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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.

Dana Loesch follows NRA playbook in Town Hall meeting by deflecting questions, avoiding fundamental conversation about gun access

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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/nra-dana-loesch-deflects-questions-town-hall-meeting-article-1.3835143

CNN’s Town Hall meeting in Sunrise, Florida began like the most honest conversation America has had about gun violence in decades. Surviving students and parents of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting peppered politicians like GOP Sen. Marco Rubio with questions about his NRA funding and positions on guns, specifically the AR-15 rifle.

But the conversation shifted when NRA spokesman Dana Loesch took a seat and began fielding questions.

A Generation-X gun rights advocate, Loesch learned how to hunt and shoot from her grandfather in the Ozark Mountains. She is a God-fearing Christian who still goes to church regularly, she claims. She made her name for years as a conservative commentator before becoming the face of the National Rifle Association last year.

The anticipation peaked when CNN let the compelling, surviving high school senior Emma Gonzalez ask the NRA representative, “Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain the semi-automatic weapons and modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic, like bump stocks?”

The question was on point, but the NRA spokesperson never answered it.

Instead, Loesch validated the young, grieving woman’s emotions, saying she was a teenage activist herself. The NRA representative then deflected the conversation to the shooter whom she described as a “monster” who was “nuts,” adding that “crazy” people like him should not have access to firearms.

Loesch then changed the conversation to states who don’t fully report incidences of mental illness to the national background check system. Gonzalez ended up silencing the crowd herself when people starting shouting and accusing the NRA official of dodging the question.

The high school senior, it seems, was played along with CNN and the rest of the nation.

The national outrage over the Parkland, Florida high school shooting has all the markings of a tipping point in the national debate over gun violence. Five years ago, however, the pro-gun movement managed to survive another alleged tipping point after the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

No one should count the NRA out yet.

The same day as the CNN Town Hall meeting, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence held a meeting together in the White House with survivors and educators who have endured shootings in Parkland, Newtown and Washington, D.C. One young man, a Parkland high school shooting survivor, managed to drill down on the issue of access to semi-automatic weapons. The rest, who seemed to be carefully vetted, expressed emotions demanding actions without saying exactly what they wanted.

The NRA is smarter than you think. For decades its representatives and pundits followed a playbook. Avoid the fundamental conversation about gun access. Deflect the dialogue by saying things like, “Before we pass new laws, enforce the laws already on the books,” without mentioning that NRA lobbying has ensured most of the same laws remain unenforceable.

Or change the conversation to focus on the mentally ill. If that fails, entangle opponents in the minutiae of firearms. As a last resort, wrap yourself in the Second Amendment. Meaning: posit a false choice between doing nothing about guns or trying to confiscate and outlaw them all.

Rubio seemed to be feeling the pressure. He suggested such a false choice, before unexpectedly breaking with the NRA on two points: setting an age limit to purchase firearms and limiting the ammunition capacity of magazines.

His A+ NRA rating may decline.

But Loesch made no concessions, while attempting to strike a sympathetic tone with the audience in the hall and homes across America.

Her recruitment by the NRA is part of an ongoing tactical shift for the organization.

For decades the NRA has sheltered in place, remaining leery of fellow conservative politicians and groups. No less than Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush each ended up betraying the gun lobby by denouncing high-capacity rifles and NRA anti-government rhetoric, respectively. Even with the rise of the Tea Party, which drew in activists like Loesch, the NRA kept its distance from what it saw as a largely leaderless, unpredictable movement.

Today many pro-gun activists still don’t trust President Trump. But the NRA has thrown its lot in with Trump and his supporters, betting that gun activists and his backers have plenty in common.

Loesch leads the NRA today on the culture war’s frontline. She has narrated videos lashing out at Hollywood along with the liberal media, saying the NRA will meet their purported lies with “the clenched fist of truth.”

But she showed another side at CNN’s Town Hall meeting that validated her opponents’ emotions instead of attacking them, just like President Trump did the same day inside the Oval Office.

Parkland school shooting survivors like Gonzalez have the potential to change the nation. But only if they and other gun reform advocates figure out a way to compel the NRA to answer the question.

Smyth (www.franksmyth.com) is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC.

