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The slope is not so slippery, actually: Dems must tackle disinformation about gun control head-on

March 13, 2021/in New York Daily News/by Frank Smyth

You may read the original here.

President Biden’s gun plan includes mandatory registration of “assault weapons” for anyone wishing to keep those they already own. He is the first president to raise the issue of gun registration in more than 50 years since President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He’s the first ever, too, to propose banning new sales of “assault” or tactical, semiautomatic weapons.

The Biden administration is responding to pressure for gun reform led today by survivors of the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The plan has finally put on the table what gun reform advocates including surviving parents and others have long demanded, seemingly in vain until now. The House just passed major gun control bills on Thursday.

Gun rights advocates, however, a group that seems to include nearly every leader of the Republican Party, are readying for a fight. If there is one issue that could reunite the GOP, from Sen. Mitch McConnell to former President Trump, not to mention every group from Three Percenters to neo-Nazis who joined in the Jan. 6 Capitol takeover, it is gun registration. Against it, that is.

It is impossible to imagine how Biden could succeed in healing the nation, as he has promised, and still enact all of his gun plan. Many if not most of the 74 million people who voted for Trump’s reelection would also oppose this plan. Not to mention many elected officials, from governors to constitutional sheriffs, who might refuse to comply. Or the new Roberts Supreme Court, which will one day no doubt rule on gun laws.

Millions of people, today, see gun control itself as an existential threat.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” as President Trump said in 2018 when he reversed himself on background checks after the back-to-back weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton. He did so after speaking with the National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre, who, like the NRA, has long promoted this theory.

Biden has yet to address the details of his own gun plan. Throughout his 48-year career, moreover, he is not known to have ever addressed the issue of gun registration. Gun groups have been circulating for months what they call the “Biden plan to destroy the Second Amendment,” filling the vacuum left by his silence with fear. They claim that this is the fateful step, after background checks, that could start the slide to disarmament, and then genocide.

This kind of cowardice has long led reformers astray. The nation has not passed any comprehensive and lasting national gun laws in more than a half-century. In 1994, during the Clinton years, Congress passed the “Assault Weapons Ban,” which outlawed, for just 10 years, select semiautomatic firearms based on their cosmetic features, like both a pistol grip and a flash suppressor. But this only led gun manufacturers to design weapons to bypass the ban, which, since it expired, has resulted in more sales of more AR-15 rifles and other tactical, semiautomatic weapons than ever before.

The Biden plan would give existing owners of semiautomatic weapons (like me) the choice of either selling their weapons back to the federal government, or registering them under a prior gun law, backed in 1934 by the NRA, along with paying a tax of up to $200 for each weapon. This would put hardship on working-class gun owners, noted the former NRA commentator and independent merchandiser Colion Noir.

The plan would limit, too, although no one has yet suggested the cap, the number of weapons one may own, along with banning high-capacity magazines. All these steps are opposed by the NRA and others who share the belief that firearms in civilian hands are a necessary check on the power of federal as well as state governments, and that they are also necessary for self-defense against not just lone criminals but also armed mobs. Firearms sales spiked last year after the death in police custody of George Floyd as the uprising began of Black Lives Matter protests.

Biden said he would also reverse the immunity granted under President George W. Bush to hold gunmakers civilly liable, again, for the potential misuse of their weapons to commit harm. He would eliminate the “gun show loophole” to require background checks on private sales. It remains to be seen whether this proposal might include an exception for, say, the passing down of a firearm heirloom to the next generation.

The president left out one measure in his recent remarks, on the third anniversary of the Parkland shooting, still posted online: to ban online sales of ammunition. The nation has experienced an unprecedented, ongoing shortage of ammunition from both over-the-counter and online retailers, according to both the trade press and the NRA. It’s been fueled by ever-rising demand, as manufacturers have been producing ammo at “above-normal capacities” throughout the pandemic. Demand spiked again to worsen the shortage after first CNN, and then Fox News, announced that Biden had won the presidency.

No doubt any attempt to end commerce in the firearms industry’s fastest-growing sector would meet opposition. Most of the outrage already smoldering in resistance to the gun plan, however, is based on speculation, not facts. This shows how much the NRA, in particular, has shaped how we as a nation look at guns and their regulations. The NRA wasn’t always like this. The NRA backed gun control from the 1930s into the 1970s, as its leaders long sought to balance the needs of gun owners against public safety.

Despite what today’s NRA may suggest, gun registration is the norm in every other advanced nation, and not one of them has deteriorated into either a totalitarian or genocidal state. Canada, the nations of Western Europe and Japan all control guns by strictly licensing owners and registering each weapon, to the degree that they permit civilian ownership at all.

A few more, like Australia and New Zealand each confiscated semiautomatic weapons after a mass shooting. Yet, rather than falling into tyranny, each of these two nations still gets the very highest rankings for their political and civil rights on the Freedom Index compiled by the watchdog Freedom House.

Six blue states, too, including New York and New Jersey, require mandatory registration of some or all semiautomatic guns. New York also requires registration of all handguns, which must be kept in the home. Most states, today, also issue permits for the concealed carry of handguns. This generates registries of gun permit holders that the NRA and others also conveniently ignore.

Resistance to gun registration runs deep. During the Reagan years, LaPierre was dubbed the “Captain” by Sen. Orrin Hatch after he guided, on behalf of the NRA, passage of a 1986 law that weakened two prior national gun control laws. The same law also prohibited “any system registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions.”

Fear of gun registration remains strong. In 2013, when a bipartisan pair of senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, wrote a bill for “universal” background checks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in two first-grade classrooms, they included language adding criminal penalties to any government official found to have compiled gun registration lists, saying it would make the bill more palatable.

Yet, even with this redundant language, the bill still fell short of garnering the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster. Today, even though the Democrats now have a slim majority in the Senate, the threat of a filibuster to block gun reform remains. Majority leaders have discussed the possibility of taking the “nuclear option” to eliminate it. But they are hesitant, as it could lead to other ways for the Republican minority to block legislation.

To support their theory of the slippery slope, the NRA helped fund research for a book called “Gun Control in the Third Reich” by the gun rights litigator and scholar, Stephen P. Halbrook, published by a small think tank in 2013. This book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read its own publisher’s blurb parroted verbatim in a review in the NRA’s flagship American Rifleman magazine, which omitted mention of Halbrook having received NRA funds.

Few if any Holocaust scholars support this claim. It ignores that European Jews had no tradition of either gun ownership or resistance, as the scholar Raul Hilberg, author of “The Destruction of the European Jews,” documented. The director of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, Alan E. Steinweis, wrote that the idea that gun control played a role “is a simply a nonissue.”

Halbrook in his book also cited evidence that seems to disprove his own thesis, burying it near his conclusion: “Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings.” The Nazis went door-to-door searching for Jews and confiscating their property. But, when it came to firearms, they found little more than hunting rifles and antique guns, as the surviving records Halbrook did manage to find show.

These are the kinds of myths and disinformation that is filling the gap left behind by Biden and his advisers’ silence over their own gun plan. If they and others want to pass meaningful reforms, they need to finally address these tough issues head-on. They might want to pace themselves, though, as anything more than expanded background checks will probably take years, and nothing less than changing the nation’s conversation about guns.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

The Myths Fueling Today’s Armed Right How the NRA seeded the storylines animating the violent groups that will be patrolling this year’s election

October 28, 2020/in The New Republic/by Frank Smyth

Please see the original article here including photos by Mark Peterson/Redux.

