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The NRA turns 150: The organization has a rich history. Most of it has been buried.

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On Nov. 17, 1871, the National Rifle Association was chartered in New York using the address of the Army and Navy Journal in lower Manhattan. Its publisher and editor, William Conant Church, had been a New York Times special correspondent during the Civil War. Once slightly wounded, he reported under the pseudonym Pierrepont, the name of a street in Brooklyn where he lived. Church later became a Union brevet officer in charge of the militia organized to defend Washington, D.C. in case of a Confederate invasion.

Church co-founded the NRA with another Brooklynite and Civil War veteran, George Wood Wingate. He was a New York national guardsman who was promoted amid fighting in Carlisle near the battle of Gettysburg. Wingate would go on to become the NRA’s master rifle trainer. Within six years of the NRA being founded, American riflemen would become the undisputed champions of the (English-speaking) world. They beat first the Irish and then the British-led Imperial Team on the NRA’s range called Creedmoor in Queens County on Long Island.

Church and Wingate had followed how Prussia in Europe had prevailed against two larger empires, Austria and France, using both better rifles and riflemen. They founded the NRA six years after the Civil War ended as a private initiative, during the peak of Reconstruction, to train soldiers in better riflery in anticipation of future wars. They began by training New York guardsmen at Creedmoor range using state funds introduced by their Brooklyn representative in Albany.

Wingate traveled to London as a lawyer and there toured the Wimbledon range of the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom. After granting it a Royal charter, Queen Victoria herself fired its inaugural shot. The NRA in New York copied the British Royal NRA’s name, the distances to its targets on Wimbledon range, and even their solid iron designs weighing up to 400 pounds each – shipped by steamer across the Atlantic.

Few NRA members today know this history. Why not? It’s as if their leaders have buried the NRA’s past. New leaders took over the group in 1977, when they “shifted” the NRA on a new, “unyielding” course for gun rights. Today’s embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, joined them a year later as a junior lobbyist. Later, during President Obama’s years, he and other leaders rolled out a new origin story claiming the NRA was founded in support of the Second Amendment and is “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization.” This claim is untrue.

A shift in history

The leaders of the “Cincinnati Revolt,” as the shift was called, incorporated into the effort affiliated gun clubs across the nation that the NRA had built up over more than a century. To further it, they buried the NRA’s Brooklyn and British roots and founding mission of better marksmanship. And how its leaders since Prohibition had come, until 1977, to weigh gun ownership against public safety to support what they called “reasonable” gun control.

During President Trump’s years, NRA leaders added a second claim about Reconstruction. “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,” wrote Allen West, an NRA board member, in 2018 for Conservative News Service. A year later, he repeated the same claim as LaPierre applauded on the dais before NRA members in Indianapolis. At the same meeting, West, now running for governor of Texas, joined other NRA board members Ted Nugent and then-President Oliver North in accusing LaPierre of embezzlement.

Not a word about arming freed slaves is true. In 1877, the same year that Reconstruction ended, Church publicly complained that the NRA, despite its global, Victorian-era triumphs, had yet to expand rifle training beyond New York and so was still not improving riflery nationwide. The longest trip taken by the NRA during Reconstruction was by steamer to Dublin to win a rematch against the Irish at their Dollymount range.

Church wrote a lengthy history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and he made no mention of anyone helping to arm freed slaves, and no reference to the NRA at all. Even as he noted that “Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold any one responsible for their murder.”

Scarce transparency

By burying so much NRA history, its modern leaders have buried the legacies of generations of war heroes. Most NRA leaders, until 1977, were decorated veterans like Milton A. Reckord. Medaled in both world wars, he was the NRA’s longest-serving leader until LaPierre. Reckord cleaned up an embezzlement scandal in 1925, when he also began a practice of publishing the NRA’s annual financial reports. This transparency stopped in 1977.

Their successors led by LaPierre have forgotten more history. Wingate was also a co-founder of the New York Public Schools Athletic League. Today the top senior boy as well as girl athlete in every sport across the five boroughs of New York City still receives the Wingate Award. He led New York public schools to start offering sports to girls in 1905.

Church was the first figure on record to exhort the military to disallow use of the n-word and d-word for African Americans and Italian Americans, respectively, writing by the early 1890s that undermined morale – over 50 years before the military integrated Black soldiers with others.

NRA leaders have noted some of the NRA’s history, like its members’ role in organizing shipments of rifles and gear to the British Home Guard before America’s entry into World War II. But they’ve rarely said much else. This might help explain why they’ve said so little about it even on the NRA’s sesquicentennial.