Four Years after Sandy Hook, the NRA Continues the Arming of America

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http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/12/189100/four-years-after-sandy-hook-nra-continues-arming-america

The weekend after the presidential election, I attended a gun show in Frederick County, one of the rural counties in the blue state of Maryland that voted for Donald Trump. One mother, with her infant resting quietly in a navy blue stroller, pulled back the black metal slide of a 9mm pistol. Not far away a man caressed the polymer handguard and stock of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

The National Rifle Association manned a booth near the entrance. One of the men behind the green wooden counter, whose nametag read Bob, said he was a longtime NRA member. I asked him what he thought about NRA head Wayne LaPierre. “He’s well-spoken, and I trust him,” he answered.

Wayne LaPierre, in a video made by the NRA just days after the election, credited NRA members for Trump’s victory: “On November 8, you, the five million members of the National Rifle Association of America, along with the tens of millions of gun owners all over this country, who followed your lead, achieved a truly extraordinary, historic, even heroic accomplishment.”

The election of Donald J. Trump, combined with a Republican sweep of the Senate, has given today’s GOP an unprecendented monopoly of power. The NRA now finds itself within reach of goals that it has pursued for nearly forty years. The organization has arrived at this point via a combination of patience, self-control, and deceit.

“In the face of the bitter hatred and elitist condemnation, this is our historic moment to go on offense and defeat the forces that have allied against our freedom once and for all,” stated LaPierre in a recent video titled, “Our Time is Now.” With a patient, self-effacing demeanor, he’s the first executive director to not come from a military, hunting, or sports background.

In the video, LaPierre also mocks universal background checks, favored by 70 to 90 percent of Americans, and derides other “common sense” gun laws. He calls for the new Congress to pass a national concealed carry reciprocity law, which would require states to accept a concealed carry weapons permits issued by other states, much like the way states recognize each other’s driver licenses. Today, twenty-six states have at least some restrictions on who is eligible to carry a concealed weapon. Among them, nine states further limit such permits to people like security guards.

LaPierre also claims President Obama has “infected” federal courts with 300 constitutionally unsound judges and states that “Second Amendment freedoms” should trump state and municipal gun control laws. How is it that in Washington, D.C., one can now legally keep a gun in the home, asks LaPierre, but there is no place to buy a gun in the same city?

The NRA pumped a record $38 million into ads to help elect Donald Trump, and another $24 million to secure GOP control of the Senate. With the help of NRA campaign ads saturating the airwaves, six NRA-backed Senate candidates won key races, including Marco Rubio in Florida. Now the gun lobby is making an unprecedented push for federally mandated measures to expand the ability of state gun permit holders to carry firearms nationwide. The group is also seeking national legislation to legalize silencers. The NRA supports President-elect Trump promise to eliminate “gun-free zones” across the country, too.

“I don’t think it’s quite game over,” said Jonathan E. Lowy, legal director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “But there are reasons to be concerned.”

Trump will appoint at least one justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia, but the court’s liberal justices include Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is eighty-three. If Trump gets to appoint a second Supreme Court justice, America’s entire political landscape could change. The NRA is looking for a Roberts court decision that would not only proscribe future attempts at gun control, but dramatically expand firearms access across the nation.

None of this was supposed to happen.

For years, many liberal pundits proclaimed the NRA was in decline. Gun ownership, they noted, has been decreasing across America. One report found that just three percent of Americans own most of the nation’s guns. The NRA, some said, is facing the same kind of challenges as the Republican Party in a nation that is increasingly diverse.

And then there was the gun tragedy that led gun reformists to believe their time had finally come. This Wednesday, December 14, marks the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of twenty small children and six of their educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Sandy Hook tragedy was preceded by many other mass shootings from Columbine to Aurora, from Tucson to Virginia Tech, to name just a few, not to mention the more mundane, daily toll of gun violence. But it was this unspeakable schoolhouse tragedy that finally seemed to signal a time for change.

“So our hearts are broken today—for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost,” said a teary-eyed President Obama. Over the ensuing six months, there was a palpable hope that Congress would finally act. The Senate drafted bills to try and pass “universal” background checks, even though they still had large loopholes.

But even watered-down versions of the relatively token legislation failed due to the threat of a Republican filibuster over a Democratic-controlled Senate. None of the legislation introduced after Sandy Hook ever even made to the GOP-controlled House.

