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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.

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.

The unsung war heroes of the National Rifle Association

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The original article is here.

The National Rifle Association of America has a long, exquisite history of service to the nation. Many of its leaders from past generations were war heroes. But their legacies, largely for political reasons, are barely known today.

The NRA was founded in 1871 by veteran Union officers in New York City six years after the Civil War. They knew that both better rifles and marksmanship had tipped the balance in favor of recent European wars. Their aim was to improve riflery at home in anticipation of future wars.

NRA co-founder William Conant Church had been a journalist, once slightly wounded during the Civil War Battle of Williamsburg in Virginia. He later became an Army brevet lieutenant colonel. The other NRA co-founder, George Wood Wingate, who retired as a general in the New York National Guard, was promoted to sergeant during fighting in Carlisle, Pa., during the nearby Battle of Gettysburg.

Wingate later wrote the Manual of Rifle Practice, and his training regimen was adopted by most branches of military service and state national guards. Church published his rifle manual in his Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, the first of its kind later renamed Armed Forces Journal. In its pages, Church also became the first to advocate that the military remove two racial epithets — one that disparages blacks and one that disparages Italians — from its vocabulary, doing so a half century before the military finally integrated its forces.

James A. Drain led the NRA after the turn of the 20th century. By then he had lost his right hand in a hunting accident. But he still later served in World War I as a lieutenant colonel leading an ordnance corps in France. He later helped design and deploy the tanks credited with having helped defeat the Central Powers, earning him the Army Distinguished Service Medal.

Milton A. Reckord was, until recently, the longest serving chief executive of the NRA. Reckord served in the Mexican Expedition. During World War I, he led troops in the Battle of Meuse-Argonne in the final Allied offensive, for which France bestowed upon him the Croix de Guerre with Palm and his own nation awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal. In World War II, he first trained recruits and then became the Provost Marshal for Europe in charge of enemy prisoners of war, earning the Distinguished Service Medal with a bronze oak leaf cluster, and the Bronze Star.

The NRA has honored other war heroes among the NRA’s past leadership like the late World War II Marine fighter pilot Joe Foss. A longtime NRA board director and former commissioner of the American Football League, Foss received the Medal of Honor for his aerial combat role in the Battle of Guadalcanal. But Foss, unlike many other war heroes, joined the NRA board after the organization’s “shift” to prioritize gun rights, as one former NRA president put it, in 1977 in what is still known in the lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.”

Three years before, in 1974, Reckord, at 94, was interviewed by NRA officials in his home for an NRA oral history. In it, he described how a law that he and the NRA supported during the Tommy Gun days of Prohibition that outlawed automatic firearms (still on the books) was “sane, reasonable and effective.” The NRA oral history was never published.

Merritt A. Edson led the NRA through the late 1950s. He became known as “Red Mike” back when he was commanding a Marine expeditionary detachment in the late 1920s in Nicaragua, where he earned the Navy Cross. He later earned the Medal of Honor for leading the defense of “Edson’s Ridge,” overlooking an airfield, in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Edson’s other honors included two Legion of Merit decorations, a Presidential Unit Citation with two bronze stars, and, from the United Kingdom, the Distinguished Service Order.

Franklin L. Orth led the NRA through the 1960s. He entered World War II as a captain in the infantry who “served on extra-hazardous duty in long-range penetrations behind the Japanese lines in Burma.” Orth later served in the Eisenhower administration as deputy assistant secretary of the Army, and as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Orth’s legacy, however, is also largely forgotten. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” said Orth in 1967, one year before the NRA supported the Gun Control Act of 1968. “We recognize that the dynamism and complexities of modern society create new problems which demand new solutions.” It was this federal gun law that radicalized the NRA along with others who formed the nation’s gun rights movement in the 1970s.

Since then, the NRA’s new leaders have focused more on the future than the past. Politics is never a good reason, however, to keep the legacies of any war heroes in the dark.

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

The Early NRA Had Nothing to Do with the KKK: Neo-Nazis and others only got closer later.