The 13 men charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen, a possible reference to the white supremacist vigilante militia in the HBO series Watchmen. The suspects began planning their kidnapping this summer, with live fire exercises and explosives, according to the charges. Not long before, gangs of armed men, many of them carrying AR-15s, and defiantly not wearing facemasks, protested inside the state capitol in Lansing against strict health measures imposed by Whitmer. Similar armed right-wing groups across the nation are planning to privately police polling sites on November 3, as President Donald Trump called for in the presidential debate in late September.

At first blush, it may seem hard to connect the various themes that crop up in recent stories about the armed right. There is, of course, the adamant assertion of their right to bear arms, but also a penchant for white supremacy (evidenced by their baleful presence at Black Lives Matter protests, and the online contempt they routinely hurl at the movement), a resistance to common sense public health measures meant to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic, and the specter of voter intimidation. But at a deeper level, what connects this powerful, and dangerous, set of attitudes and reflexes is a collection of myths that have spread like coronavirus mutations through social media, allowing the different groups of the armed right to perceive themselves as good guys fighting various historic evils.

Many of these myths can be traced back to the National Rifle Association, the once-powerful and now-waning guns rights organization that is in the midst of tearing itself apart. The NRA is in decline and in debt, laying off staff and losing members. The New York Attorney General’s office is seeking “to dissolve” the NRA over credible charges of massive embezzlement first raised by the NRA whistleblower Oliver North, the Reagan-era White House official at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal. North, identified as “Dissident No. 1” in court documents, was backed by other NRA board directors, including the rock star Ted Nugent.

But even as the NRA teeters, its mythical spirit lives on, entering a welter of new right-wing groups, some of which are neo-fascist—such as The Proud Boys, whom the president notoriously told to “stand back and stand by” at the first debate—or openly white supremacist, and some of which are not. They are united in their paranoia, and in their anti-government agenda, by one of the NRA’s grand theories: the “slippery slope.” The idea is that even a little gun control, like background checks, can start a dangerous slide in disarmament leading all the way to white genocide. Trump himself fuels the myth. “They call it the slippery slope, and all of sudden everything gets taken away,” he told reporters last summer, explaining his own reversal on background checks.

Even as the NRA teeters, its mythical spirit lives on, entering a welter of new right-wing groups.

For these armed groups, the slippery slope’s primary example is the Holocaust. In 2016 Nugent posted a graphic on his Facebook page featuring photos of prominent Jewish American leaders, each one next to an Israeli flag, calling them “punks” who “hate freedom” over their support for gun control. Within hours the Anti-Defamation League denounced Nugent, saying that “anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate.” Nugent then posted in response, “What sort of racist prejudiced POS [piece of shit] could possibly not know that Jews for gun control are Nazis in disguise?” Nugent was referring to the belief amongst gun activists and other conservatives across the country that the Nazis used gun control to disarm Europe’s Jews before they killed them.

Another example marshalled to bolster the slippery slope argument comes from the Reconstruction era. “I’m a Black American and I know that the NRA was started as a civil rights organization training Black Americans to arm themselves and defend themselves against the KKK,” said Candace Owens in 2018 on Fox News, announcing her membership in the NRA.

These gun myths about Reconstruction and the Holocaust are both the work of the NRA. The first is a fabrication wholly invented by its modern leadership, while the second is an old trope that the NRA has endorsed and amplified. The NRA’s messages have spread through social media to animate gun activists nationwide. The work of one NRA-funded scholar, David B. Kopel, has appeared in newspapers like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, arguing that gun laws don’t work, usually without disclaimers reflecting the millions of dollars in NRA funding Kopel’s think tank, the Independence Institute, has received. The NRA’s rewriting of history continues to feed viral memes that appropriate the epic struggles of two historically persecuted minorities. These fantasies have saturated the Republican electorate to the point that the “slippery slope” is now embraced as gospel truth on the American right.

The NRA wasn’t always like this. For over a century, it was dedicated to riflery and the shooting sports. It was founded in New York City in 1871, during the peak of Reconstruction. Union Army veterans, most of whom were New York National Guard officers, formed the group to improve riflery among soldiers and able-bodied men in anticipation of future wars. They modeled their organization upon the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom, inaugurated 12 years before by Queen Victoria, and borrowed its namesake and target designs for their shooting range. In 1876, during the American centennial, the NRA added “of America” to its name to prevent “any international confusion.”

In 1977, in an internal uprising that today’s NRA leaders pretend never happened, the NRA literally shifted overnight into America’s largest gun lobby in what is still quietly known within its lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.” This internecine mutiny was over the NRA’s prior support for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which outlawed, among other things, mail-order rifles like the one tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, bought through an ad in the NRA’s own flagship magazine American Rifleman. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” explained the NRA’s old guard before it was overthrown. The modern NRA has since embraced an “unyielding” and “absolutist” take on gun rights, and over the past 43 years it has helped expand access to guns across most of the nation.

The NRA’s Royal British roots hardly make for a good story for the modern NRA to tell. It has come up with a new origin story more than once, most recently as 2013, after the re-election of a Black president, Barack Obama. “We are the largest civil rights organization in the world, and we have been part of the fabric of America ever since 1871,” wrote LaPierre in February 2013 in an article that appeared in the American Rifleman. The idea of the NRA being the world’s largest civil rights organization planted a new notion that soon morphed into another. “As members of the oldest civil rights organization in the nation, NRA members know tyranny when we see it,” wrote LaPierre six months later on the conservative news website The Daily Caller.

Wayne LaPierre and NRA chief spokesman Andrew Arulanandam each declined to comment for this story.

Since then, the NRA has made this specious claim—that the NRA is the nation’s oldest (or longest-standing) civil rights organization—its new mantra, repeated by leaders, lawyers and the group’s website. Just last year the NRA laid down the keystone of its new genesis story by falsely claiming that the early NRA “stood with freed slaves” during Reconstruction. This is a canard that tries to turn the history of gun ownership in America from one dominated by white men armed to help maintain an unequal social order into a mythical one where white gun owners and the NRA itself were on the frontlines of America’s earliest struggles for racial equality. “Those Who Call The NRA Racist Don’t Know Our History,” wrote LaPierre in 2017. “In our [149-year] history, open doors for minorities, and defense of our common rights, has been at the center of the NRA’s existence.”

By then the NRA had already helped boost a novel theory about the Holocaust: that German gun control laws were “essential elements” leading to the genocide of six million Jews, the idea being that Jews could have defended themselves from Nazi fascism if the Gestapo had not first seized their guns. Needless to say, this claim has no basis in any prior scholarship. “For whatever reason, historians have paid no attention to Nazi laws and policies restricting firearms ownership as essential elements in creating tyranny,” as one NRA-funded scholar himself lamented. This theory turns the worst atrocity of the modern era from one with many documented factors leading to the Nazis’ consolidation of power, into a myth where the Holocaust itself is the cautionary tale of gun control.

The NRA’s attempts to identify itself with the Black struggle for equal rights can be seen in the case of Roy Innis and the award named after him.

In 1968, around the time of the start of the gun rights rebellion within the NRA, Innis emerged as the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, running on an independent “Black Nationalist” agenda. His predecessors had helped establish the “Freedom Rides” and led them through the deep South in the early 1960s. By the early 1990s, after Innis had seen first one and then another of his sons “murdered,” in his words, “by young, Black thugs,” he joined the NRA’s board of directors, among the first African Americans to do so.

In 2017, after Roy Innis died, the NRA established a memorial award in his name. The first recipient was honored posthumously in 2019. Otis McDonald was an Army veteran and retired maintenance engineer from the South Side of Chicago. It was McDonald who brought the pivotal Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, decided in 2010, that extended the right to keep arms in one’s home throughout the nation.

