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. (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.”

See the original article here: http://progressive.org/dispatches/swamp-things-texas-governor-abbott{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-debt-to-the-gun-lobby/

Texas Governor Greg Abbott made no mention of guns at his press conference in Sutherland Springs about five hours after a man opened fire during a Sunday morning church service there, killing twenty-six people and wounding twenty. Instead, he spoke of the family members killed or injured, and asked for God’s comfort and guidance for the survivors and loved ones.

Later, after the shooter’s military conviction for domestic violence came to light, Abbott told CNN that David Kelley’s request for a permit to carry a concealed handgun had been rejected in Texas, and that, because of his prior record of domestic abuse, he should not have been allowed to buy rifles.

But ever since he ran for his first Texas legislative seat more than twenty years ago, Abbott has been a steady advocate for expanding Texans’ access to guns. He has earned a 100 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association, and is proud of it.

“I supported #gun rights BEFORE the campaign began & have an A rating by @NRA,” Abbott tweeted during his last race. “I’ll keep Texas free.

What Abbott has not mentioned is that he owes part of his rise in Texas politics to the gun lobby.

Back in 2002, twelve years before the NRA publicly endorsed him for governor, the gun lobby used a law enforcement front group to quietly help elect Abbott as Texas attorney general. Back then, Democrats still held a majority in the Texas state house and in the Texas delegation to Congress. It was a time when the gun lobby was learning how to reach out to other right-leaning groups, forging alliances that predated both the Tea Party and the Trump campaign. It was the beginning of a redistricting or “gerrymandering” process that has since helped bring the Republican party in Texas and other states to unprecedented political power.

Abbott faced a tight race for attorney general against Austin’s popular mayor Kirk Watson. Shortly before the election, television ads appeared, attacking Watson for allegedly being soft on crime, and favoring Abbott, who was then a Texas Supreme Court justice, for supporting “the swift and aggressive prosecution of sexual predators and child pornographers.”

The ads were signed by the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Mayor Watson said he had never before heard of this group. As I later reported in The Texas Observer in 2004, it was established in 1991 with a grant from the National Rifle Association, and opened offices just eleven miles away from NRA headquarters in Virginia. The Law Enforcement Alliance had a budget of $5 million in 2001. The Alliance’s attack ads often favored the same candidates as Texans for a Republican Majority, a group founded by then-Texas state house representative and later-U.S. House Leader Tom Delay.

Justice Abbott won the 2002 election by fifteen points—the same year that Texas Republicans gained control of the Texas House for the first time since Reconstruction. Attorney General Abbott later approved a Republican-led redistricting plan that soon helped give Texas Republicans a majority in the Senate as well. House Leader Delay was later tried and convicted of violating election laws, though this was overturned on appeal. But politicians like Attorney General Abbott continued to rise and he was elected Texas governor in 2014.

No one should doubt that the Law Enforcement Alliance was a front, one with a small office just off the Washington Beltway, rooted in the so-called “swamp.” Today its website still boasts color photos and topics like “2nd Amendment” and “Support Your Local Police.” But most of the text is just gibberish oddly in Latin, with the same lines and paragraphs repasted throughout the site.

The Alliance’s executive director for 23 years was James J. Fotis, now president of the National Center for Police Defense. Mr. Fotis recently wrote an op-ed for FoxNews.com in support of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, initially failing to disclose that his new charity had paid for Arpaio’s legal defense.

Until it become inert, the Alliance quietly influenced elections around the nation. The group succeeded in helping defeat twelve state-level candidates in fourteen years, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. It choose tight races, running attack ads often accusing candidates of being soft on crime. The candidates it targeted were in states including Kansas, Nevada, Mississippi, Illinois, Michigan and Arkansas.

These are classic gun lobby tactics. Last month, in response to the Las Vegas country music shooting, legal scholar David Kopel, the highest paid employee of the Independence Institute, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. He noted, correctly, that mass shootings are not as common as Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, had just claimed, but did not disclose that his Institute has received more than $2 million since 2004 from NRA foundations.

After the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, Mr. Kopel and another legal scholar who has received NRA grants, David T. Hardy, testified in Congress about gun violence without disclosing their NRA funding.

No wonder no one is talking about gun reform—even as mass shootings go on devastating communities. Instead, bolstered by the Trump Administration and Republican control of both the House and Senate, the NRA has publicly gone on the offensive for the first time in decades, seeking either a Supreme Court ruling or new federal legislation that would allow a permit to carry a concealed handgun issued in any one state like Texas valid across the country.

Governor Abbott recently signed one bill dropping the fee for a concealed carry permit in Texas to among the lowest in the country, joking about shooting reporters at the same time. After Hurricane Harvey, he promptly announced that concealed carry permits lost or damaged in the storm would be replaced at no charge. Governor Abbott is hardly the only elected official to benefit from the gun lobby, but his story reveals how they hide in the swamp.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer, MSNBC.com and The Progressive. He won a Society of Professional Journalists national investigative award for his Mother Jones story, “Unmasking NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook massacre.

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