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

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

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

Sequester trumps Sandy Hook: Why gun-control measures may falter

Many Americans expected a real change in the nation’s gun laws after the killing of 20 first-graders in Newtown. But three months later, the outcome looks unclear. No fewer than four pieces of legislation have passed a Senate panel over the past two weeks to move to the Senate floor. “It’s a step forward,” Debra DeShong Reed, spokeswoman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told MSNBC.

At the same time, legislators in both the House and Senate have stuck provisions into spending bills that could undermine federal enforcement of both existing and proposed gun control efforts. “It’s gonna be a slog,” Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told MSNBC.

“The will is there,” Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, told MSNBC. Sugarmann is a longtime gun control advocate who grew up in Newtown decades before this past December’s tragedy. “But the NRA is relentless,” he added. “They are out there in public. They are working behind the scenes, and that is what we are seeing right now.”

To finish reading the story, please click here.

[Correction: The story incorrectly refers to a pump-action, semi-automatic shotgun used in Aurora, Colorado. The weapon used was a pump action shotgun. As many readers pointed out in comments, a weapon could not be both. My apologies. FS]

Senate witness on weapons ban funded by gun lobby

One witness, David Kopel, who testified on January 30, identified at the hearing as a law school adjunct professor, received more than $108,000 in grants from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund in 2011. Another witness, David T. Hardy, testifying Wednesday as a private attorney in Tucson, Arizona, received $67,500 in grants from the same NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund in 2011. Another witness testifying Wednesday, Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham Law School professor, spoke a year ago at an NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund scholars’ seminar.

Read the complete article at the link below:

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/02/27/senate-witness-on-weapons-ban-funded-by-gun-lobby/

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

http://www.progressive.org/what-judiciary-comm-should-ask-wayne-lapierre

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

by Frank Smyth, January 29, 2013, TheProgressive.org

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on gun violence featuring testimony from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, as well as Mark Kelly, the husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, who was shot in the head while holding a public meeting in her district two years ago.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should take the opportunity to press LaPierre on whether his organization truly represents the views of most American gun owners–and on what, specifically those views are.

While the NRA boasts a 4 million strong membership, it has a secretive and tightly controlled process for choosing its board of directors.

That’s why journalists did not find out that one of the NRA’s most trusted, top officials lives just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Patricia A. Clark, a longtime Newtown resident, is chairman of the NRA’s shadowy, but powerful nominating committee.

She is also an instructor in the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program–heralded right after the Newtown tragedy on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by Wayne LaPierre–but she has been on the NRA’s governing board of directors since 1999, entrusted with ensuring that the NRA board’s own ruling clique remains in power.

I have spoken with numerous NRA members who complain about the obscure, Politburo-like governance of the NRA, which keeps ordinary members in the dark about how the organization is run and by whom.

One of the figures whom the NRA board quietly appointed to the 2012 Nominating Committee is George Kollitides II, the chief executive of one of America’s largest consortiums of gun manufacturers. Kollitides last year also became head of the consortium Freedom Group, which includes the company that made the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used not just at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, but also at last year’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and, a decade before, by the DC sniper in and around Washington.

The NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, has artfully managed the gun lobby’s message for more than 20 years. His skills include knowing what not to say and when.

A little more than one week after the Newtown shooting on “Meet the Press” with David Gregory, LaPierre made a wholly pragmatic (and not necessarily convincing) argument. When asked whether he would support any gun control measures including restrictions on high-capacity magazines, LaPierre replied, “We don’t think it works, and we’re not going to support it.”

Instead he said the NRA will “support what works,” making the case to put armed guards or police in every school. LaPierre’s TV comments then and in a “no-questions” press conference right after Sandy Hook seemed to resonate, as, for weeks, news outlets explored how and whether armed guards in schools might work.

But the main argument driving the modern NRA is not a pragmatic, but an ideological one.

“American gun owners will never surrender our Second Amendment freedom. Period,” LaPierre said in July, expressing the NRA’s opposition to a proposed U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea. History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

That statement suggests the NRA sees the Second Amendment as being more important that all nine other articles of the Bill of Rights, or any other principle or article of government including perhaps the original U.S. Constitution that became law by itself several years before.