This ceremony last spring was the high point of the NRA’s convention in Indianapolis—a weekend marred by breaking news of the embezzlement scandal. The commemoration was led by NRA board director Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel whose mock execution of an Iraqi policeman had led to him receiving a fine but keeping his rank. He also served in Congress as the first African American representative from Florida since Reconstruction. He rose in the Tea Party Caucus until, after redistricting, he lost his seat. West is now the chairman of the Texas Republican Party. He made the QAnon phrase, “We are the storm,” the new slogan of the Texas GOP, putting it on fundraising emails, social media, T-shirts, and hats.

The NRA had helped boost a novel theory about the Holocaust: that German gun control laws were “essential elements” leading to the genocide of six million Jews.

West joined fellow board members Oliver North and Ted Nugent in making accusations of financial improprieties against LaPierre, and it was West who called for him to resign. Yet West and LaPierre still managed to maintain a united front when it came to the ceremony for McDonald, which led to the NRA announcing that its founding fathers had armed freed slaves.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to Otis W. McDonald for his courage, his commitment and his sacrifice to take a stand and be steadfast in his belief in the United States Constitution,” West said from the stage, with LaPierre and his staff sharing the dais. Close to 1,000 NRA members, many wearing NRA gear or MAGA hats, were in the hall. West went on to fold McDonald’s action into the myth of the early NRA’s role during Reconstruction. “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights,” he said. Everyone in the room rose and applauded, in the longest standing ovation of the meeting.

“As an American black man, the history of the National Rifle Association has a special meaning for me, and I often reflect on it,” West wrote in a 2018 column for the Conservative News Service. “At a time when recently freed slaves were transitioning to being American citizens, they came under assault during the Reconstruction Era. 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.”

Is there any actual historical link between the NRA and the Black struggle? In the six years after it was founded in 1871, the NRA kept busy. It took the organization two years, after lobbying for funding from Albany, to finally open its first range, known as Creedmoor, in what is now Queens in 1873. Over the next four years, NRA shooters honed their skills, defeating first the Irish and then the “Imperial Team” of their Royal role models, both times at Creedmoor, to become the undisputed rifle champions of the (English-speaking) world in 1877. It was an American triumph in the Victorian Era, and the early NRA’s greatest accomplishment. Yet, like most of the NRA’s actual history, this is something that the modern NRA would prefer to forget.

It is also true that co-founder William Conant Church and other early NRA leaders, all based in New York, supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts during Reconstruction to crush the Ku Klux Klan, in order to put an end to ongoing Southern resistance. The filmmaker Michael Moore’s insinuation in his 2002 film Bowling for Columbine that the NRA and the KKK were somehow linked, because they were founded five years apart, is another canard, one flying in the other direction.

The use of Black Codes to outlaw gun ownership by freed slaves in the South was painfully real. But even this important issue was not raised by the early NRA or the men who founded it. Church, an unabashed Grant admirer, wrote one of the first books about the Civil War and its aftermath, titled Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction. In it, Church dealt explicitly with the challenges faced by freed slaves, including violence by Southern groups and authorities:

The negroes had ceased to be slaves, but they had not yet become free men, and there was no guaranty that they might not be subjected to some new form of oppression …[O]ne Southern State after another passed laws designed to perpetuate the scheme of enforced labour by establishing a system of apprenticeship, more heartless and cruel than slavery had ever been, and lacking the ameliorating features of the ‘patriarchal institution.’ . . . Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold any one responsible for their murder.

Church made no mention whatsoever of any group, whether private or governmental, coming to the aid of freed slaves by helping to arm them. (Although he did mention the Union Army’s decision during the war to start “arming the negro” to add “a powerful ally” and “make good soldiers.”) Nor did he mention any need to arm freed slaves, or even any discussion about the matter. As a matter of fact, Church did not mention the National Rifle Association at all.

Eighty years after Reconstruction, however, at the start of the Civil Rights era, there was a case that involved the NRA and the KKK. A Black man named Robert Williams, who had served as a Marine in a segregated unit during World War II, became the president of the local NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. He helped integrate the town library, but trouble started when he and other activists tried to desegregate the town’s swimming pool after several Black children drowned in nearby swimming holes. The local KKK mobilized in response. “So we started arming ourselves,” said Williams. “I wrote to the National Rifle Association in Washington which encourages veterans to keep in shape to defend their native land, and asked for a charter, which we got. In a year we had 60 members.” They called themselves Monroe’s Black Armed Guard.

In 1957 a group of hooded Klansmen fired shots at the home of a Black doctor who was another local NAACP leader. They were surprised when “Williams and the black men of Monroe fired back from behind sandbags and covered positions,” wrote Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham University law professor and the nation’s leading African American scholar on gun rights. The firefight was covered by newspapers as far away as Norfolk, Virginia, with the headlines “Citizens Fire Back at Klan” and “Shots Exchanged Near Residence of NAACP Head.” But the American Rifleman said nary a word, and the NRA did nothing subsequently to support its Black Monroe chapter, either.

The NRA did support at least one African American group in the South during the Civil Rights era. A half century ago it sold surplus government ammunition to the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The group “provided their own guns.” Yet today’s NRA falsely claims that “the NRA was their arsenal of democracy.”

The NRA’s use of the Holocaust myth began, as so many things do in the world of conservative politics, with a think tank.

Stephen P. Halbrook, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, has been described by the UCLA law professor Adam Winkler as “the nation’s leading expert on the right to keep and bear arms.” Halbrook filed an amicus brief in Heller vs. District of Columbia, the watershed Supreme Court case that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and president of the Senate, Vice President Dick Cheney—all without making any mention of having received nearly $300,000 in NRA funding. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller cited Halbrook’s brief twice. Halbrook was later one of the attorneys representing the NRA in the McDonald v. Chicago, which extended the Heller ruling throughout the nation.

In 2013, The Independent Institute published Halbrook’s book Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the States.’ “Based on newly discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries and newspapers of the time,” the book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read the review of the book in the NRA’s American Rifleman. “While voluminous scholarship has documented the Third Reich and the Holocaust, this is the first thorough examination of the laws restricting firearm ownership that rendered Hitler’s political opponents, as well as the Jews, defenseless.”

The Washington Times, the conservative daily controlled by the Unification Movement (associated with the late Sung Myung Moon), also reviewed it, but notably hedged the book’s extravagant claim that gun suppression was pivotal in setting the Holocaust in motion. “There is no way to prove it,” Robert VerBruggen wrote of the book’s thesis. But he did note that the book provides an “extensive history” of the matter.

Halbrook’s book glosses over evidence that prior scholars like Raul Hilberg have established that would seem to counter, if not disprove, his thesis. “Preventive attack, armed resistance, and revenge are almost completely absent in two thousand years of Jewish ghetto history. Instances of violent opposition, which may be found in one or another history book, are atypical and episodic,” Hilberg wrote in his 1961 book The Destruction of The European Jews. “The critical period of the 1930s and 1940s is marked by that same absence of physical opposition.”

The biggest hole in Halbrook’s research is one he admits himself, albeit in the pages near the back of his book. Halbrook notes that, “Police were required to list all weapons taken from Jews and to send the weapons seized and listing to the Gestapo.” Yet he has failed to locate any significant records of seizures of weapons from Jews, and no large caches of any weapons at all. As Halbrook writes:

Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings. Routine police reports mention arms and seizures along with other incidents. For example, a report to the commander of the municipal police in Leipzig dated November 29, 1938, noted: “Based on the decree regarding the surrender of weapons in possession of Jews, three Jews surrendered their slashing and thrusting weapons and one Jew surrendered his hunting rifles. Two bayonets and a 85 mm grenade were reported found and surrendered.”