Understanding how the NRA survived Sandy Hook helps explain how the gun lobby has ended up on top today. It prevailed by downplaying its own extremism, and by presenting one alleged “independent” expert whose influence ran all the way to the Senate and Supreme Court.

LaPierre’s initial response to Sandy Hook shocked many people. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” he said, adding that if any adults at Sandy Hook had been armed, the children and educators might still be alive. His comments were described as “tone-deaf.” During the subsequent Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on gun violence, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois asked LaPierre if he thought the Second Amendment was meant to let citizens amass arms as a check on government, the driving mantra of gun rights absolutists. LaPierre said this was the Founding Fathers’ original intent, sidestepping the question of whether this is still the NRA’s view now.

Another witness at that Senate hearing, David Kopel, titled his testimony, “What Should America Do About Gun Violence?” He identified himself as the research director of the Independence Institute in Golden, Colorado, an associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at Denver University. He did not disclose that his Institute had received more than $1.4 million, including about $175,000 a year over the past eight years, from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund. For decades, until the funding was uncovered first by this reporter at MSNBC.com and later by FOX31 in Denver, Kopel managed to write op-eds in leading newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, without ever identifying his NRA funding.

Kopel also wrote law journal pieces at top schools, including Harvard, Yale, and the University of Michigan, without disclosing his NRA funding. And he appeared before the Supreme Court, as part of the team arguing in favor of gun rights in the District of Columbia vs. Heller. His amicus briefs on behalf of law enforcement groups, at least two of which have themselves received NRA funding, each failed to mention any NRA funding to either these groups or himself. Kopel’s briefs were cited four times in 2008 in Heller’s majority decision by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. They cropped up again in 2010 in another landmark Supreme Court gun case, McDonald v. Chicago.

Four years can seem like a long time. The gun reformists who were expecting victory after Sandy Hook now see their worst nightmares forming on the horizon.

It’s true that an NRA victory is hardly assured, especially at the state level. In November, gun restrictive referendums passed in three out of four states. In Washington, courts can now block access to people deemed dangerous. In California, background checks are now required to buy ammunition. Nevada voters passed one of the nation’s most restrictive laws, requiring background checks for almost any firearms transfers. A similar initiative failed in Maine.

“The [gun control] movement is in better shape than it’s ever been,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center and longtime gun control expert, He points to relatively new organizations including one funded by parents who lost children at Sandy Hook, and another organized by former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was injured in a racially motivated 2011 attack that killed six people, including a child. A third group organized by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pumped millions to back gun reform candidates.

But nearly all of those candidates lost on November 8, one more sign that the view from Capitol Hill in every direction favors the NRA. Unless progressives and gun reform groups manage to muster enough strength and resources to oppose it, the gun lobby may well end up expanding arms access across America for some time to come.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, MSNBC.com and The Progressive. He won a Society of Professional Journalists national investigative award for his Mother Jones story, “Unmasking NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook massacre.

The Dangerous Movement Behind Donald Trump

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http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/10/189005/dangerous-movement-behind-donald-trump

It makes sense to worry that Donald Trump’s recent comments about the Second Amendment could encourage an assassination attempt against Hillary Clinton. But, as a long-time follower of the gun-rights movement, I think Trump’s words mean something else.

His controversial statement in a speech that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges and cracking down on gun rights fits in with a familiar National Rifle Association message to members—that gun owners should prepare for an armed insurrection against the state. Trump is stoking the coals of an extremist movement that in the long run may prove more dangerous than any crazy would-be assassin inspired by Trump.

“He pointed out that an armed populace is a check on lawless politicians,” wrote a commenter about Trump’s Second Amendment remarks on the pro-gun ar15.com forum, adding, “I wonder if anybody else ever thought of that? Or codified it in a document of some type?”

While Trump and his supporters claim he is upholding the Constitution, these latest comments are an escalation of his ongoing attack against the credibility of our constitutional democratic process. Since he started losing ground in the polls, Trump began claiming without evidence that “the system” and the elections are rigged. Now he seems to be suggesting that some kind of collective act of resistance may be necessary to stop an overreaching government should Clinton win the November election.