LaPierre made no reference to the Second Amendment at all last month in his overly hyped press conference at NRA headquarters one week after the Newtown shooting. On “Meet the Press,” he only referred to it negatively, saying he and the NRA will not back any effort “to destroy” or “lose the Second Amendment.”

But what exactly does than mean after Newtown? NBC’s David Gregory was credited with challenging LaPierre on his vague, unsubstantiated claims that gun control measures won’t work. But he missed an opportunity to probe the longtime NRA chief on whether his interpretation of the Second Amendments means he would never support gun control measures, even if they could be proven to work.

LaPierre, who earned close to $1 million in salary and other compensation from the NRA and related organizations in 2010, has been at the NRA’s helm for the last 22 years.

Few people remember that, before LaPierre, the NRA was not always so extreme. Back in 1968, the NRA’s then-executive vice president, retired general Franklin Orth, supported what still stands as America’s most important gun control law. The Gun Control Act regulated the interstate sale of firearms and effectively rewrote a prior, post-Prohibition-era law banning machine guns or fully automatic weapons. The act passed in 1968 just months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, and five years after Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy with a single, bolt-action rifle he bought through an ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine.

But a group of hardline gun rights advocates resented what they saw as a sell-out of Americans’ Second Amendment rights. LaPierre began working as a paid lobbyist for the NRA in the late 1970s, just as the hardline advocates were consolidating control of the NRA board. For the next two decades, the NRA’s internal debate boiled down to one question: whether to try and repeal the ban on fully automatic weapons, or let it stand while allowing no other gun control regulations. (A chronology of U.S. laws concerning “Fully-Automatic Firearms” compiled in 1999 and still posted on the website of the NRA’s lobbying wing is sympathetic to a Georgia man who unsuccessfully tried to register a fully-automatic weapon in 1986.)

LaPierre became the NRA’s operations chief in 1991, right before a series of raids by U.S. agencies lead to many violent deaths over illegal guns. In 1992 federal charges related to the sale of two illegal, sawed-off shotguns eventually led to a federal raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho resulting in the wounding of two men including the suspect, Randy Weaver, who was a white supremacist, and the killing of his wife, and their 14-year-old son along with an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms or ATF.

But it was another federal siege, this one over illegal, fully-automatic firearms, less than a year later that became nothing less than a call to arms for gun rights hardliners. In February 1993, federal ATF agents attempted to serve a search warrant to look for the illegal, fully automatic firearms at the compound of a small religious sect known as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. After a 50-day standoff, ATF agents launched an assault, and the ensuing firefight along with a fire of still unclear origins resulted in the deaths of at least 74 people including 25 children.

LaPierre soon wrote unambiguously in his first book published the following year: “The people have a right to take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.”

The government crossed another line for even more gun rights advocates when Congress passed and President Clinton signed the assault weapons ban, prohibiting a number of high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons. Seven months later, on April 13, 1995, LaPierre signed a fund-raising letter to NRA members: “The semiauto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

But his timing was unfortunate for his cause. Six days later, on exactly the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh, an NRA member, and an accomplice used a fertilizer bomb hidden in a truck to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of six. Not unlike LaPierre in his letter, McVeigh in his terrorism was reminding people of the Waco tragedy, which for them both along with other hardline gun rights advocates still holds significance as a deplorable federal raid over fully automatic guns.

LaPierre was forced to apologize for his “jack-booted thugs” remark, after former President George H.W. Bush, a decades-long member of the NRA, resigned from the organization over his letter. But few NRA members followed suit. Instead the NRA has increased from over three million then to over four million members today.