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The protesters who recently carried semi-automatic rifles into capitol buildings in different states were hardly the first to do so. Back in May 1967, a group of Black Panthers led by Bobby Seale in Sacramento carried firearms into the California state house. Within less than three months, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the open carry of weapons in the state.

This swift change in California law showed the role of race in gun politics, and the National Rifle Association (NRA), back then, quietly supported its passage. But the era was also a time—long since forgotten—when the NRA favored gun control. A year later, the NRA supported a federal law banning mail-order guns like the one tied to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, among other measures. The law ended up both radicalizing the NRA and giving rise to the gun rights movement that is active today.

The role that race has played in the NRA is actually different from what many people may think. There was no evidence of any ties between the NRA, founded in 1871, and any white power groups for more than a hundred years, and it has only been in recent decades that such groups have moved closer to the NRA, despite its leaders’ efforts to keep their distance.

The NRA began hiring minorities in the mid-1970s, when a black attorney, Peter S. Ridley, who had earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam, joined its lobbying wing. The Washington College of Law at American University still has an award for African-American students demonstrating leadership qualities in his name.

A few figures have peddled misleading myths. Michael Moore in his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, insinuated that the NRA and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) might be linked since they both were founded after the Civil War, six years apart. But nothing could be further from the truth. The NRA was founded by veteran Union officers, who rarely ventured much further south than their shooting range on Long Island. They supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to crush the KKK during Reconstruction.

The NRA itself recently peddled the opposite myth. Last year, Allen West, an NRA board member, Army veteran, and former Florida congressman, told NRA members in Indianapolis, “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights.” This claim, however, is equally unfounded, as the writings from the period—including one by NRA co-founder William Conant Church—undeniably show.

A former war correspondent, editor, publisher, and writer, Church was also aware of, and sympathetic to, the plight of freed slaves. “The negroes had ceased to be slaves, but they had not yet become free men, and there was no [guarantee] that they might not be subjected to some new form of oppression,” he wrote in his 500-page tome on Grant’s policies in the South. “Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold anyone responsible for their murder.”

A product of his age, Church resorted to a racial stereotype for freed slaves by singularizing them as “Sambo” in one piece about their electoral potential. But he still stands out as the earliest figure on record to advocate that the military remove the racial epithets of “nigger” and “dago” from its vocabulary, more than fifty years before it finally integrated troops.

By 1957, however, shortly after the start of the civil rights era, there was a case involving the NRA and the KKK. A returning black veteran named Robert F. Williams organized a group in Monroe, North Carolina, that received a local charter from the NRA. It eventually was attacked by the local KKK in a firefight that made press as far north as Norfolk, Virginia. But the NRA, not far away in Washington, D.C., neither did nor said anything to help its first black chapter.

Another black armed group, Deacons for Defense and Justice, was formed in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The NRA sold to this group, as it did with others, surplus military ammunition available to the NRA through a government program. The same year, white power groups like Minutemen and Rangers appeared in a number of states. Nationally syndicated columnist Inez Robb, a former war correspondent, called these groups “private armies of the extreme right.”

Fearing they could possibly spoil their own image, the entire leadership of the NRA in 1964 said the “NRA vehemently disavows” any link to any “private armies or group violence,” making a statement that sounds nothing like what NRA leaders say today.

In 1977, the NRA finally embraced gun rights as its “unyielding” aim, shifting the life arc of the association. Following the lead, in fact, of two other groups, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Gun Owners of America, which were formed in opposition to the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 that had been backed by the NRA. It was only after all three of these groups embraced gun rights that white power paramilitaries gravitated to their coalition.

NRA leaders have tried to keep their distance from violent extremists. In 1992, a botched, fatal federal raid on a family of white separatists over two illegal, sawed-off shotguns in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, galvanized white power paramilitaries along with other gun rights activists. The NRA’s American Rifleman magazine waited a year, however, before even mentioning the raid, and the organization’s CEO Wayne LaPierre waited even longer, knowing the group would lose political clout if it was perceived as being allied with extremists.