Frank Smyth is the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The NRA is 150 years old: A look at how the organization has evolved

Yahoo posted a free version of the same article.

MLB vs. NRA: Compare and contrast

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MLB vs. NRA: Compare and contrast

By FRANK SMYTH
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS 
JUL 20, 2021  5:00 AM
A police vehicle is seen across from Nationals Park, Sunday, July 18, 2021, in Washington. A baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Washington was suspended in the sixth inning Saturday night after a shooting outside Nationals Park.
A police vehicle is seen across from Nationals Park, Sunday, July 18, 2021, in Washington. A baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Washington was suspended in the sixth inning Saturday night after a shooting outside Nationals Park. (Nick Wass/AP)

The gunfire that suspended a game between the San Diego Padres and the hometown Washington Nationals was a first for Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, it’s hardly surprising in 2021 America.

This year the nation has endured a mass shooting, or the wounding or killing of at least four people, more than once a day. We have about 25 times more on average than in other advanced nations. Every day a new gun tragedy, each with its own loss of life and lifelong toll, seems to replace a prior heartbreak.

Major League Baseball and the National Rifle Association are each a century and a half old. But while MLB celebrates its history, the NRA buries and rewrites its own, likely because an exhumation could illuminate our nation’s pickle over gun violence.

Baseball’s roots are long. Amateur clubs emerged in many states after the Civil War. The first “professional” game where all players were paid occurred in Mansfield, Ohio in 1869, and the first “major league” game was played nearly two years later in Indiana. The hometown Fort Wayne Kekiongas, named for the capital of a local Native American tribe, beat the Cleveland Forest Citys, in an association that in 1903 became the Major League Baseball we know today.

Six months after the Fort Wayne game, the NRA was founded in New York City. Two Union Army veteran officers founded the group to improve marksmanship in anticipation of future wars. They copied its name, the layout of its gun range and even the design of tons of iron targets, shipped by steamer across the Atlantic, from the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom.

The MLB celebrates its history. From retiring numbers of baseball legends, to players donning uniforms to celebrate the Negro Leagues, to honoring surviving legends by bringing or assisting them into stadiums to be cheered by fans, to archiving scores and statistics in publicly accessible databases dating back to 1903 — the year of the first World Series.

The NRA at least appreciates its history, having built a climate-controlled room to preserve documents, blueprints, trophies, ephemera and movie reels of shooting competitions dating back to the 1930s, in the basement of the National Firearms Museum at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Va. But it is closed to both rank-and-file NRA members and the public. Why? The NRA underwent a change in 1977, more than a century after it was founded, and its new leaders wanted a reboot. The “Cincinnati Revolt,” as it is known, shifted the group from a gun club to the unyielding gun lobby we know today.

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s longtime and now embattled CEO, joined NRA a year later. He and other modern leaders don’t want anyone to know about the NRA’s British Royal roots, lest the disinterment belie their claims that the NRA was founded to support gun rights and the Second Amendment.

The NRA’s museum illustrates much about firearms but nothing about NRA history, apart from a large bronze bust of Harlon B. Carter, the leader of the Cincinnati Revolt whom LaPierre recently called a “great leader.” Carter had changed his first name from Harlan to conceal for 50 years that he was once convicted and jailed of murdering a fellow juvenile, Ramón Casiano, with a shotgun before his conviction was overturned upon appeal.

Today’s NRA leaders have more to hide. Like how the NRA took no position on gun control over its first 50 years, then supported national gun control legislation from the 1930s until the 1977 revolt. Or how the NRA ended a 50-year practice of financial transparency, also in 1977.

Recently NRA leaders have told new lies. In Indianapolis, in 2019, an NRA board member named Allen West claimed that the early organization had “stood with freed slaves.” West is a former Florida congressman and chair of the Texas Republican Party, who is now running against Greg Abbott in the Texas gubernatorial primary.

“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,” West previously wrote.

Not one word of this is true. Five years before, a book whose research was partly financed by the NRA claimed that gun control helped enable the Holocaust. That’s also false. But it shows how far the modern NRA will go to keep making it easy for Americans to buy guns, sustaining earnings for gun industry and NRA executives alike.

The MLB has seen its share of scandals from accusations of throwing the World Series in 1919, to widespread steroid use, to pitchers today allegedly doctoring the ball. But the MLB has survived each one by using transparency, even if commissioners were slow at first, to regain trust. One American pastime, gun-toting, could learn a lot from the other.

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.

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“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.