If this all seems rather cracked, which it is, consider that this issue came up in the last election cycle when Ben Carson, now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, suggested on CNN that gun control led to the Holocaust. His claim prompted a response from Alan E. Steinweis, a professor of history and Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, that this argument “is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into a historical situation where it was not seen as important. I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor.”

The “slippery slope” and its theoretical underpinnings are fueling today’s armed right. They disagree over matters from hate speech to the rules of engagement for use of force, with some openly advocating opening fire on BLM marchers. But what unites them is the shared notion that they are on the right side of history. The NRA-boosted myths about Reconstruction and the Holocaust reinforce their claim that it is not them, but gun control itself that is racist. “Thank God that the NRA was able to come to the black community’s defense” during Reconstruction, posted Old North State Patriots on Facebook in 2019. “There’s a reason that Hitler did it,” said former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka on Fox News the same year, referring to the Fuhrer’s alleged gun control to disarm the Jews. “This isn’t a theory–It’s history.”

The Oath Keepers/Patriot Movement in 2008 adopted the “Hitler took guns away” argument to Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “Imagine that Herr Hitlery is sworn in as president in 2009. After a conveniently timed ‘domestic terrorism’ incident (just a coincidence, of course) … she promptly crams a United Nations mandated total ban on the private possession of firearms.” The idea has become a fixture on Fox News, with host Andrew Napolitano extending the example to include Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones took up a similar line, telling Piers Morgan in 2013, “Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chavez took the guns, and I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!”

Many of today’s paramilitary groups keep a low profile. Instead of their own banner, many fly the Gadsden flag, a yellow militia banner of the Revolutionary War with a coiled green snake over the words “DONT TREAD ON ME.” Cadres greet each other online and in person through shared phrases, insignias, and other signs, creating a rich environment for racist extremists to operate. What else unites the armed right is their ongoing support for President Trump. He has called forth a movement bigger than himself, one that seems likely to outlast him.

America’s pro-Trump armed right would not be the first to invent a new ideology to justify in advance their violence against others. Genocidaires developed propaganda ahead of the mass violence in late-1930s Germany and early-1990s Rwanda. The modern NRA’s whitewash of history today helps armed right-wing gangs from neo-Nazis to Three Percenters rationalize their intimidation and violence against others, including fellow Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech. Many of the same pro-Trump paramilitaries, who will be self-policing voters on election day, may grow more aggressive after the votes are tallied, especially if the top of their ticket comes up short.

It no longer matters to many of them, either, that the same NRA that helped inspire them is now nearing the previously unthinkable possibility of default. Unlike the NRA, which worked largely within the system, these armed gangs—with or without Trump—say they are ready to overthrow it.

Research for this article was supported by a Logan Nonfiction fellowship.

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

“The Price of Freedom”: For the Gun Lobby, Mass Shootings Cannot Be Avoided

October 21, 2017/in The Progressive/by Frank Smyth

http://progressive.org/dispatches/price-of-freedom-for-the-gun-lobby-mass-shootings/

“The Price of Freedom”: For the Gun Lobby, Mass Shootings Cannot Be Avoided

by Frank Smyth

October 6, 2017

USAF

Why does anyone need so many guns?

This is a question that President Trump and other elected leaders, along with the gun lobby led by the National Rifle Association, are trying to avoid.

The Las Vegas country music concert shooting poses one of the toughest challenges for the NRA and its supporters to date. The shooter was neither foreign-born nor foreign-motivated. He was a homegrown killer who legally amassed an arsenal of weapons he used to target an unsuspecting crowd.

High-powered, semi-automatic rifles of the type purchased and used by the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock are designed not for hunting or self-defense, but for combat—to target as many enemy combatants as possible in the shortest amount of time. So why does the NRA maintain every American has the right to amass these kinds of weapons? So that they can defend themselves at will without being out-armed by anyone.

“This is the price of freedom,” former, disgraced Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly wrote Monday on his own website hours after the shooting.

Under pressure to do something in the wake of America’s worst modern mass shooting to date, the NRA and a growing number of Republican politicians have said they will consider regulating “bump stocks”—a crude device used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock to convert one or more of his rifles into a relatively slow, but still fully automatic weapon.

This is a rare concession. Hardline gun advocates to the right of the NRA oppose it. And, it’s a symbolic gesture at best, sidestepping the issue of why the shooter was able to lawfully purchase so many powerful guns. The NRA is offering it coupled with a push for legislation to make permits to carry concealed handguns issued in any one state valid in every other, just like a driver’s license.

Paddock broke no laws until nearly the moment he opened fire. He had no apparent sign of mental illness or a criminal record, and had passed what background checks are required for retail store firearms purchases in Nevada.

He did not commit a crime when he brought ten high-powered rifles, one handgun and ammunition inside his luggage into his room at the Mandalay Hotel. He did not even break the law when he obtained a “bump stock,” as possession of one is—due to NRA lobbying—not illegal.

Paddock broke no laws until nearly the moment he opened fire.

He seems to have first broken the law only when he physically attached the device to one or more of his rifles to convert them into fully automatic firing weapons, which are with few exceptions illegal. He gave no sign of criminal intent until he broke his hotel room’s windows to give himself two clear lines of sight, 32 floors up and 400 yards away, before firing on the concert fans below.

“You know – it’s an open society,” South Dakota Republican Senator John Thune told an NBC News reporter after the Las Vegas shooting. “And when somebody does what he wants to do, it’s going to be hard to prevent anything.”

He continued: “I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”

NRA leaders have previously claimed that high-powered, semi-automatic rifles are good to kill vermin, although use of a high-powered round—designed to cause massive tissue and bone damage in a human—is literally overkill for small mammals.

But gun rights advocates have other scenarios in mind when claiming the right to stockpile such weapons including one incident that has become part of their tribal lore.

During the Los Angeles riots following the 1992 acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, Korean-American store owners used a variety of weapons to keep largely African-American rioters from looting. “They finally interview the Legend himself,” recently wrote one YouTube commentator about one of the store owners.

Hardline gun advocates also point to the need for self-defense after massive storms. In 2013, after Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey and New York, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre wrote: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone Criminals” and the “total anarchy” that may ensue are all reasons why people need guns.

But the other reason Americans need guns is to arm themselves against a potentially tyrannical government, or so many hardline gun advocates claim. This view was popularized by the so-called patriot militia movement against gun control during the Clinton administration, and which helped motivate Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. It reached a crescendo, especially in Internet chat forums, during President Obama’s eight years in office, in no small part due to his race.

The NRA maintains that previously law-abiding, mentally competent citizens like Paddock should continue having unlimited access to high-powered firearms so they can either fight, or defend, the government, depending upon who is in power.

Defense against government tyranny was also the basis of candidate Donald Trump’s threats of violence, either if he did not receive the presidential nomination by his own party, or if Hillary Clinton as president were to nominate gun reform justices to the Supreme Court. The same view remains the undercurrent driving recent NRA video messages targeting liberals, the media and others who protest nonviolently against police abuses and who oppose President Trump.

Americans should make no mistake about it. The reason that the NRA maintains that previously law-abiding, mentally competent citizens like Paddock should continue having unlimited access to high-powered firearms is so they can either fight, or defend, the government, depending upon who is in power. That would be hard to do if citizens had access to less firepower than police and other government authorities. It helps explain why the NRA is backing legislation to legalize sales of silencers, absurdly claiming that silencers—as opposed to ear plugs or muffs—are necessary to protect hearing loss among gun owners.