In 1995, one month after the Oklahoma City bombing, members of the National Alliance, the nation’s then-largest neo-Nazi organization, whose literature inspired the bomber, quietly passed out trifold fliers on the floor of the NRA convention in Phoenix. “There is hardly a more significant difference than that which exists between the people who want gun control and those who don’t,” read the pamphlet, concluding, “The day for a great cleansing of this land will come.”

NRA leaders did not dispute that Nazis were in the room. “People have passed out literature, they could pass out literature for the communists. It doesn’t mean we support communism,” NRA chief lobbyist Tanya Metaksa told me for an article in The Village Voice.

At the same meeting, LaPierre addressed anyone on the floor “who supports—or even fantasizes about—terrorism [or] insurrection,” saying there is “a difference between 3.5 million united NRA members, and some scattered band of paranoid hatemongers,” telling them, “if someone in this room doesn’t know the difference, then there’s the door!”

White supremacist paramilitaries reappeared during President Donald Trump’s first year in office in Charlottesville, Virginia, mounting a larger presence than seen for decades. The year before, NRA board member Ted Nugent had posted a meme on Facebook accusing prominent Jewish leaders of being Nazis for supporting gun control, which the Anti-Defamation League called anti-Semitic.

In 2018, after the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, LaPierre addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference, singling out Jewish philanthropists for backing gun control. Two writers at the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz called his remarks anti-Semitic as well.

The NRA of today, unlike the organization of more than fifty years ago, has not denounced any armed groups among the recent protestors, despite the presence of Confederate flags and even a few Nazi symbols. Much like the President and his advisors, NRA leaders know these extremists comprise a loyal part of their coalition.

Frank Smyth is the author of the new book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).

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

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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

The Times Has Finally (Quietly) Outed an NRA-Funded “Independent” Scholar

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This article originally appeared in The Progressive on April 23, 2014 here.

The Progressive, April 23, 2014

by Frank Smyth

Last Friday The New York Times finally addressed a conflict of interest that it had been ignoring for years. Although, among the powerful institutions that have long done so, the Times is hardly alone. The matter helps illustrate how the gun lobby has managed to shape the nation’s gun debate without showing its hand. The news comes to light one day before the start of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Indianapolis.

David Kopel is the Research Director and Second Amendment Project Director of the Colorado-based nonprofit Independence Institute, which describes itself as a “free-market think tank.” He is an Associate Policy Analyst at the Washington-based Cato Institute, and an adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at Denver University. Kopel is also the author of 15 books and 90 scholarly articles many having to do with the Second Amendment and gun policies.

Kopel is widely known as one of the nation’s leading legal scholars on gun issues, writing from a pro-gun rights perspective. He testified in the Senate last year as an apparent independent expert in the nationally televised hearings held in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. For even longer, he has regularly written opinion pieces for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal while being similarly identified as an independent scholar.

David Kopel has managed to establish himself as an independent authority on gun policy issues even though he and his Independence Institute have received over $1.42 million including about $175,000 a year over eight years from the NRA.

NRA officials at the nonprofit group’s Virginia headquarters declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.

Kopel, for his part, has rarely disclosed his NRA funding. But when presented with evidence of it, he has not denied it, either.

“If that’s her editorial judgement, that’s fine with me,” he said in a brief telephone interview on Friday from his Colorado office at the “Independence Institute” about a New York Times editor’s decision to disclose his NRA funding in an opinion piece under his byline posted the day before. “I’m not going to second-guess an editor.”

For years, Kopel’s defense of the gun lobby has been unmistakable. “Today, with 4 million members, the N.R.A. is one of the largest civic organizations in the U.S., and by far the largest civil liberties organization on the planet,” he wrote in the Times “Room for Debate” section last year less than one month after the Newtown Sandy Hook shooting.

Kopel also often suggests, much like NRA leaders, that there is little possible compromise in the gun policy debate. “The only item on the agenda of today’s antigun advocates that realistically could have prevented a psychopath from stealing his mother’s legally registered guns would be banning and confiscating the more than 300 million firearms in the United States,” he added in his Times’ piece last year right after a disturbed young man in Newtown used his mother’s guns to murder first his mother and then 26 others including 20 first-grade children.

