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?”

Crazy is as Crazy Does

The newspaper articles refer to the speech of the week:




The NRA, of course, is more about protecting the manufacturers of guns and ammo than it is about the rights of hunters to keep their guns.


Kids are far more safe in schools in this country than anywhere else, including and especially their own homes.


The only reason we even heard of the Newtown shootings is because such shootings are extremely rare. I won't even touch on the class issue of these shootings happening in a more affluent area of the country than where most violent school incidents happen.

LaPierre's speech got this response from Lawrence O'Donnell:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Etc.

Musician Lee Dorman, 70, has died. He is best known as having been the original bass guitar player for the 1960s band Iron Butterfly.

It was believed he was on his way to visit a doctor when he passed away. Dorman was found dead in his car. The cause of death was natural causes. Dorman suffered from heart problems for many years, which ended his music career.

Original guitarist Erik Brann died in 2003 of a cardiac arrest.
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Britain system of state schools (equivalent to our public schools) are under assault by the same forces as in the United States.
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Good piece from a few days ago by Cass Sunstein about the distortion of the meaning of the Second Amendment by the NRA and other gun lobbyists which found itself taken seriously by the Roberts court when it made shit up.

To understand what Burger was thinking, consider the words of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Fair- minded readers have to acknowledge that the text is ambiguous. Sure, it could fairly be read to support an individual right to have guns. But in light of the preamble, with its reference to a well-regulated militia, it could also be read not to confer an individual right, but to protect federalism, by ensuring that the new national government wouldn’t interfere with citizen militias at the state level.

A lot of historians believe, with Chief Justice Burger, that some version of the latter interpretation is the right one. Until remarkably recently, almost all federal judges have agreed. It is striking that before its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court had never held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have guns.

For almost seven decades, the court’s leading decision was U.S. v. Miller. The 1939 case involved a ban on the possession of a sawed-off shotgun. Sounding like Burger, the court unanimously said that the Second Amendment’s “obvious purpose” was “to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of” the militia. Without evidence that the possession of a sawed-off shotgun was related to preservation of a well-regulated militia, the court refused to say that the Second Amendment protected the right to have such a weapon.

Jeffrey Toobin also gives a history lesson on the NRA and its bizarre campaign to twist the Constitution in order to score political points. But, hey, the Roberts court ruled there was a "right to bear arms" in its 2008 bullshit decision..

Interesting people are finally starting to talk about this when yours truly called bullshit on the ruling when it was handed down.

Toobin:

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)

My mother swallowed that NRA shit until she read Warren Burger's article in Parade magazine which caused her to completely change her opinion on the issue and agree with me on it. We used to have arguments about gun control, but she saw the light.

Link to Burger piece, which I have linked on this blog before:

People of that day were apprehensive about the new "monster" national government presented to them, and this helps explain the language and purpose of the Second Amendment. A few lines after the First Amendment's guarantees -- against "establishment of religion," "free exercise" of religion, free speech and free press -- came a guarantee that grew out of the deep-seated fear of a "national" or "standing" army. The same First Congress that approved the right to keep and bear arms also limited the national army to 840 men; Congress in the Second Amendment then provided:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

In the 1789 debate in Congress on James Madison's proposed Bill of Rights, Elbridge Gerry argued that a state militia was necessary:

"to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty ... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia in order to raise and army upon their ruins."

We see that the need for a state militia was the predicate of the "right" guaranteed; in short, it was declared "necessary" in order to have a state military force to protect the security of the state. That Second Amendment clause must be read as though the word "because" was the opening word of the guarantee. Today, of course, the "state militia" serves a very different purpose. A huge national defense establishment has taken over the role of the militia of 200 years ago.