I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons…. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.
Karl T. Frederick, NRA President (1938)
Once upon a time, the National Rifle Association was a reasonable, rational organization which understood the need for sensible gun control…and they endeavored to achieve that goal. The NRA worked with government to create legislation that struck a balance between public safety and the rights of gun owners. For the first century of its existence since being founded in 1871, the NRA was the nation’s first and foremost gun control organization. The group’s leadership understood the role they could play in ensuring that their members could continue to enjoy their 2nd Amendment rights while also protecting the American public from criminal gun violence. The NRA was a responsible citizen, engaging in education and outreach, teaching generations of children (myself among them) about gun safety, and promoting shooting sports and hunting.
As a child growing up in northern Minnesota, I learned about handling firearms safely at an early age. My father was a committed NRA member, and our house had an NRA sticker displayed on the front door. I took many safety classes made available by the NRA, and I learned early on about what firearms were capable of. I was taught to have a healthy respect for the power of, and the damage that could be done by, firearms.
In Minnesota, one of the cherished rites of passages for a 12-year-old boy was the state’s required gun safety class, which used materials provided by the NRA. Upon successful completion of the class, I received the cherished orange patch that I wore on my hunting jacket. The patch meant that I could handle legal weaponry of all sorts, and though I wasn’t a fan of guns, I spent enough time on firing ranges to comfortably know my way around numerous rifles and handguns.
Even then, the NRA was a reasonable organization that strove to maintain a balance between the rights of gun owners and public safety. Government was a partner, not an adversary; because of that, the NRA and its membership were taken seriously when it came to gun-related issues.
“Historically, the leadership of the NRA was more open-minded about gun control than someone familiar with the modern NRA might imagine,” wrote Adam Winkler, a Second Amendment scholar at U.C.L.A. Law School, in his 2011 book, Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right To Bear Arms In America. “The Second Amendment was not nearly as central to the NRA’s identity for most of the organization’s history.”….
The NRA was founded in 1871 by two Yankee Civil War veterans, including an ex-New York Times reporter, who felt that war dragged on because more urban northerners could not shoot as well as rural southerners. It’s motto and focus until 1977 was not fighting for constitutional rights to own and use guns, but “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shhoting for Recreation,” which was displayed in its national headquarters.
The NRA’s first President a Union general named Ambrose Burnside (for whom the street that bisects Portland is named). Burnside began the tradition of partnering with the US government in order to promote the interests of gun owners while holding true to the view of the 2nd Amendment that prevailed in the late 19th century.
The understanding of the Amendment at the time concerned having a prepared citizenry to assist in domestic military matters, such as repelling raids on federal arsenals like 1786’s Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts or John Brown’s 1859 attack in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Its focus was not asserting individual gun rights as it is today, but a ready citizenry prepared by target shooting. The NRA happily accepted $25,000 from New York State to buy property for a firing range ($500,000 today). For decades, the U.S. military gave surplus guns to the NRA and sponsored shooting competitions.
Then came May 21, 1977, or what later came to be known as “The Revolt in Cincinnati.” A small cadre of gun-rights radicals caught the NRA’s old guard unawares. The rebels viewed the NRA leadership as traitors who planned to “turn the NRA into a sports publishing organization and get rid of guns.”
What unfolded that hot night in Cincinnati forever reoriented the NRA. And this was an event with broader national reverberations. The NRA didn’t get swept up in the culture wars of the past century so much as it helped invent them — and kept inflaming them. In the process, the NRA overcame tremendous internal tumult and existential crises, developed an astonishing grass-roots operation and became closely aligned with the Republican Party.
Today it is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared. There is no single secret to its success, but what liberals loathe about the NRA is a key part of its power. These are the people who say no.
The Revolt in Cincinnati transformed the NRA from a lobbying group that saw government as a partner into a militant guns-first-last-and-always powerhouse which viewed government and Liberals as not just adversaries, but intractable enemies. In very short order, the NRA became Washington’s “800-lb. gorilla,” a reactionary organization which increasingly came under the thrall of paranoid conspiracy theorists convinced that Big Government was after their guns.
The NRA became, and remains, and inflexibly ideological organization whose interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that it’s absolute, immutable, and sacrosanct.
“We must declare that there are no shades of gray in American freedom. It’s black and white, all or nothing,” Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said at an NRA annual meeting in 2002, a message that the organization has reiterated at almost every opportunity since.
And so the NRA, which was once as committed to public safety as gun rights, is now an organization which values guns, and the industry that produces them, far more than human life. NRA membership since 1977 has become increasingly more radical and unalterably opposed to anything they interpret as even tangentially impacting what they view as their 2nd Amendment rights. Once rational voices have given way to the likes of Wayne LaPierre, James Yeager, Alex Jones, and Ted Nugent.
The NRA, once an organization that made a significant contribution to American society, is now an embarrassment, the domain of crackpots and paranoid conspiracy theorists with an inflated sense of their own value and importance. That outrage and paranoia has been brilliantly manipulated as a fund-raising tool and a means to grow the organization’s membership. Where the NRA once worked to promote public safety, it now serves as the platform of those who seem to view firepower as a means to compensate for other shortcomings.
Thankfully, the NRA, whose awesome self-promoted power struck fear into the hearts of elected officials from coast to coast, is losing influence. In the month since the Sandy Hook massacre, we’ve seen the gun nuts reveal themselves to be nothing if not monsters. As increasing numbers of Americans begin to see the truth, those of us who believe in gun control have an opportunity to bring down the NRA and restore sanity to our public debate about how much personal firepower is enough.
The NRA could be a partner in moving forward and creating sensible legislation to protect the public AND the rights of gun owners. They’ve chosen to take another road, an all-or-nothing approach that views those of us who favor common sense gun control as evil and un-American.
It’s time to show the NRA that they can no longer hijack and control the debate. The momentum appears to be ebbing away from the NRA…and I can only hope that good and decent Americans (including gun owners) will carry the day.
WE DESERVE BETTER…and so do our children.