This is a message that resonates with the hardline base of the gun lobby and the NRA, which this year, for the first time, had an official speak from the stage of a Republican National Convention. It also appeals to people like the small group of armed men who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. And it’s a message that strikes a chord with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have never felt so comfortable with a major party presidential candidate as they do now.

Americans should not forget that Timothy McVeigh was a gun-rights absolutist who was following the plot of a novel, The Turner Diaries, written by a neo-Nazi leader, in 1995 when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Nor should we forget that he did so on the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas.

For most people, the death of seventy-six people at a compound in Waco was the result of a tragic standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians, a messianic cult. For gun rights absolutists, Waco remains a galvanizing example of federal abuse of power. Most important to gun advocates, the original reason for the raid was the presence of illegal, fully-automatic weapons.

Seen in that context, Trump’s recent remarks are potentially more treasonous than encouraging Russian agents to hack into Democratic National Committee emails. They are a more serious threat than Trump’s remarks that riots might break out if he did not receive the Republican Party nomination. Trump’s appeal to “Second Amendment people” is the kind of claim you might hear from a failing candidate in an underdeveloped nation prone to coups.

For the first time in modern history, a major U.S. presidential candidate seems to be promoting a possible armed insurrection against the U.S. government.

Trump’s words, as usual, were sketchy and ambiguous. Clinton wants to essentially revoke the Second Amendment, Trump falsely contended, adding:

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

A Trump spokesman claimed he meant that “Second Amendment people” would act before the election by “voting in record numbers” to defeat Clinton. A Trump spokeswoman later said he meant “Second Amendment people” would act afterward, exerting their clout to stop Senators from approving Clinton’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Neither explanation is what countless gun-rights absolutists heard. For them, the Second Amendment is about their right to keep arms in order to fight an insurgent war against our own government, should one ever become necessary to keep tyranny at bay. This may sound ludicrous. But go to Twitter and search terms like #2A, #NRA and #MolonLabe, an ancient Greek expression of defiance that means “come and take them.” Or spend any time on websites like InfoWars.com. Or read NRA statements.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” said NRA chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre in 2012 before a United Nations arms control panel in New York City. “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.”

This view has nothing to do with hunting or sports shooting, which is where the NRA—until hardliners took over the organization in the late 1970s—had its roots. In fact, NRA hardline advocates today deride hunters who don’t share their Second Amendment views as “Fudds,” short for the bumbling cartoon character Elmer Fudd who never managed to shoot Bugs Bunny. The late President Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s most famous Fudd for supporting gun control both during his tenure and after.

Gun rights absolutists don’t entirely trust Trump, either. “Never trust a Fudd,” wrote “waltdewalt” on a gun politics page on Reddit, suggesting Trump is not as committed to the Second Amendment as he claims.

The gun lobby is playing a long game. They have managed to withstand the fallout from one horrific mass shooting after another, including the heartbreakingly tragic loss of first-grade children in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and the largest such tragedy in our nation’s history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Gun reformists, meanwhile, have managed to make progress in just a handful of states, while they have failed to pass even token legislation in Congress. In the long run, the gun lobby faces the same demographic challenges as the Republican Party. But no one should count them out anytime soon.

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the NRA’s transition from a sports shooting club to a gun lobby, the group’s vision for an armed America is becoming a reality. The change was led by a small group of determined advocates who, through some parliamentary jockeying using the NRA’s own bylaws, assumed control in 1977 at the NRA annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. (I attended NRA meetings and reported on the machinations of extremists controlling the NRA board for The Village Voice.)

Since then, the NRA has grown into the nation’s most powerful single-issue lobby, and has managed, through both transparent and shadowy means, to dramatically expand Americans’ access to guns across the nation.

In 1986, just nine states required the granting of concealed-carry-weapon permits; now at least forty-one states allow concealed carry, some without the need for permits. A majority of states also allow the open carrying of firearms. When gun reformists talk about passing federal gun reform legislation in Congress, they need to remember that these gun-permissive state laws are already nearly a fait accompli.

The patchwork of gun laws across the nation is precisely what allows weapons to flow unchecked across state and city lines. States with permissive gun laws are the main suppliers of guns used in crimes in states and cities with stricter laws. Of 3,806 crime guns confiscated in New Jersey last year, more than 86 percent came from other states. Of the 12,390 crime guns confiscated in Illinois, more than two-thirds came from out of state. These statistics are from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which now, due to an executive order by President Obama, is once again allowed to compile data on guns used in crimes (a simple law-enforcement practice previously outlawed thanks to successful NRA lobbying in Congress).

