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The NRA’s 40-year problem: It chose its leadership and gun-rights zealotry over integrity and a simpler mission

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The original article is here.

The financial improprieties alleged by New York’s attorney general in her lawsuit against the National Rifle Association remind me of a scandal nearly a century ago. NRA leaders back then, however, handled it differently from the way leaders do today.

Back in 1925, the NRA secretary, who had accumulated unchecked power, was dismissed over evidence of embezzlement. The NRA reorganized its board and created the office of the executive vice president, choosing the title out of respect for the traditions of the Reconstruction-era-founded association.

In other words, the group cleaned its own house and implemented controls so no one could easily either accumulate power or divert funds again.

The first EVP was a highly decorated Maryland national guardsman named Milton A. Reckord. Reckord served in the Mexican Expedition against Pancho Villa and in World War I. The Military Police commander for Europe in World War II, he was responsible for all prisoners of war.

In 1974, Brig. Gen. Reckord, at 94, was interviewed by NRA officials in his home for an NRA oral history. In it, he described how a 1934 law supported by him and the NRA and inspired by the Tommy Gun days of Prohibition that outlawed automatic firearms (still on the books) was “sane, reasonable and effective.”

But the NRA oral history was never published, and his legacy, too, seems forgotten.

The NRA didn’t used to take sides then like it does today. “Take an active interest in politics, Mr. Shooter,” read an editorial in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine before the 1936 elections. “But keep your political interest and activity on a high plane of honest, frank discussion; and remember that there is neither rhyme nor reason in splitting open a good rifle club over a bum political argument.”

But splitting open a good rifle club is exactly what the men who later took over the NRA did. Today EVP Wayne LaPierre and other NRA leaders claim the NRA is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. But the NRA did not raise gun rights until 1922, in an editorial warning about the possible spread of a New York State gun law passed in 1911, and the outlawing of civilian ownership of guns in Russia after its 1917 Bolshevik-led Communist revolution. The NRA did not raise “the Second Article of the Bill of Rights” until 1952, and it did not describe itself as an organization defending “civil liberties” until 1968.

The split in the NRA resulted in an internal revolution rarely mentioned out loud anymore but still known within the lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.” That’s when, in 1977, the NRA under Harlon Carter transformed literally overnight from America’s largest firearms sporting organization into the nation’s largest gun-rights vanguard.

It was Carter who ended the policy of publishing the NRA’s annual financial reports in NRA member magazines, and who centralized control, hand-picking three men under him to run the organization; everyone, including magazine editors had to report up the new chain of command.

In 1981, the New York Times reported that Carter had changed a vowel in his first name, according to his birth certificate, to help conceal that, as a juvenile, he had been once convicted of murder and later had his conviction overturned on appeal. After the news broke, NRA members changed the by-laws to elect him to an unprecedented five-year term.

The leadership soon led another change of the by-laws to transfer power away from the membership and back to the board. NRA leaders themselves have since compared their own board to a Communist politburo.

LaPierre, who calls Carter a “great leader,” was made EVP in 1991, and he fended off one rebellion in the late 1990s. A bigger insurgency arose against him last year through leaked accusations of his alleged financial malfeasance by dissident board directors led by Oliver North.

But we’re missing the bigger picture if we think the NRA has suddenly gone off the rails. Its current troubles began more than 40 years ago.

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

Five myths about the National Rifle Association: No, the NRA did not start out as a civil rights organization.

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“Never is the Second Amendment more important than during public unrest,” a National Rifle Association video claimed in March. Rhetoric about owning, wielding and using guns has grown especially heated in recent weeks. In response to protests against police brutality, President Trump tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” echoing a Miami police chief from the 1960s — and an NRA article published after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. “You loot — we shoot,” wrote Marion Hammer, the organization’s first female president. Meanwhile, armed protests against state health measures, such as those that shut down the Michigan Legislature last month, seem rooted in an ideology promoted by the modern NRA: that only firearms in civilian hands can safeguard the nation from government overreach. Here are five myths about the group’s mission and history — some told by critics, others told by the NRA itself.

Myth No. 1

The early NRA was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.

Michael Moore, in his 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” insinuated that the NRA and the KKK were linked, because they were formed six years apart. The New Republic drew a similar connection in a 2013 article on the history of gun control. In a recent review of my book (which reported no ties between the organizations), the New York Times wrote that the NRA “came to the rescue of Southern members of the K.K.K.,” before issuing a correction.

Documents from the era, including an exhaustive tome by NRA co-founder William Conant Church, show that this isn’t true. The early NRA, founded at the peak of Reconstruction in 1871, never went much farther than its shooting range outside Manhattan, and played no role in the South during Reconstruction or for years thereafter. Church and other early NRA leaders, nearly all of whom were veteran Union officers, unequivocally supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan.