Of course, when it comes to the protection of, or against, government, their logic is flawed. The language of the Second Amendment reads “to keep and bear arms,” and has thus been interpreted to apply only to handheld weapons. While it could be conceivably construed to allow citizens to have weapons like shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said on Fox News shortly after the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, no one argues that the Second Amendment allows civilians to keep and bear heavier firepower like cannons or tanks. The notion of fighting government forces, if taken literally, is a fantasy.

Americans must decide whether they accept the gun lobby’s logic. As NRA head Wayne LaPierre expressed it after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”

Although the NRA has now come out in favor of slightly more regulation of “bump stocks,” (but not other mechanical devices that can effectively convert semi-automatic rifles into fully automatically firing weapons), it initially went dark for several days, refusing to comment and uncharacteristically failing to update its usually active Facebook and Twitter pages.

They still seem to be scrambling to respond. The gun lobby recently advocated to make it easier for mentally ill people along with others like accused domestic abusers to continue accessing guns.

Of course, it would have made no difference in this case. I run a training and consulting firm helping prepare journalists, aid workers and others how to protect themselves from various kinds of weaponry and attacks, including domestic active shooters. But the nature of the Las Vegas attack, with the shooter having a high, distant line of sight to target the crowd in an open space with continuous fire, would render even the best of training marginally effective.

The NRA may not be saying much, but Fox News anchor Sean Hannity has. Following the NRA’s bad guy versus good guy logic, he suggested that an armed individual with a modicum of training like himself (Hannity said he was trained by his parents who had “law enforcement connections”) might stop a shooter, “when they start to reload.”

A point his own Fox News colleague immediately shot down.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, 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.

Despite Widespread Calls For Him to Go, the NRA is Stuck With Nugent

February 16, 2016/in The Progressive/by Frank Smyth

by Frank Smyth, February 16, 2016

The 1970s-era rock star and longtime National Rifle Association board director Ted Nugent lit a firestorm last week when he made a series of anti-Semitic posts on his Facebook page. Nugent accused prominent Jewish Americans of promoting gun control as part of a plot to disarm citizens and impose Nazi-like tyranny across the United States.

In response to criticism of his posts Nugent wrote, “what sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for gun control are nazis in disguise?”

Nugent has sat on the NRA board for more than twenty years. He’s also very popular among the organization’s leaders and members alike. Now, however, there is a movement from both outside and within the NRA demanding that Nugent finally be ousted.

But what casual observers of the gun lobby fail to realize is that the NRA’s own bylaws—withheld from the public, but obtained by The Progressive—make removing Nugent all but impossible anytime before 2017, and doubtful even after that. As I previously reported in Mother Jones, the National Rifle Association’s governing board of directors are elected through a tightly controlled nominating process, one that even former NRA directors have compared to a Soviet-style Politburo.

Previous efforts to recall NRA directors have dragged on for years, or have failed altogether. Nugent is up for reelection this year, but the bylaws that govern NRA board elections make it hard for any director with name recognition to lose. Eligible NRA members are asked to vote for up to twenty-five candidates out of no more than thirty officially sanctioned nominees. Nugent would have to end up being among the very least popular candidates not to be reelected.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how many members vote against him, only that he get more votes than a few others at the bottom of the pack.

Nugent could, of course, still step down voluntarily for the good of the organization. But his vigorous self-defense makes that seem unlikely. The NRA’s response to date makes it unclear whether they would even ask.

What is clear is that any effort to oust Nugent would divide the NRA.

Debbie Schlussel, a self-described conservative commentator, religious Jew, and gun rights advocate wrote on her blog site:

“Although thousands of people ‘liked’ and shared Ted Nugent’s scurrilous anti-Jewish screed and it drew a lot of anti-Semitic comments and support from Neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites, I’m very proud to note that many gun owners, particularly Christians and conservatives, posted comments attacking Nugent’s comments and disavowing them.”

It’s also unclear whether a movement to remove Nugent from the NRA board would succeed. “In this era of Trump, preceded by years of jackbooted PC thought policing, I don’t think the membership have much patience for ‘you can’t say that,’” wrote “Sebastian,” a Pennsylvania gun rights blogger and voting NRA member who wants Nugent off the board.

The NRA leadership, notably, has yet to weigh in. “Individual board members do not speak for the NRA,” spokesman Lars Dalseide told The Progressive, neither denouncing nor embracing Nugent’s remarks.

A few gun rights groups have denounced Nugent. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, whose founder Nugent accurately states was a friend, recently posted on the group’s Facebook page that they were “appalled” at Nugent’s “deeply anti-Semitic comments.”

Another is Gun Owners of America, a much larger organization to the right of the NRA. The watchdog group Media Matters has linked longtime leader Larry Pratt to various white supremacist groups. But even Pratt denounced Nugent after his recent anti-Semitic rant.

“We’re very disappointed to see what Ted has done,” Pratt told the online magazine The Trace. “Gun Owners of America very strongly disagrees with his point of view.”

“Quite a few of the pro-gun people that I’ve spoken with today are simply done with Nugent,” wrote Bob Owens of the pro-gun website Bearing Arms. Owens stated that Nugent should apologize, and that if he wouldn’t, “then he has no business being on the board of an inclusive organization such as the National Rifle Association.”

This quote in particular has been repeated in The New York Daily News, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and Media Matters as evidence that gun owners at large are demanding the NRA oust Nugent from its board. On Friday, Charles C. W. Cooke in the National Review weighed in with a piece titled, “It’s Time for the NRA to Cut Ted Nugent Loose.”

But Cooke and other critics are all missing the same thing. The NRA could not cut Nugent loose even if most board directors wanted to. NRA bylaws that govern the organization have been written to maintain control over the board and to prevent challenges—more likely to come from the right-wing than from gun reformers.

“If they could, I’d say yes,” said the pro-gun blogger Sebastian in a public conversation with me on Twitter. But “NRA bylaws don’t allow it.” His Pennsylvania gun rights blog has long been sympathetic to the NRA. But many gun rights blogs have also been highly critical of the NRA for the way its leadership has long manipulated its own board elections.

“[T]he NRA insists on keeping election information and their board of directors shielded from public scrutiny,” noted Jeff Knox of the Firearms Coalition blog. “I don’t think most people who vote in NRA elections have much of a clue,” said Sebastian on Twitter. The process is so controlled that, in most years, fewer than seven percent of eligible NRA members bother to vote.

Similar to the way NRA bylaws control who gets elected to the board, the same bylaws control how a director may be removed once elected. Recalling a board director requires first the signatures of at least 450 eligible NRA members including 100 signatures each from three different states. But the signatures must be collected over the seven or eight month period beginning after the last NRA annual convention, held this past April in Nashville, and 150 days before the next NRA convention, taking place this May in Louisville.

So with May 20, the start of the Louisville convention, little more than three months away, it’s already too late for this year.

The signatures would then need to be validated, and, if enough were upheld, a hearing would be required within thirty days. If the hearing were to rule against Nugent, NRA voting members would be mailed ballots with pro and con opinions. Then, if a majority of responding voters were to mail back their ballots in favor of recall, that step would finally get Nugent off the board.

In other words, there is nothing that anyone can do to even start the process until nearly summer. Even then, the procedures would be sure drag on into 2017, to be decided perhaps at least a year from now, if at all.

Petitions to recall NRA directors have failed before. There has been an ongoing effort to try and recall Joaquin Jackson, a storied Texas Ranger who has acted in Hollywood films alongside stars like Tommy Lee Jones. In a 2005 interview Jackson said that he did not understand why any hunter would need more than five rounds. Jackson has been since derided as an “Elmer Fudd,” the bungling cartoon character whom NRA hardliners use to label those who fail to support the need for high-powered, high-capacity weapons.

