtained by NPR this year. “To survive,” LaPierre said, he took the group “down to the studs,” laying off dozens of people and cutting the pay of others. Meanwhile, the New York authorities continue to investigate whether the NRA illegally diverted funds from its tax-exempt foundation, threatening the organization’s nonprofit status. This combination of internal and external pressures presents LaPierre with the biggest crisis of his career — and the NRA as a whole with its worst crisis since the Cincinnati Revolt.

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).

Five Years After Sandy Hook, Major U.S. Papers Still Have a Serious Gun Problem

http://progressive.org/dispatches/five-years-after-sandy-hook-newspapers-still-have-gun-problem-171221/

On December 21, 2012, the National Rifle Association called a rare press conference to respond to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which happened seven days earlier. The killing left twenty young children and six of their educators dead.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who took no questions afterward. Critics at the time derided his remarks as “tone-deaf,” but five years on, the NRA has still managed to defeat every subsequent attempt at gun reform in Congress.

What is the secret of the NRA’s success? It may involve the NRA’s ability to speak to and write for media outlets without being questioned, like it did after the Sandy Hook tragedy. Key to this strategy is the use of alleged “independent” experts who spread its pro-gun views throughout the press.

Take, for example, the pro-gun scholar, David Kopel. Today the news and opinion sections at both The New York Times and The Washington Post are out of sync over whether to disclose his receipt of NRA funding, while The Wall Street Journal misleads readers by never disclosing it.

“Writers and editors make their own decisions, which I don’t second-guess,” said Kopel in an email to The Progressive.

“I think most credible news organizations are pretty good about disclosing relevant information about those who write guest columns or op-ed pieces, and it is always best to provide similar disclosures about experts quoted in news stories,” Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics at the University of Minnesota, said in an email.

“The news people should not obey different rules from the opinion people,” said Ed Wasserman, a journalism ethics expert and Dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, in a telephone interview.

Washington Post editors disagree.

“The news department was not involved in how the opinion section chose to identify Mr. Kopel,” the Post’s Communications Manager Molly Gannon Conway said in an email. She was referring to how the paper’s opinion section discloses Kopel’s NRA funding while the news section does not.

Gannon Conway defended the news editors’ decisions, writing, “At times, Kopel’s positions have not been in sync with the NRA, even though one organization he is affiliated with gets some NRA funding. We don’t see a reason at this time to single out the NRA in referring to Mr. Kopel, given his affiliation with multiple entities, with varied sources of funding.”

Key to the NRA’s strategy is the use of alleged “independent” experts who spread its pro-gun views throughout the press.

David Kopel’s pro-gun positions rarely, if ever, seem out of sync with the NRA. It’s true, he does wear several hats. Mr. Kopel is an associate policy analyst at the libertarian CATO Institute in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor teaching one elective course a year at the Denver University law school.

Kopel’s main job is research director and Second Amendment project director at the Denver-based Independence Institute. A self-described “action tank,” the institute has received more than $2 million from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund since 2004, according to its publicly available tax filings. David Kopel is mentioned by name. He earns $194,258 per year from the Independence Institute, and has also long been its highest paid employee.

“If he is financially dependent on the NRA, you do have to point out that there is a relationship,” said Dean Wasserman of Berkeley.


Last month the Times ran a news story about “Ghost Guns,” homemade firearms that are hard to track. The story quoted David Kopel, describing him as “the research director of the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank, who is also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver.”

In the story, Kopel compared the nation’s current level of gun regulation to “prohibition or quasi-prohibition,” adding that the nation’s allegedly restrictive gun laws are “the lever that pushes up homemade production.” That seems odd considering that gun laws have only grown more lax across the nation over the past twenty years. But, knowing that his Independence Institute has received NRA funding, his comments make a lot more sense.

The New York Times’s assistant managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, declined to comment.

Three years earlier, Times’s opinion editors ran an online column by Kopel where he complained about, “Bloomberg’s Gun Control That Goes Too Far for the Average Citizen.” Might readers have looked at it differently had they known that the author was the top-paid employee at an NRA-funded think tank? I brought the matter to Times’ online opinion editors, and as previously reported in The Progressive, they “updated” Kopel’s author identification and changed the wording to note that his Independence Institute “has received NRA funding.”

Back in 2013, the paper still had a public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who is now a media columnist at the Post. She commented back then about the lack of disclosure in Kopel’s Times opinion pieces.

“The more readers know about the background of an opinion writer, the better they are served. And that applies here,” Sullivan told me after I pointed out to her that the paper had failed to disclose Kopel’s NRA funding with his 2013 article, “The N.R.A. Is Still Vital, Because the 2nd Amendment Is.” That piece ran little more than two weeks after the Sandy Hook tragedy in Newtown.


The Washington Post’s news and opinion sections are similarly out of sync. Only four days after the Sandy Hook shooting, the Postquoted Kopel in a news story saying that the AR-15 rifle used by the shooter was “the best-selling rifle in the country,” and that it would meet a future Supreme Court standard for being in common use.

A central goal of the NRA has been to normalize the use of military-style, semi-automatic rifles, some of whose models were outlawed for 10 years due to a now-expired federal ban on “assault weapons.” Yet the Post identified Kopel only as an independent scholar without mentioning his NRA funding.

This year in October, in another news story that ran three days after America’s largest modern mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, the Post similarly identified Kopel as “an adjunct professor at Denver University’s Sturm College of Law and an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute,” never mentioning either his main position as Research Director of the Independence Institute or its steady receipt over more than a decade of annual six-figure NRA foundation grants, according to the foundation’s tax filings.

The Post’s online opinion section has done better. The paper runs Kopel’s opinion columns as part of The Volokh Conspiracy, a consortium of conservative-leaning legal scholars hosted by the Postonline. But for years, the Post ran Kopel’s columns without identifying his NRA funding.

The Post finally began noting Kopel’s NRA financial ties after a critical post by the liberal group Media Matters. The paper’s opinion editors quietly changed his identification retroactively in all his columns. Editors call that a “rowback,” as if to row backwards over water and then forward again to smooth any ripple of an error. On this point Post spokeswoman Gannon Conway declined to comment.

Both the news and opinion sections of The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, have shared Kopel’s views with readers without ever disclosing his NRA funding. Journal editors declined to comment.

This incongruity among America’s top newspapers misleads readers. An easy online search of his name locates a “Supported Research” page (now outdated) on the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund website with Kopel’s name listed multiple times.

Frank Smyth has written on the gun movement for The Progressive, MSNBC, and The Washington Post. His Mother Jones story after Sandy Hook, “Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” won the Society of Professional Journalists Delta Sigma Chi award for National Magazine Investigative Reporting.

“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