Last week, in the same Times forum, Kopel painted former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently pledged to devote $50 million to promote gun reform efforts, as an extremist. “[A]ccording to my analysis, the Bloomberg version of background checks felonizes the vast majority of American gun owners.” A link embedded into the words “my analysis” refers to an article last spring under his byline in the National Review that similarly fails to disclose Kopel’s NRA funding.

His arguments often set up straw men that he then knocks down. How many gun control advocates or groups, for instance, have ever suggested that Mexico’s failed gun policies could somehow be a model for us? Yet Kopel recently wrote online in The Washington Post, one of two major newspapers to run his gun policy opinions last week, a piece titled “Mexico’s gun control laws: A model for the United States?”

News broadcasters and a leading journalism institute have also treated Kopel as an independent expert. Both PBS and NPR have brought him into gun policy debates as an apparent independent voice. The nonprofit Poynter Institute has asked Kopel to help lead seminars for journalists on gun policy issues including last spring during the Congressional gun debate. (This coming Friday Kopel will help lead a Firearms Law Seminar at the NRA convention in Indianapolis.)

Newspapers like The Christian Science Monitor have cited Kopel as an independent expert in news reports. Although two newspaper reporters, Ed O’Keefe and Tom Hamburger, in the news section of the Washington Post did identify Kopel’s NRA funding at least once last spring, after I broke news of it on MSNBC.com, and after the NRA itself began distributing one of Kopel’s opinion pieces during the Congressional debate over gun control legislation.

LAST FRIDAY at 3:53 PM in New York editors at The New York Times “Room for Debate” online section changed Kopel’s author ID on his opinion piece almost 22 hours after it had been originally posted. The change informed readers that Kopel “has received grant money from the National Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund.” Kopel had been previously identified in this piece, like in his previous Times “Room for Debate” pieces, as an independent researcher, author and legal scholar.

Kopel received $1.39 million in grant money from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund between 2004 and 2011, according the Fox News affiliate television station in Denver, Fox31, in a May 2013 report by Eli Stokols. The report was about a lawsuit filed by Kopel and his Independence Institute on behalf of 55 of Colorado’s 62 elected sheriffs challenging Colorado gun control laws passed last year.

The same day that Kopel led a press conference with Colorado sheriffs to announce the law suit, Colorado resident Tom Mauser called the Independence Institute to ask the think-tank whether it has received money from the NRA. Mauser has been a well-known Colorado gun control advocate for years, ever since his 15-year-old son, Daniel, was one of 12 students murdered along with one teacher in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.

“I asked them if they got money from the NRA, and they wouldn’t tell me,” Mauser told Fox31 Denver. “They said, ‘look it up for yourself.’”

In February 2013, less than one month after Kopel testified in the Senate, I reported in MSNBC.com that two of the Senate’s recent witnesses, Kopel and David T. Hardy, another legal expert who similarly testified at the nationally televised Senate hearing as an independent witness, had received over $108,000 and $67,500, respectively, from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund in 2011.

At the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont read Kopel’s biography including his affiliations with the Independence Institute, the Cato Institute and Denver University Strum College of Law. Chairman Leahy jokingly added, “Did I get that all correct?”, before giving Kopel the floor. No one, not any Senators, Kopel or the press made any mention of his NRA funding.

Kopel later conceded to me that he has received NRA funds, but maintained that he was not obligated to disclose them.

“I’ve never heard of [a] think tank or interest group employees naming donors during legislative testimony,” Kopel wrote to me in an email last year.

Kopel’s role at the Independence Institute is larger than it appears. Dozens of staff members and experts including the institute’s President Jon Caldara are listed on the institute’s website. But the highest paid employee is not the organization’s president but Kopel who earned $187,666 including bonuses, a total of $67,000 more than Caldara in 2011, according to the group’s latest financial records available.