But, contrary to claims by NRA board director Allen West, who has said that the group “stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights,” the organization didn’t play a major role in opposing white supremacists, either. The NRA was so provincial at the time that, in 1877, Church had to remind the board that New York City and its environs “are only a part of the great rifle movement in America.”

Myth No. 2

The NRA originated as a champion of gun rights.

The group calls itself “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization,” a claim constantly repeated by its leaders and lawyers, and by media outlets including NPR.

But the NRA did not raise gun rights at all over the first half-century of its existence. It focused instead on improving marksmanship in anticipation of future wars. In 1922, an editorial in the NRA’s first official journal flagged gun rights as an area of concern for the first time, citing both a 1911 New York law and Russia’s recent outlawing of civilian ownership of guns. The Second Amendment came up only as the Cold War set in: The NRA first asserted what it called “the Second Article of the Bill of Rights,” along with the “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” in a 1952 American Rifleman editorial.

In 1977, the NRA finally embraced gun rights as its “unyielding” aim, in the words of its leader Harlon B. Carter. At that year’s national convention, Carter, a former Border Patrol chief, led the “Cincinnati Revolt,” an internal rebellion that transformed the NRA into the nation’s largest gun rights organization.

Myth No. 3

Armed Black Panthers led the NRA to support gun control.

“When Black Folks Armed Themselves The NRA And Republicans Suddenly Supported Gun Control,” read a headline on NewsOne. “Back in the 1960s, even the NRA supported gun control” when it came to disarming the Black Panthers, says the History Channel. Indeed, in 1967, mere months after a group of Black Panthers entered the California State Capitol with long guns and holstered sidearms, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the open carry of firearms. The NRA helped write that legislation and monitored its passage in American Rifleman without comment; race no doubt influenced the bill.

But this event was not a turning point for the NRA. By the 1960s, it had disavowed the “private armies” of white supremacists that arose during the civil rights era, and it broadly supported greater regulation of firearms, such as those tied to recent political assassinations. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” said its chief executive, Franklin L. Orth, three weeks before the Black Panthers protested at the California capitol. “We recognize that the dynamism and complexities of modern society create new problems which demand new solutions.” The following year, the NRA supported a federal law banning, among other things, mail-order guns, adding to a 1934 NRA-backed law sharply restricting “machine guns.”

Myth No. 4

The NRA is just an extension of the gun industry.

People often declare that the group is a mere “front for gun makers,” as one HuffPost article put it. It’s true that the NRA was born at the gun industry’s hip: All seven editions of the “Manual for Rifle Practice,” by co-founder George Wood Wingate, were packed with firearms ads. Today, large donations from gun manufacturers make up a substantial portion of the NRA’s revenue, as membership dues have declined.

But the NRA has still operated relatively autonomously over the past 149 years. In 1937, its leadership even labeled a new, powerful Magnum revolver by Smith & Wesson a “ ‘freak’ class of weapon” that should be restricted to police.

More important, the modern NRA is a political force in its own right, commanding outsize influence that can’t fully be explained by the deep pockets of the companies that fund it. Since 1977, when the group started to back the notion that civilians are entitled to nearly the same level of firepower as police, it has helped to roll back federal gun laws it once supported and to block almost all new federal regulations, while working to expand concealed-carry laws in most states.

Though money is important to its operations, “the real source of its power, I believe, comes from voters,” law professor Adam Winkler told the Guardian. In recent elections, especially primary contests, the NRA has mobilized voters at every level, attacking opponents and rewarding “pro-gun” candidates. That electoral following helped chief executive Wayne LaPierre persuade President Trump last summer to reverse himself on expanding background checks.

Myth No. 5

The NRA isn’t threatened by its current troubles.

The NRA is in turmoil. A 2019 tax investigation by the New York attorney general prompted a billing dispute between the group and the advertising firm Ackerman McQueen, its chief vendor and longtime communications partner. What ensued was a crossfire of charges of financial improprieties, pitching LaPierre against the group’s president, Oliver North, who eventually stepped down. Its top lobbyist was forced out. Several board members resigned. Still, members insist that the organization’s leadership remains strong. “It’s going to take a big revolt to get them out of power,” John Crump, an NRA member and firearms instructor, told the Chicago Tribune. The NRA has endured “these sorts of internal discussions, debates, and changes without losing a step,” board director J. Kenneth Blackwell said in the Washington Times.

The NRA also faces significant financial issues. Already in debt from the more than $30 million it spent on Trump and other candidates in 2016, its recent legal troubles have cost an additional $100 million, according to secret recordings obtained by NPR this year. “To survive,” LaPierre said, he took the group “down to the studs,” laying off dozens of people and cutting the pay of others. Meanwhile, the New York authorities continue to investigate whether the NRA illegally diverted funds from its tax-exempt foundation, threatening the organization’s nonprofit status. This combination of internal and external pressures presents LaPierre with the biggest crisis of his career — and the NRA as a whole with its worst crisis since the Cincinnati Revolt.