Despite the decade-long effort, the former Texas Ranger remains on the NRA board.

This year another NRA director with even more name recognition faces a stronger challenge. In ballots slated to arrive this week, eligible NRA voters are being asked to vote for or against the recall of NRA director Grover Norquist. The prominent Republican and director of Americans for Tax Reform is accused of having ties to Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood. Part of the concern is that Norquist’s wife is a Palestinian Muslim.

But the effort to recall Norquist has been in process within the NRA for nearly two years, and it also seems unlikely to succeed. “I urge you to VOTE NO on the recall of Grover Norquist,” wrote Todd Rathner last week on the Ammoland blog.

The lengthy bylaw requirements, of course, are one reason why Nugent is going nowhere. But another reason is that many eligible NRA members might still vote for the aging rocker despite his recent anti-Semitic remarks. Said Sebastian about his fellow voting NRA members, “People are not in a mood to be persuaded, or to think rationally about things like this.”

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has written about the National Rifle Association for The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and MSNBC.com.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/02/188561/despite-widespread-calls-him-go-nra-stuck-nugent#sthash.CH9ZhCgu.dpuf

Cat Scratch Fever—Is Ted Nugent’s Racism Too Much for Republicans?

February 10, 2016/in The Progressive/by Frank Smyth

by Frank Smyth, February 10, 2016

Racism has long bubbled quietly beneath the surface of America’s gun rights movement, even as its well-heeled leaders have wrapped themselves in the cloak of respectability. White Supremacists and neo-Nazis openly hostile to blacks, Jews, and other minorities continue to appear in public at gun rights rallies. But the National Rifle Association, in particular, has long held openly racist groups at arm’s length from their conservative but still very much mainstream political organization.

Not anymore.

Yesterday longtime NRA board member Ted Nugent went further into racist territory than any previous NRA director—including himself. Nugent posted a graphic on his Facebook page featuring photos of Jewish-American leaders who have spoken out in support of gun violence prevention. The accompanying text states that Jews are “really behind gun control” and that they “really hate freedom.” Within hours the Anti-Defamation League denounced Nugent saying that “anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate.”

At the root of Nugent’s Facebook post is the notion that gun control can lead to tyranny, if not genocide, as Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson posited in his book and on the campaign trail last year. Other Republican candidates including Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have made similar statements. But claiming that gun control could lead to genocide is still not the same as claiming that Jewish-American leaders are supporting gun control to take away Americans’ rights as part of some absurd racist plot, as Nugent—an NRA board director for the past 20 years—has suggested.

How will the NRA respond to Nugent’s rant? The NRA’s polished leadership, based just outside the Washington beltway in Virginia, has long walked a fine line between extremism and respectability. NRA leaders have tried to mollify gun rights absolutists, including the racist extremists in the base, while maintaining the mainstream respectability that continues to make the NRA America’s most powerful single-issue lobbying organization. To hold this balance, NRA leaders, some of whom could teach Karl Rove the finer points of deflective communication, say different things in public to mainstream audiences than they do behind closed doors.

A more timely question is how the field of Republican presidential candidates—all of whom have made statements sympathetic to the NRA and gun rights—will respond. What will they say when asked if the NRA should remove Ted Nugent from its board? At least one gun control group is already demanding the NRA board remove Nugent, although, to be fair, the same group has made the same demand before. Nugent once called the late Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot in 2012 in Florida by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, a “dope-smoking, racist gangsta wannabe.”

Nugent may be a has-been performer in today’s music charts, but he remains a favorite son of influential Republicans. In 2013, Texas Republican Congressman Steve Stockman invited Nugent to come to Washington to attend President Obama’s State of the Union Address. The 67-year-old rocker, an avid gun owner and hunter, enjoys support among conservatives even though he once told High Times and later the Detroit Free Press how he took crystal meth, defecated on himself, and stopped bathing or brushing his teeth for weeks to fool his local draft board into relieving him of military service in Vietnam. He also told them how he often slept with underage girls while on tour with his band.

Nugent’s social media post yesterday, however, crossed a line, even for him.

“Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic right to defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS,” he wrote. Beneath his words is a square image with individual photos of twelve Jewish-American figures including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senators Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer, Richard Blumenthal and Carl Levin, former Obama aide and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, each emblazoned with the Israeli flag.

Within hours the New York Daily News wrote a brief online piece protesting the post. Nugent soon fired back: “Just when you hope that mankind coudnt (sic) possibly get any dumber or more dishonest, superFreaks rise to the occasion. What sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol are nazis in disguise?”

Nugent then made another Facebook post, this time of a late 1930s-era photo of German Nazis rounding up Jews showing one man wearing a Star of David. Beneath the image were the words: ‘Back when I learned about the Holocaust in school, I remember thinking, “How did Hitler get MILLIONS of people to follow along blindly and NOT fight back? Then I realized I am watching my fellow Americans take the same path.”

Images and texts like these—claiming that the Holocaust was the result of gun control—circulate widely on social media among gun rights absolutists and so-called Second Amendment advocates. To make sure Nugent’s 2.7 million Facebook followers got his point, Nugent wrote himself in the same post: “Soulless sheep to slaughter. Not me.”

Among the Republican Presidential candidates, Ben Carson has claimed that gun control in Nazi Germany helped produce the Holocaust. In his book, A More Perfect Union, Carson wrote that “German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and others whom they considered inferior.”

Carson repeated this claim in October as he was running for President in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, and then again a few weeks later in a speech at the National Press Club. Other Presidential candidates in both major parties chose not to weigh in at the time. But Alan E. Steinweis, a University of Vermont professor of history and Holocaust studies, debunked his claims in a New York Times op-ed.

“Mr. Carson’s argument,” wrote Steinweis, “is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into an historical situation where it was not seen as important. I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor. Neither does gun control figure in the collective historical memory of any group that was targeted by the Nazi regime, be they Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, gay people or Poles. It is simply a non-issue.”

Neither the NRA, nor its paid stable of legal scholars—whose undisclosed NRA financing I have documented here and one of whom, David Kopel, recently appeared on NPR’s Diane Rehm show talking about gun issues without disclosing his NRA funding—have since weighed either in support of Dr. Carson, or to challenge Dr. Steinweis.

But that didn’t stop NRA board director Nugent from going ahead and putting forth the theory again. After all, such unsubstantiated claims thrive in Twitter posts with hashtags including #NRA #2A (Second Amendment) #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) and “Molon Labe.” The term Molon Labe derives from the Greco-Persian wars of 480 B.C. and means “come and take them” or, what in contemporary NRA vernacular might be more like: “If you want to take my gun, you’ll have try pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

What motivated Ted Nugent to make such an unambiguously racist post now is unclear. He could not be reached for comment. On his Facebook page I queried him: “Ted, So why are you raising the sheep to the slaughter issue now? Do you know something we don’t?” Although he “liked” my comment, he hasn’t responded further.

One cannot help but wonder if he may have been influenced by some of the rhetoric used by candidates in the current Presidential campaign. After the terrorist attacks last fall in Paris, Donald Trump suggested that they were the result of France’s relatively strict gun control policies—policies that are similar to those in every other Western European nation. The French ambassador Gerardo Araud responded to Trump’s remarks on Twitter: “This message is repugnant in its lack of any human decency. Vulture.”

Nugent endorsed Trump’s candidacy this past fall.