A few pundits have boldly predicted the NRA’s demise. But the gun lobby continues to endure, for a number of reasons. First, it controls the message, including running a script designed to deflect debate away from gun reform after every mass attack. Second, it uses “independent experts” like lawyers David Kopel and David T. Hardy, each of whom testified after Sandy Hook on national television in the Senate without anyone disclosing that Kopel in particular had by then received $1.39 million from the NRA.

Third, the NRA sets up shell organizations like the Law Enforcement Alliance of America to claim more support from police than actually exists. And, finally, the group intimidates politicians by wielding funds from its gun-industry-filled coffers, less to make donations to the candidates it supports than to finance attack ads against opponents, usually on nongun issues (like Benghazi).

The racial tensions that have exploded over the past two years since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have only bolstered the gun lobby. Yet the sniper attack on police in Dallas, Texas, led some law enforcement officers to challenge policies long championed by the NRA. After the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attacks, the head of the Cleveland police union raised the safety of police officers to try to get Ohio to ban both concealed and open-carry of weapons in downtown Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. The effort failed, but it shows that law enforcement is not lined up behind the gun lobby as the NRA claims.

Since Sandy Hook, a number of new gun reformist groups have emerged, including one funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But all of them combined still pale in comparison to the kind of deep-rooted national and local voter networks painstakingly built over decades by the NRA. One Pennsylvania gun-rights blogger mocks these gun reform efforts as little more than astroturf, meaning you can buy it and lay it down but it still won’t grow into a grassroots movement.

This year, the gun rights movement is enjoying a higher national profile than ever before. Meanwhile, the gun reform movement, despite the very good work of groups going back decades like the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center, is in many ways just getting started. Gun reformists need to pace themselves for the struggle ahead.

The gun lobby will outlast Trump. But his campaign has helped bring far-right gun enthusiasts and white supremacist groups into the mainstream.

“We have a wonderful OPPORTUNITY here folks, that may never come again, at the RIGHT time,” wrote Rocky Suhayda, the chairman of the American Nazi Party last fall, as was recently reported by Buzzfeed. “Donald Trump’s campaign statements, if nothing else, have SHOWN that ‘our views’ are NOT so ‘unpopular’ as the Political Correctness crowd have told everyone they are!”

Mainstream pundits and the Clinton campaign are right: Trump’s talk is inciting violence, and America has a tragic history of political assassinations. We have a history of homegrown terrorism, too.

Frank Smyth is an award-winning investigative journalist and gun owner who covers the gun lobby the The Progressive. He has written about the NRA for more than twenty years for outlets including The Village Voice and The Washington Post. 

Why Trump’s Second Amendment Comments are More Dangerous than You Think

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Read the original article here: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/08/188903/why-trump{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-second-amendment-comments-are-more-dangerous-you-think

It makes sense to worry that Donald Trump’s most recent comments about the Second Amendment could encourage an assassination attempt against Hillary Clinton. But as a long-time follower of the gun rights movement, I think Trump’s words mean something else. Hiscontroversial statement in a speech that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges and cracking down on gun rights fits in with a familiar NRA message to members–that gun owners should prepare for an armed insurrection against the state. Trump is stoking the coals of an extremist movement that in the long-run may prove even more dangerous than any aspiring assassin inspired by Trump.

“He pointed out that an armed populace is a check on lawless politicians,” wrote the “FuriousYachtsman” this week about Trump’s Second Amendment remarks on the pro-gunar15.com forum, adding: “I wonder if anybody else ever thought of that? Or codified it in a document of some type?”

While Trump and his supporters like to claim he is upholding the Constitution, his latest comments are an escalation of his ongoing attack against the credibility of our constitutional democratic process. Since he started losing ground in the polls, Trump began claiming without evidence that “the system” and the elections are rigged. Now he seems to be suggesting that some kind of collective act of resistance may be necessary to stop an overreaching government should Clinton win the November election.

