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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

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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.

Why Can’t We Do Anything About Guns?

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Posted: June 21, 2016

Read the original article here: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/06/188793/why-can{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99t-we-do-anything-about-guns

Once again, in the wake of a horrific mass shooting, Congress has failed to pass even any token gun reform legislation. This time, legislative inaction took a little more than eight days.

Why can’t we do anything about massacres with semi-automatic, high-capacity guns that have helped make ours the most violent advanced nation on earth? Because we have allowed a minority of extremists to control the gun debate.

The only thing stopping real gun reform in the United States is a paranoid fear that has long been quietly peddled by the gun lobby. Any system of regulation, they maintain, would create lists of gun owners that some future, tyrannical regime would use to seize Americans’ guns and impose a totalitarian state.

That might sound like hyperbole (and it is), but propaganda about a federal government registry or list of gun owners is the chief obstacle to meaningful gun reform in the United States.

For decades, proponents of gun reform have avoided the gun lobby’s central argument. Cowed by the NRA, they have chosen to try to make incremental reforms in the vain hope that they might some day build enough momentum to make a difference. That’s what happened when Democratic Senators led a filibuster last week after the Orlando gay nightclub shooting, and proposed reforms including a “no-buy” list for suspected terrorists, and a new “assault weapons” ban.

A “no buy” list would be a step in the right direction, but it would still only stop terrorist suspects who have already been clearly flagged as dangerous. An “assault weapons” ban, if it looks anything like the 1994 ban, would outlaw guns based more on their cosmetic features than their mechanical functions, or proscribe some guns while allowing for other, equally lethal weapons.

Similarly, expanded background checks, a reform proposed after the Sandy Hook school shooting that failed to pass Congress, would deter some gun buyers. But even so-called “universal” background checks, if they were finally enacted, would only marginally help reduce gun violence. In the bills proposed after recent mass shootings,  “universal” background checks have been riddled with loopholes for gun shows and private sales.

Over and over, members of Congress have allowed the NRA to deflect, distort and ultimately define the terms of the gun debate. Aging rocker, bona fide Vietnam-era draft dodger, and NRA board member Ted Nugent may be a raging, racist buffoon, but NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre is a master at public communication. He has long quietly struck an ideological chord with NRA loyalists, while making far more pragmatic sounding arguments in public.

NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia declined to comment for this story.

But NRA spokespeople follow a script, as anyone watching cable news since the Orlando gay nightclub shooting must have noticed. This is how it goes:

  • Before trying to pass any new laws, government must first “enforce the laws already on the books.” (Don’t mention that NRA lobbying has ensured that agencies tasked with enforcing gun laws don’t have the resources to do it. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or ATF, prevented by law from using an electronic database to track gun sales, specifically because of NRA pressure. The Centers for Disease Control are barred from conducting research on gun violence.)
  • Proposed reforms would not have prevented shooters in recent tragedies from obtaining guns, as LaPierre said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” (The NRA, by the way, is largely right on this point, as I explain above.)
  • Bog the discussion down with mechanical minutiae about guns like whether an AR-15 riflewas used in Orlando. Disdainfully point out, for instance, that the Sig Sauer MCX rifle used inside the nightclub operates with a different firing system—gas piston instead of direct impingement- than the traditional AR-15, which the NRA has dubbed “America’s rifle.” Even though the manufacturer markets the MCX as a “next generation” improvement on the AR-15.

Most importantly, wrap yourself in the Second Amendment, saying undermining it is no way to respond to gun tragedies, like Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan did last week after Orlando. Without ever explaining how exactly the Second Amendment allegedly protects an unlimited right to guns, as the NRA claims; it doesn’t, and no court has ever ruled it does.

Finally, start over and repeat the same points ad infinitum, to prevent gun dialogue from advancing any further. The result? After each gun tragedy from Sandy Hook to San Bernardino, from Aurora to Orlando, from Columbine to Charleston, from Virginia Tech to Tucson, we end up talking more about why specific reform measures won’t work than about what actually will. Rarely, if ever, do we begin the conversation with a simple premise, Why can’t we make a difference?

This is the kind of broad question that makes NRA lobbyists nervous, as the answer has the potential to unmask the fallacy of their own core claim: Americans must have unregulated access to unlimited quantities of high-powered firearms to defend our freedom and, if necessary, fight a war or wage an insurrection against the state.

That claim might sound like a B movie pitch (as in the 1984 classic “Red Dawn” starring the late Patrick Swayze and directed by former NRA board director John Milius). But it is the steady drumbeat played by right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and Internet outlets including  Glen Beck’s DailyCaller.com and Alex Jones’ InfoWars.com. More than a few Twitter streams are similarly flooded with terms like #Molon Labe, a classic Greek phrase for “come and take” them [guns], often juxtaposed to #NRA.