The same year, Kopel received not only one $108,000 grant from the gun lobby, but part of another grant from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, this one for a $55,000 grant to him and two other Independence Institute scholars.  The NRA fund has continued supporting the Independence Institute, giving the group $317,500 in 2012, according to the NRA fund’s latest records on file.

Kopel has bona fide Ivy League credentials. He graduated with honors from Brown University and earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. He has written for scholarly journals at Yale, New York University, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania.

Kopel is a regular contributor, too, to “The Volokh Conspiracy,” an influential and self-described “libertarian, conservative, centrist” legal blog that since January has been hosted by The Washington Post. Kopel wrote another piece there on Monday arguing that both the First and Second Amendments “safeguard natural, pre-existing human rights.”

At the same time, Kopel’s gun lobby funding is now no longer in doubt. The question is how should those who give him a platform to air his gun rights views like Congress and the Times identify him to the public?

“The more readers know about the background of an opinion writer, the better they are served. And that applies here,” The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan told me last year in an email after I first broke news of Kopel’s NRA funding.

Last Friday, I forwarded her email to editors at the Times “Room for Debate” section, after they ran another one of Kopel’s pieces without disclosing his NRA funding. Editors made the change to identify Kopel’s receipt of NRA grant money little over an hour later, after first calling Kopel to confirm his receipt of NRA funds.

Kopel’s piece last Friday in the Times was part of an online series by six different authors about the nation’s gun policies pegged to both Bloomberg’s funding announcement and this weekend’s NRA convention. The series was titled, “Toe to Toe with the NRA.”

Frank Smyth is an independent, award-winning investigative reporter who has covered the gun lobby for The Progressive and MSNBC. His Mother Jones story last year, “Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” won the Society of Professional Journalists Delta Sigma Chi award for National Magazine Investigative Reporting. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com. Follow him on Twitter @SmythFrank.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/04/187663/times-has-finally-quietly-outed-nra-funded-{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}9Cindependent{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}9D-scholar#sthash.OYfZhMvM.dpuf

One Year After Sandy Hook, Shooting is Still a Family Sport

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What was the mother of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter thinking over a year ago?

Trying to find a way to somehow help her clearly troubled youngest son.

Gun culture is often associated with red states in the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountains. But gun ownership is a time-honored tradition in many blue states, too, like among the bedroom communities within commuting distance of New York City in Southwestern Connecticut.

The late Nancy Lanza in Newtown grew up with firearms and had a pistol permit. She returned to shooting with more intensity, according to one family friend, after her 2009 divorce. She wanted to bond with her youngest son, Adam, especially, who five years before, at 13, had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and who, instead of getting better, had been showing signs of social dysfunction and anxiety.

“Shooting was a pastime in which the family engaged,” reads theConnecticut State’s Attorney report of the Sandy Hook massacre released last month. “Both the mother and the shooter took National Rifle Association (NRA) safety courses. The mother thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns. Both would shoot pistols and rifles at a local range and the shooter was described as quiet and polite.”

David B. Lyman is the owner of the Blue Trail Range, “New England’s finest shooting range,” according to the range’s website, “where shooting is a family sport.” Lyman is also an NRA-certified instructor and former national sports shooting champion. He does not seem to have spoken with reporters much since the New York Post last year in the early days after the shooting named the Blue Trail Range as the Lanza family’s preferred gun range.

Did Nancy Lanza go shooting there with one or both of her sons?

“He will not be calling. I can guarantee it,” said a woman about her boss David Lyman after she answered the phone at the Blue Trail Range in Wallingford, about 40 miles from Newtown. An email from bluetrailrange.com later directed queries to Lyman’s lawyer, Craig Fishbein.

“There is nothing that has ever been confirmed,” said Fishbein about whether the Nancy and Adam Lanza went shooting at the Blue Trail Range. “There’s a sign-in process. There’s never been anything showing that.”