This is a message that resonates with the hardline base of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association, which last month had a representative speak from the stage of a Republican National Convention for the first time. It also speaks to people like the small group of armed men who occupied of an Oregon National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. And it’s a message that strikes a chord with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have never felt so comfortable with a major party Presidential candidate as they do now.

Americans should not forget that Timothy McVeigh was a gun rights absolutist who was following the plot of a novel, The Turner Diaries, written by a neo-Nazi leader, when in 1995 he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Nor should we forget that he did so on the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas, which for most people was a tragic standoff between the government and the Branch Davidians, a messianic cult. For gun rights absolutists, Waco remains a galvanizing example of federal abuse of power. Most important to gun advocates, the original reason for the raid was the presence of illegal, fully-automatic weapons.

Seen in that context, Trump’s recent remarks are more potentially treasonous than encouraging Russian agents to hack into Democratic National Committee emails. They are a more serious threat than Trump’s remarks that riots might break out if he did not receive the Republican party nomination. His appeal to “Second Amendment people” is the kind of claim you might hear from a failing candidate in an underdeveloped nation prone to coups. For the first time in modern history, a major U.S. presidential candidate seems to be promoting a possible armed insurrection against the U.S. government.

Trump’s words, as usual, were sketchy and ambiguous. Clinton wants to essentially revoke the Second Amendment, Trump said, and then added:

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

A Trump spokesman claimed he meant that “Second Amendment people” would act before the election by “voting in record numbers” to defeat Clinton. A Trump spokeswoman later said he meant “Second Amendment people” would act afterward if she wins through the clout of the National Rifle Association to stop senators from approving her pick for a justice.

Neither explanation is what countless gun rights absolutists heard. For them, the Second Amendment is about their right to keep arms in order to fight an insurgent war against our own government, should one ever become necessary to keep tyranny at bay. This may sound ludicrous. But go to Twitter and search terms like #2A, #NRA and #MolonLobe, an ancient Greek term for “Come and Take Them” away. Or spend any time on websites like InfoWars.com. Or read NRA statements.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” said NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre in 2012 before a U.N. arms control panel in New York.

“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.”

This view has nothing to do with hunting or sports shooting, which is where the NRA —until hardliners took over the organization in the late 1970s— has its roots. In fact, NRA hardline advocates today deride hunters who don’t share their Second Amendment views as “Fudds,” short for the bumbling cartoon character Elmer Fudd who never managed to shoot Buggs Bunny. The late President Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s most famous Fudd for supporting gun control both during his tenure and after.

Gun rights absolutists don’t entirely trust Trump, either. “Never trust a fudd,” wrote “waltdewalt” on a gun politics page on Reddit last month, suggesting Trump is not as committed to the Second Amendment as he claims. The gun lobby will outlast Trump. But his campaign has helped bring far right gun enthusiasts and white supremacist groups into the mainstream.

“We have a wonderful OPPORTUNITY here folks, that may never come again, at the RIGHT time,” wrote Rocky Suhayda, the chairman of the American Nazi Party last fall, as was recentlyreported by Buzzfeed.

“Donald Trump’s campaign statements, if nothing else, have SHOWN that ‘our views’ are NOT so ‘unpopular’ as the Political Correctness crowd have told everyone they are!”

Mainstream pundits and the Clinton campaign are right: Trump’s talk is inciting violence, and America has a tragic history of political assassinations. We have a history of homegrown terrorism, too.

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

Cat Scratch Fever—Is Ted Nugent’s Racism Too Much for Republicans?

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by Frank Smyth, February 10, 2016

Racism has long bubbled quietly beneath the surface of America’s gun rights movement, even as its well-heeled leaders have wrapped themselves in the cloak of respectability. White Supremacists and neo-Nazis openly hostile to blacks, Jews, and other minorities continue to appear in public at gun rights rallies. But the National Rifle Association, in particular, has long held openly racist groups at arm’s length from their conservative but still very much mainstream political organization.

Not anymore.

Yesterday longtime NRA board member Ted Nugent went further into racist territory than any previous NRA director—including himself. Nugent posted a graphic on his Facebook page featuring photos of Jewish-American leaders who have spoken out in support of gun violence prevention. The accompanying text states that Jews are “really behind gun control” and that they “really hate freedom.” Within hours the Anti-Defamation League denounced Nugent saying that “anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate.”