One of Trump’s challengers, Ted Cruz recently echoed a similar theme: “The right to self-defense is an essential component of the liberty we enjoy as Americans and is embodied in the Second Amendment.” The Canadian-born Texas senator’s view is shared by many American gun rights advocates. But whether gun control itself can lead to tyranny, or a genocide like the Holocaust, as Nugent just claimed, is a question that neither Trump nor Cruz has yet to address.

Ted Nugent’s statements may seem extreme to outsiders, but they reflect gospel truth within the gun rights absolutist community. The community even includes a few Jewish-Americans. “The founder of Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership called me his 2nd Amendment/Freedom hero,” Nugent wrote yesterday on Facebook. The founder of this Jewish, pro-gun group, Aaron Zelman, passed away in 2010. He was a longtime friend of the NRA. I once heard him speak behind closed doors in Minneapolis at a 1994 NRA board meeting—one year before Ted Nugent was elected to the NRA board. Zelman made the claim then that Nugent made today—that the Holocaust resulted from gun control. He received enthusiastic applause from about 75 listening NRA directors.

But NRA leaders—for decades—have been far more circumspect in public. In 2012, NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre addressed a Small Arms panel at the United Nations in New York, and unequivocally explained the real purpose, in his view, of the right to bear arms.

“Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea. History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives,” he said. The statement remains posted on the NRA lobbying wing’s website.

But less than a year later, when pressed on this point by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in response to the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the NRA leader chose more guarded language.

Sen. Durbin asked LaPierre point blank about the purpose behind the Second Amendment, saying his own constituents who are NRA members have said it’s not just about hunting, shooting targets, or even defense against criminals, telling the senator: “We need the firepower and the ability to protect ourselves from our government—from our government, from the police—if they knock on our doors and we need to fight back.”

It seemed like the perfect opportunity for the NRA leader to lay out how the NRA cherishes the Second Amendment for its defense of freedom. But LaPierre, in a far milder tone that he used at the United Nations in New York seven months before, gave a far more subdued answer on camera in Washington:

“Senator, I think that without a doubt, if you look at why our founding fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again,” said LaPierre.

But in today’s world, the NRA leader went on, the Second Amendment remains “relevant and essential” for other reasons. People fear “being abandoned by their government. If a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits, if a riot occurs that they’re gonna be out there alone. And the only way they’re gonna protect themself (sic) in the cold and the dark, when they’re vulnerable is with a firearm.”

Ted Nugent is one NRA leader who has never been guarded in his talk about the Second Amendment which, in his view, is still all about the right to not only bear arms, but to bear them against the government when and if needed to prevent tyranny. If recent Twitter posts are any indication, many NRA advocates agree with him. “Ted Nugent is right!” reads one such post that included a news headline, “Jewish groups push for action on gun control.”

So what does the NRA think about Ted Nugent’s claim that Jewish-Americans who support gun control are really Nazis in disguise trying to disarm Americans to impose tyranny? This is one question to ask NRA leaders like LaPierre. Another is, should the NRA remove Nugent from its board?

The same questions should be put to Presidential candidates starting with Carson, Trump, and Cruz.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has written about the National Rifle Association for The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and MSNBC.com.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/02/188548/cat-scratch-fever{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}94-ted-nugent{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-racism-too-much-republicans#sthash.cbgVPR93.dpuf

Six months after Sandy Hook, grassroot groups and the gun debate

June 13, 2013/in MSNBC/by Frank Smyth

After the horror of the Newtown shooting, gun reform advocates expected to finally see a change. Yet Friday marks the six-month anniversary of the tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and, largely due to the efforts of the gun lobby, none of the nation’s federal gun laws have changed.

“The NRA and special interests have been schoolyard bullies,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told reporters after a press conference Thursday with Newtown family members in the Capitol. “We lost the first vote, but we’re going to win the last vote.”

Groups on both sides of the debate including Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the National Rifle Association have already begun spending money on attack ads against senators who did not vote as the groups’ wished this spring. But advocates on both sides seem to agree that the debate will be decided not by money but by the ability to mobilize grassroots support and voters.

“[A] real grassroots gun control movement? It doesn’t exist, and has never existed,” recentlynoted Sebastian, a pen name for a popular Second Amendment activist and blogger in Pennsylvania read by activists on both sides. The blogger has dismissed well-financed gun reform efforts as “astroturf,” as opposed to real grassroots support, deriding Mayor Bloomberg as “Astroturf-in-Chief.”

“Sebastian’s right about the past,” Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told MSNBC.com. “For a generation, the NRA had three advantages,” he added. The gun lobby has long enjoyed a strong grassroots base, members who make gun rights a priority when they vote, and a budget of up to $250 million a year to strengthen their clout.

Please finish reading the article here.

Gun Control and Genocide

March 23, 2013/in The Progressive/by Frank Smyth

You may also read the article at The Progressive where it first appeared.

Here’s why the NRA is dead wrong about gun control causing genocide. But at least they agree with human rights groups about the horrors of the military dictatorship in Guatemala.

What does America’s gun lobby have to do with the question of genocide in Guatemala? Plenty, although not for anything they did. But for the particular ideology they bring to this and almost every other case of genocide or similar violence in the twentieth century.

Today, in the United States, the gun lobby and gun manufacturers have a joint interest in both fighting gun control and encouraging Americans to buy more guns.

At the same time, gun manufacturing executives play a greater, hidden role inside the National Rifle Association that NRA leaders like to admit, as I helped established in a piece in January on this website.

The gun lobby also shares ideological ground with a small, but vocal group of gun rights activists who, like most NRA leaders and many gun industry executives, take an absolutist view of the American Second Amendment. Their ideology has two articles of faith, and each one reinforces the other. First, even the slightest form of control is likely, if not certain to result in government seizure of all firearms. And, second, gun control itself invariably leads to government tyranny, if not genocide.

That’s another reason why the gun lobby along with many gun rights activists oppose even modest gun control legislation.

And it’s also why the NRA is vehemently opposed to a U.N. Arms Trade Treaty that human rights groups like Amnesty International strongly support.

Two seemingly unconnected events recently unfolded in March more than 2,500 miles apart. On March 18, Guatemala began an historic trial against a former military dictator on charges of genocide. On March 20, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper signed landmark gun control measures in that state into law.

What does one have to do with the other? For Second Amendment absolutists, gun control and genocide, or at least the specter of government violence, are always tightly intertwined.

“This is how it starts. ==> Landmark gun bills signed in Colorado,”@Bobacheck tweeted in Wisconsin just hours after thy became Colorado law, adding hashtags including, “#NRA #2ndAmendment.”

Colorado’s new gun control laws require background checks on private gun sales, and limit magazines for semi-automatic weapons to a maximum of 15 rounds. (New York recently passed a law limiting magazines for semi-automatic weapons to seven rounds, although it may now modify the law to allow use of industry-standard 10-round magazines as long as they are not loaded with more than seven rounds; the District of Columbia limits magazines to 10 rounds.)

The Colorado legislature passed the law three months after this past December’s Newtown, Connecticut grade school tragedy, and in the wake of two more of America’s worst gun massacres over the past 13 years in the Denver suburbs at Columbine High School in 1999 and in an Aurora movie theater last summer. Many Colorado residents along with most Americans, as recent polls suggest, see such measures like background checks as an important step forward for public safety.

But for the gun lobby along with Second Amendment absolutists, the signing of Colorado’s new gun laws –which came only hours after the state’s Corrections director was shot and killed standing in the front door of his own home—is just the first sinister step toward government repression.