David Lyman’s wife, Debbie, runs the “Junior” or child shooting division of the Connecticut State Rifle & Revolver Associationbased in New Haven. One category among Junior competitors is the Smallbore or .22 caliber rifle. One popular rifle among Juniors is the Mark II made by the Massachusetts-based Savage Arms, which describes it as being “light enough to be a child’s first rifle.”

Nancy Lanza owned a Savage Mark II, which was later found near her bed. In the years before she died, she may or may not have encouraged her youngest son, Adam, to use it. All we know now for sure is that he did not partake in shooting competitions. Instead Adam, who was 20 a year ago when he perpetrated the massacre, preferred isolation, computers and video games. One friend told The Wall Street Journal last year that Nancy brought Adam to the range to not only bond with him, but to try and teach him responsibility.

This past spring, as the Sandy Hook heartbreak continued to resonate in Washington and around the nation, the Connecticut State Rifle & Revolver Association held its annual All-State Awards Dinner in Wallingford to honor Junior shooters. Junior Director Debbie Lyman presided over the ceremony, where dozens of boys and girls, some of whom were already bound for college, were honored for having successfully shot in Junior matches.

Did the Sandy Hook shooting ever come up?

“I’m not going to make any comment on the Sandy Hook issue,” Debbie Lyman said this week by telephone from her office at a university-affiliated medical office.

The Guest Speaker for the Junior awards dinner was NRA board member Patricia Clark, who works as a hospital laboratory technician. Earlier this year, I identified her in Mother Jones and The Progressive as the former Chairman of the NRA’s shadowy Nominating Committee, which hand-picks candidates to control elections to the NRA board.

Clark remains an NRA board member and member of the board’s executive committee. She also happens to live little more than a few miles from the site of America’s worst gun tragedy, the now torn-down Sandy Hook Elementary School.

NRA Director Clark declined to return both voice and email requests for comment.

Clark is a nationally recognized Smallbore rifle competitor. Both David and Debbie Lyman are NRA Double Distinguished Expert shooters with the Smallbore rifle, according to an Ohio State website and biography of their son, Remington Lyman. A member of the Ohio State Rifle Team, Remington, who shares the namesake of America’s oldest arms manufacturer, shoots air and Smallbore rifles for the Buckeyes at National Collegiate Athletic Association Rifle competitions.

Surrounded by so many families who have, by any measure, successfully bonded with their children while shooting guns, Nancy Lanza perhaps thought that giving her mentally ill son Adam guns including a Smallbore rifle might somehow help draw him out of his shell. Instead he turned the .22 caliber rifle on her.

“Prior to going to the school, the shooter used a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle to shoot and kill his mother in her bed at the home where they lived,” according to the Connecticut State’s Attorney report.

Adam brought two handguns — a Glock 20, a10 mm semi-automatic pistol and a Sig Sauer P226 9 mm semi-automatic pistol — along with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle with him into the Sandy Hook school. He used the Bushmaster to quickly discharge over three hundred rounds, causing the fatal, unspeakable carnage that left 20 first-grade children and six of their teachers dead on the ground.

By then Adam had already left the Savage Mark II behind, back in his mother’s bedroom, after taking the time to use the bolt-action Smallbore rifle to shoot Nancy Lanza four times in the head.

The Connecticut State’s Attorney report concluded that the motive for Adam’s behavior may never be known. But his mother’s actions suggest a different story. No doubt she never should have introduced her youngest son to guns. But her motive for bringing him to a shooting range seems to make more sense once one glimpses the successful families of sports shooters within her community.

One reason gun reform has failed since even the Sandy Hook tragedy may be that advocates have failed to grasp the depth of gun culture in not only red states but also blue ones. Another could be that gun reform advocates have yet to find a way to talk to gun owners without the gun lobby led by the NRA twisting the discussion.
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Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the National Rifle Association for The Village Voice, The Texas Observer, Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC, where, over the past year, he has been a frequent on-air contributor. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank.

Photo: Flickr user Gordon Tarpley, creative commons licensed.

Click here to read the original story in The Progressive: http://progressive.org/one-year-after-sandy-hook-shooting-still-a-family-sport