At the root of Nugent’s Facebook post is the notion that gun control can lead to tyranny, if not genocide, as Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson posited in his book and on the campaign trail last year. Other Republican candidates including Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have made similar statements. But claiming that gun control could lead to genocide is still not the same as claiming that Jewish-American leaders are supporting gun control to take away Americans’ rights as part of some absurd racist plot, as Nugent—an NRA board director for the past 20 years—has suggested.

How will the NRA respond to Nugent’s rant? The NRA’s polished leadership, based just outside the Washington beltway in Virginia, has long walked a fine line between extremism and respectability. NRA leaders have tried to mollify gun rights absolutists, including the racist extremists in the base, while maintaining the mainstream respectability that continues to make the NRA America’s most powerful single-issue lobbying organization. To hold this balance, NRA leaders, some of whom could teach Karl Rove the finer points of deflective communication, say different things in public to mainstream audiences than they do behind closed doors.

A more timely question is how the field of Republican presidential candidates—all of whom have made statements sympathetic to the NRA and gun rights—will respond. What will they say when asked if the NRA should remove Ted Nugent from its board? At least one gun control group is already demanding the NRA board remove Nugent, although, to be fair, the same group has made the same demand before. Nugent once called the late Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot in 2012 in Florida by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, a “dope-smoking, racist gangsta wannabe.”

Nugent may be a has-been performer in today’s music charts, but he remains a favorite son of influential Republicans. In 2013, Texas Republican Congressman Steve Stockman invited Nugent to come to Washington to attend President Obama’s State of the Union Address. The 67-year-old rocker, an avid gun owner and hunter, enjoys support among conservatives even though he once told High Times and later the Detroit Free Press how he took crystal meth, defecated on himself, and stopped bathing or brushing his teeth for weeks to fool his local draft board into relieving him of military service in Vietnam. He also told them how he often slept with underage girls while on tour with his band.

Nugent’s social media post yesterday, however, crossed a line, even for him.

“Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic right to defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS,” he wrote. Beneath his words is a square image with individual photos of twelve Jewish-American figures including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senators Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer, Richard Blumenthal and Carl Levin, former Obama aide and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, each emblazoned with the Israeli flag.

Within hours the New York Daily News wrote a brief online piece protesting the post. Nugent soon fired back: “Just when you hope that mankind coudnt (sic) possibly get any dumber or more dishonest, superFreaks rise to the occasion. What sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol are nazis in disguise?”

Nugent then made another Facebook post, this time of a late 1930s-era photo of German Nazis rounding up Jews showing one man wearing a Star of David. Beneath the image were the words: ‘Back when I learned about the Holocaust in school, I remember thinking, “How did Hitler get MILLIONS of people to follow along blindly and NOT fight back? Then I realized I am watching my fellow Americans take the same path.”

Images and texts like these—claiming that the Holocaust was the result of gun control—circulate widely on social media among gun rights absolutists and so-called Second Amendment advocates. To make sure Nugent’s 2.7 million Facebook followers got his point, Nugent wrote himself in the same post: “Soulless sheep to slaughter. Not me.”

Among the Republican Presidential candidates, Ben Carson has claimed that gun control in Nazi Germany helped produce the Holocaust. In his book, A More Perfect Union, Carson wrote that “German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and others whom they considered inferior.”

Carson repeated this claim in October as he was running for President in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, and then again a few weeks later in a speech at the National Press Club. Other Presidential candidates in both major parties chose not to weigh in at the time. But Alan E. Steinweis, a University of Vermont professor of history and Holocaust studies, debunked his claims in a New York Times op-ed.

“Mr. Carson’s argument,” wrote Steinweis, “is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into an 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. Neither does gun control figure in the collective historical memory of any group that was targeted by the Nazi regime, be they Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, gay people or Poles. It is simply a non-issue.”

Neither the NRA, nor its paid stable of legal scholars—whose undisclosed NRA financing I have documented here and one of whom, David Kopel, recently appeared on NPR’s Diane Rehm show talking about gun issues without disclosing his NRA funding—have since weighed either in support of Dr. Carson, or to challenge Dr. Steinweis.