“#COLORADO How are they getting away with this crap? It’s coming to a town near you. We better stand, and fight this people,” tweeted @SanddraggerTees on the West Coast, one of countless gun rights absolutists who also rang the alarm just hours after the legislation became law, using the hashtags #2A for Second Amendment and #NRA.

YOUTUBE and the blogosphere have long been full of material alleging historical connections between gun control and genocide.The videos often use dramatic music, images and language, whilethe website prefer elaborate chart presentations to illustrate correlations and, thereby suggest causations between gun restrictions and genocidal violence.

A small group of legal scholars have also written essays, often for journals at small, accredited law schools, making similar but more substantive arguments. Two such scholars, David Hardy and David Kopel, each testified early this year before the Senate Judiciary Committee, not on genocide, but on guns and gun violence in America; the nationally televised audience watching them was not informed that some of their research has been funded by theNational Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, as Irecently reported on MSNBC.com.

Another pair of scholars, who, back in the 1990s, were among the first to assert a connection between gun control and genocide, began one of their first law review articles on the matter in a defensive tone. The language perhaps indicates how some of their peers view their arguments.

“This essay seeks to reclaim a serious argument from the lunatic fringe,” begin Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. in “Of Holocausts and Gun Control” in the Fall 1997 issue of Washington University Law Quarterly published by the law school of the same name in St. Louis. “We argue a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country’s civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide.”

One of the NRA-funded scholars who recently testified in the Senate, Kopel, teaches Advanced Constitutional Law as an adjunct professor at Denver University law school. Kopel lists a number of specific cases in his review of a book, “Lethal Laws”, by Jay Simkin, Alan M. Rice and Aaron S. Zelman of the small but voluble gun rights organization, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

Cases where gun control led to genocide, according to the group, allegedly include Armenia under Turkish occupation, Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, the Holocaust led by Nazi Germany, the Cultural Revolution in China, the genocide carried out by the U.S.-backed military in Guatemala, atrocities in Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The same group along with the NRA’s longest-standing African-American board member, Roy Innis, of the Congress for Racial Equality, also put the more recent genocide in Rwanda on the list.

In the case of Guatemala, the authors of Lethal Laws focus mainly on a time several decades before its genocidal acts occurred. Even Kopel takes issue with the authors’ claim whether repealing gun control laws in the early 1950’s might have made a difference, as most Guatemalans, he points out, were too poor to afford firearms anyway. The main thing the Lethal Laws authors seem to say about Guatemala’s genocidal acts in the early 1980s is that human rights advocacy groups like Amnesty International should have advocated for the arming of victimized populations.

Such an argument would of course violate Amnesty International’s mandate. More importantly, anyone who has ever been to, or spent any time even just reading up on Guatemala would know such an argument is patently absurd. It would have only put the nation’s surviving highlands civilians at risk of even more military reprisals.

The bloody history of Guatemala includes grotesque human-rights abuses—in spite of the fact that there were significant numbers of armed rebels. The insurgents had military weapons, but they were still not strong enough as a force to defend civilians including women and children from brigade-level and other large-unit attacks by the Army.

THE TRIAL of the former military dictator, retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide is underway in Guatemala City. A U.N. Truth Commission previously documented the wholesale annihilation of men, women and children in hundreds of ethnic Mayan villages while he led the country, calling them “acts of genocide.” The abuses were carried out with CIA assistance, as was established in 1995 by journalist and author Tim Weiner in The New York Times.

In late 1990, in The Progressive, I reported how villagers in Santiago de Atitán finally broke through their own fear of military reprisals to place the photos of hundreds of loved ones who had disappeared over the previous decade on the windows and walls of the village’s town hall. It all began with one family’s photo, and soon became a silent, collective act of defiance of military authority.

Another five years passed before Guatemala’s civil war finally ended. By then, Guatemala’s civil war had been bloodier than all the other wars in Central America combined. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. Leftist guerrillas committed some abuses, but the U.N. Truth Commission found the Guatemalan military responsible for 93 percent of the nation’s wartime abuses.

Gun control had nothing to do with it. Instead it was the state’s concentration of power by the military as an institutional that facilitated the abuses. Even as the massacres were still being carried out, military authorities began organizing civilians in villages whom they deemed as being less tainted by rebel ideology into military-controlled “strategic hamlets” or population centers. In other villages, where surviving residents were not forcibly relocated, the Army organized the males into the civil defense patrols and armed them with M1 carbine rifles.

Unlike the claims of Second Amendment scholars and activists, the same phenomenon of military power being the primary factor leading to genocide or similar acts is characteristic of state violence committed by other governments in previous eras.

“The history of gun control in Germany from the post-World War I period to the inception of World War II seems to be a history of declining, rather than increasing, gun control,” wrote Bernard E. Harcourt in the Fordham Law Review in 2004. Debunking the arguments made explicitly by NRA activists and Second Amendment scholars point by point, Harcourt concludes their claims “are not about history, nor are they about truth. These are cultural arguments.”

Other scholars looking at the Holocaust and other genocidal acts seem to agree.

“Perhaps the greatest source of power in an oppressive society in times of war is the military establishment that is identified with the authorities in charge,” wrote scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian in “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in the 2008 edited volume, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide.

Now in Guatemala prosecutors are alleging that General Montt presided over military counterinsurgency efforts that targeted not armed leftist guerrillas trying to overthrow the government, but explicitly unarmed civilians suspected of supporting or even being sympathetic to the rebel cause.

“A woman was found hiding in a ditch and realizing her presence, the point man fired, killing her and two ‘chocolates,’” according to one platoon report from mid-1982 called “Operation Sofia” and obtained by the National Security Archive of George Washington University. The “chocolates” referred to two children she was protecting.

One former Army sergeant operating in the Quiché region, where many abuses were concentrated, told me during the war how his commanders justified such brutality. “The innocent pay for the sins of the guilty,” he explained, saying the innocents referred to unarmed civilians and the guilty referred to the armed guerrillas.

When the military confronted unarmed civilians, there was “a clear indifference to their status as a non-combatant civilian population,”later concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. The level of carnage in Guatemala was extreme even when compared to other bloodied nations in the region like El Salvador.

“In the majority of massacres there is evidence of multiple acts of savagery, which preceded, accompanied or occurred after the deaths of victims,” concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. “Acts such as the killing of defenseless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.”

BUT WHEN it comes to one thing, Second Amendments scholars are closer to human rights advocates than to many American conservatives about Guatemala. Back in late 1982, President Ronald Reagan, whom many conservative Republicans still revere, met General Montt and afterward told reporters that he thought the Guatemalan dictator was getting “a bum rap” over his alleged human rights abuses.

Today’s gun lobby scholars disagree. They and other gun rights absolutists fault President Reagan for supporting gun control measures including the Brady Bill mandating background checks after his press secretary, Jim Brady, was shot and Reagan was wounded, and for later speaking out against non-sporting, high-powered weapons.

But some of the same leading Second Amendment scholars also reject Reagan’s apologies for Guatemala’s human rights record under General Rios Montt.

“Perhaps the most overlooked genocide of the twentieth century has been the Guatemalan government’s campaign against its Indian population,” wrote Kopel in 1995. One reason “may be that the Guatemalan government has been friendly to the United States.”

He’s right about that.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and MSNBC Contributor. He has been covering the gun lobby since the mid-1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. He’s been covering Guatemala since the late-1980s, writing for outlets including The Progressive, The Wall Street Journal and The Texas Observer. Smyth is the author of the 1994 Human Rights Watch report released on the eve of genocide, Arming Rwanda, and of the 2010 study, “Painting the Maya Red: Military Doctrine and Speech in Guatemala’s Genocidal Acts”, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His clips are posted atwww.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank .