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

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The original article is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”