But that didn’t stop NRA board director Nugent from going ahead and putting forth the theory again. After all, such unsubstantiated claims thrive in Twitter posts with hashtags including #NRA #2A (Second Amendment) #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) and “Molon Labe.” The term Molon Labe derives from the Greco-Persian wars of 480 B.C. and means “come and take them” or, what in contemporary NRA vernacular might be more like: “If you want to take my gun, you’ll have try pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

What motivated Ted Nugent to make such an unambiguously racist post now is unclear. He could not be reached for comment. On his Facebook page I queried him: “Ted, So why are you raising the sheep to the slaughter issue now? Do you know something we don’t?” Although he “liked” my comment, he hasn’t responded further.

One cannot help but wonder if he may have been influenced by some of the rhetoric used by candidates in the current Presidential campaign. After the terrorist attacks last fall in Paris, Donald Trump suggested that they were the result of France’s relatively strict gun control policies—policies that are similar to  those in every other Western European nation. The French ambassador Gerardo Araud responded to Trump’s remarks on Twitter: “This message is repugnant in its lack of any human decency. Vulture.”

Nugent endorsed Trump’s candidacy this past fall.

One of Trump’s challengers, Ted Cruz recently echoed a similar theme: “The right to self-defense is an essential component of the liberty we enjoy as Americans and is embodied in the Second Amendment.” The Canadian-born Texas senator’s view is shared by many American gun rights advocates. But whether gun control itself can lead to tyranny, or a genocide like the Holocaust, as Nugent just claimed, is a question that neither Trump nor Cruz has yet to address.

Ted Nugent’s statements may seem extreme to outsiders, but they reflect gospel truth within the gun rights absolutist community. The community even includes a few Jewish-Americans. “The founder of Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership called me his 2nd Amendment/Freedom hero,” Nugent wrote yesterday on Facebook. The founder of this Jewish, pro-gun group, Aaron Zelman, passed away in 2010. He was a longtime friend of the NRA. I once heard him speak behind closed doors in Minneapolis at a 1994 NRA board meeting—one year before Ted Nugent was elected to the NRA board. Zelman made the claim then that Nugent made today—that the Holocaust resulted from gun control. He received enthusiastic applause from about 75 listening NRA directors.

But NRA leaders—for decades—have been far more circumspect in public. In 2012, NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre addressed a Small Arms panel at the United Nations in New York, and unequivocally explained the real purpose, in his view, of the right to bear arms.

“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,” he said. The statement remains posted on the NRA lobbying wing’s website.

But less than a year later, when pressed on this point by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in response to the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the NRA leader chose more guarded language.

Sen. Durbin asked LaPierre point blank about the purpose behind the Second Amendment, saying his own constituents who are NRA members have said it’s not just about hunting, shooting targets, or even defense against criminals, telling the senator: “We need the firepower and the ability to protect ourselves from our government—from our government, from the police—if they knock on our doors and we need to fight back.”

It seemed like the perfect opportunity for the NRA leader to lay out how the NRA cherishes the Second Amendment for its defense of freedom. But LaPierre, in a far milder tone that he used at the United Nations in New York seven months before, gave a far more subdued answer on camera in Washington:

“Senator, I think that without a doubt, if you look at why our founding fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again,” said LaPierre.

But in today’s world, the NRA leader went on, the Second Amendment remains “relevant and essential” for other reasons. People fear “being abandoned by their government. If a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits, if a riot occurs that they’re gonna be out there alone. And the only way they’re gonna protect themself (sic) in the cold and the dark, when they’re vulnerable is with a firearm.”

Ted Nugent is one NRA leader who has never been guarded in his talk about the Second Amendment which, in his view, is still all about the right to not only bear arms, but to bear them against the government when and if needed to prevent tyranny. If recent Twitter posts are any indication, many NRA advocates agree with him. “Ted Nugent is right!” reads one such post that included a news headline, “Jewish groups push for action on gun control.”

So what does the NRA think about Ted Nugent’s claim that Jewish-Americans who support gun control are really Nazis in disguise trying to disarm Americans to impose tyranny? This is one question to ask NRA leaders like LaPierre. Another is, should the NRA remove Nugent from its board?

The same questions should be put to Presidential candidates starting with Carson, Trump, and Cruz.

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/2016/02/188548/cat-scratch-fever{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}94-ted-nugent{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-racism-too-much-republicans#sthash.cbgVPR93.dpuf