Such views have helped spawn terrorism before. In 1995, on the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children. McVeigh later said he was acting in revenge for Waco’s federal raid over illegal guns, and in opposition to the “assault weapons” ban that had just passed Congress.

The gun lobby has publicly distanced itself from people like McVeigh, but its leaders clearly support the notion of armed insurrection against the state.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” LaPierre said in 2012 before a United Nations international arms control panel. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea.”

“History proves it,” he went on. “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.”

History proves no such thing, even though Ben Carson made this explicit claim in the case of Nazi Germany both in his book and when he ran for the Republican nomination for president earlier this year. Historians like professor of history and Holocaust studies Alan E. Steinweis at the University of Vermont have debunked this view, and no serious scholar has ever made a credible case for it.

Nor have U.S. courts ever even heard, let alone upheld such a view. The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment as ensuring not just the right of state militias to be armed, but also the right of individuals to keep a gun in the home for self-defense. But instead of upholding the gun lobby’s expansive claim of individual gun rights, the Court in an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that that the Second Amendment is “not unlimited” and that laws may be passed on “conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

While quietly telling its base that the NRA defends its alleged right of unlimited access to guns, NRA leaders have been far more circumspect in public when asked to address the matter. In 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre, Sen. Dick Durbin asked LaPierre point blank about the purpose behind the Second Amendment, saying his own constituents in Illinois who are NRA members have told 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.”

Wasn’t that the perfect chance for LaPierre to say clearly for all to hear how much the NRA cherishes the Second Amendment for its defense of freedom? But instead the NRA executive director, just seven months after his campy U.N. speech, spoke in a more subdued tone on national television:

“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,” answered LaPierre.

The polished NRA communicator then deftly changed the subject.

In today’s world, LaPierre 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.”

There is an important distinction between these two types of scenarios. You might be willing to wait for a background check before obtaining a gun to protect your family. But if you are worried about the federal government, you might be concerned that any serious regulation of firearms would generate lists of gun owners could be used by “jack-booted government thugs,” as LaPierre himself put in a 1995 fundraising letter for which he later apologized, to seize Americans’ weapons and impose a rogue state.

The NRA is serious about that idea. In 2013, after Sandy Hook, the universal background checks bill that came closest to passing Congress included language as a concession to the NRA that would have imposed extra penalties of up to 15 years in prison for any official who helps create a federal gun registry.

If change is ever to come, it will mean finally calling out the NRA for a dangerous radicalism that is wholly out of step with the opinions of both U.S. courts and the public.

One of the NRA’s own slogans in this regard could help, but gun reformists must first turn it on its head. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” Remember that? Right. So, following the lead of the “no-buy” list, we need to focus less on guns, and more on gun buyers.

Let’s make the purchase of any highly lethal weapon as involved a process as buying a car. We should ensure that every new gun buyer has the training and the insurance to properly store and handle his or her firearms safely.

Many gun owners would support such steps, just as they already support universal background checks. Such measures are also nearly the minimum standard in every other advanced nation.

In the United States, many gun buyers first see new products in the glossy, color pages of NRA magazines like American Rifleman produced only for NRA members. The fear that the government might one day come for your guns drives record gun sales, especially of expensive, high-powered weapons like AR-15 or next generation rifles used in Orlando, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Aurora and other shootings. And these sales tend to spike after every well-publicized mass shooting.

Many of the same firms that make these weapons also donate a percentage of sales or in other ways contribute to the NRA. That might help explain why both the gun lobby and its allied manufacturers continue to promote inaction, as America endures at least five times more gun violence than any other advanced nation, with a mass shooting that leaves at least four people dead or wounded occurring on average more than once a day.

The gun lobby’s professed fear of government further explains why it claims citizens must maintain access to weapons so powerful that The New York Times editorial page last week said “[n]o civilian anywhere should be allowed to have” them. Because if civilians are really going to defend America’s freedom by standing up to a potentially abusive government, they will need all the firepower they can find. That means not only AR-15-style rifles, but weapons like a .50 caliber sniper rifle along with silencers that can fit almost any kind of gun.

American gun violence is dominated by white males committing suicide, followed by young minorities dying on the streets, and at least 30 people dying every day. For the gun lobby, this is the price of freedom. For the rest of us, it is beyond obscene.

Mustering the courage to enact real reform is not going to be easy, and the struggle is certain to outlast the current electoral cycle. But if we are ever going to curb America’s pandemic of gun tragedies, we first need to face the extremist minority that enables them.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and gun owner who won the Society of Professional Journalists National Magazine Investigative Reporting Award for his Mother Jones exposé,“Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook shooting. He has also written about the gun lobby in The Village Voice and The Washington Post, and writes often about the NRA in The Progressive.

Gun Control and Genocide

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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 .