Extremist groups including white supremacists have long operated in the NRA’s shadow. The National Alliance is a neo-Nazi party whose members have quietly handled out literature to try and attract recruits on the floor of NRA conventions. (I was handed one at the annual NRA convention in Phoenix in 1995 –two months after the Oklahoma City bombing– after I showed a man my New Jersey Firearms Purchaser Identification Card to demonstrate that I was a gun owner.) The late head of the National Alliance also wrote a novel, The Turner Diaries, about a coming race war and insurrection against a Jewish-dominated government; McVeigh used scenes in the novel as an explicit blueprint to make the bomb and choose his target in Oklahoma City.

LaPierre has become expert at handling the press. But there is little question that he holds an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment. “[T]here is no such thing as a free nation where police and military are allowed the force of arms but individual citizens are not,” he wrote in a 2003 book.

WOULD U.S. courts agree? In 2008 the Supreme Court made its first ruling on the Second Amendment in 69 years, affirming the right in the District of Columbia v. Heller of an individual to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense within the district, and then in 2010 affirming the same right throughout the United States.

Yet Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, still allowed for some limits on the right to bear arms including “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Scalia went on to say he could also find “support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Exactly what kinds of weapons might meet that criteria, however, remain unclear. Justice Scalia in an interview in July on Fox News –after the Aurora movie theater shooting– made seemingly more ambivalent comments. Scalia said the Second Amendment only applies to arms that can be borne or carried, but added that whether it would allow for arms like “hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes” will have be decided in future court decisions.

Could government airplanes be legitimate targets?

Fear and hatred of government agencies, especially the ATF, helps explain why many gun rights advocates were so supportive of House oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s investigation last year into Operation Fast and Furious, which involved ATF agents planting up to 2,000 guns into the Mexican black market in an effort to trace them to drug cartels.

Besides absolutist ideology, gun manufacturers play an important role in the NRA’s uncompromising stance.

NRA revenues from fundraising –including donations from gun manufacturers—have grown twice as fast as income from members’ dues, according to Forbes. Over 50 firearms-related companies have given the NRA almost $15 million since 2005 –the same year that NRA lobbyists helped get a federal law passed that limits liability claims against gun makers. Two gun-making firms’ chief executive officers, Ronnie Barrett and Pete Brownell, sit on the NRA board.

Yet nearly half of the NRA’s total annual revenues still come from its (rarely-voting) dues-paying members.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should ask LaPierre whether NRA opposition to gun control is rooted in the view that the Second Amendment allows citizens to have the same “force of arms,” to borrow LaPierre’s phrase, as police and military forces.

And they should pin him down on automatic weapons: NRA leaders and other their supporters often try to change the conversation when questions like whether they believe fully automatic weapons should be legal.

Providing unfettered access to enough firepower, as LaPierre’s own writings suggest, to “take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government,” to quote him again, is simply incompatible with any integrated effort to curb today’s gun violence.

For LaPierre and most NRA directors including, apparently, Newtown’s Chairman Clark, the slaying of 27 people including 20 children in Newtown is an acceptable price to pay for upholding what they maintain is “freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea” embodied in the Second Amendment.

Today’s NRA leaders are not just “gun nuts.” They are ideologues wielding extraordinary power, and secrecy is part of their success. After all, who knew their board’s nominating chairwoman lives just a few miles from the now shuttered Sandy Hook school? Or that the executive of the firm that made the gun that killed the kids there had been appointed to the same shadowy committee?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been covering the NRA and related groups since the early 1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer and Mother Jones.

How the NRA became the fringe

National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre calls on Congress to pass a law putting armed police officers in every school in America during a news conference Dec. 21, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

On Wednesday, the National Rifle Association’s chief executive officer for the past 22 years, Wayne LaPierre, will testify with other witnesses, including Mark Kelly, whose wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is still recovering from a bullet-wound to the head, before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Coming less than a week after Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced what would be, if passed, America’s most sweeping ban on “assault” or military-style semi-automatic weapons, and nearly seven weeks after the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting shocked the nation, the stage is set to debate American gun policies.

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Please go to the MSNBC.com link below to read the full piece on the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its support in prior eras for the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968, unlike today’ NRA led by Wayne LaPierre that opposes almost every form of gun control.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/28/how-the-nra-became-the-fringe/