How Did the NRA Get So Screwed Up Over Gun Control?

In this very interesting piece, blame libertarian whackos back in the 1970s for staging a coup against the venerable and vulnerable organization.

For decades prior to the 1977 takeover, the NRA not only wasn't against gun control laws, it actively advocated for them. But the nutters, lead by a murderer by the name of Harlan Carter (Carter's conviction was overturned because the court believed the jury should have been able to consider self-defense as Carter shot the victim after the victim pulled a knife on him), decided they were going to get their revenge on the organization, thanks to them literally making up shit about the Second Amendment. Since I was around when the 1968 federal gun control law was passed, I clearly don't remember ANY opposition at ALL by the NRA or any other group to it.

This bullshit about the Second Amendment continues today and was actually used in a 2008 USSC decision, which few bothered to criticize until the recent Sandy Hook murders. Only NOW has that and the NRA's utter b.s. about the Second Amendment come under scrutiny.

Snip:

In November 1976, the NRA’s old guard Board of Directors fired Carter and 80 other employees associated with the more expansive view of the Second Amendment and implicit distrusting any government firearm regulation. For months, the Carter cadre secretly plotted their revenge and hijacked the NRA’s annual meeting in Cincinatti in May 1977. The meeting had been moved from Washington to protest its new gun control law. Winkler writes that Carter’s top deputy Neal Knox was even more extreme than him—wanting to roll back all existing gun laws, including bans on machine guns and saying the federal government had killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy as “part of a plot to advance gun control.”

Using the NRA’s parliamentary rules, the rebels interrupted the agenda from the floor and revised how the Board of Directors was chosen, recommited the NRA to fighting gun control and restored the lobbying ILA. Harlon Carter became the NRA’s new executive director. He cancelled a planned move of its national headquarters from Washington to Colorado Springs. And he changed the organization’s motto on its DC headquarters, selectively editing the Second Amendment to reflect a non-compromising militancy, “The Right Of The People To Keep And Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.”

After Carter was re-elected to lead the NRA in 1981, The New York Times reported on Carter’s teenage vigilante killing—and how he changed his first name’s spelling to hide it. At first, he claimed the shooting was by someone else—and then recanted but refused to discuss it. Winkler writes, “the hard-liners in the NRA loved it. Who better to lead them than a man who really understood the value of a gun for self-protection?”