C'mon! Let's not have it both ways. One cannot decontextualize the NRA and then essentially accuse it of staying in business to fight legislation it promulgated.
KMKeller:
What they should have done in the past is not the issue here. What they are doing now is.
Well I am not the one that has detached the NRA from the moorings of history and the tenor of the times to accuse them of thriving on falsely combatting gun laws by passing them.
It is interesting that such a thought disconnect is possible. How can one decontextualize the NRA from the political scene as they confronted it and then claim that the present would be somehow better had they fought tooth and nail and failed? Had the NRA not supported alternate bills in exceedingly hostile legislative environments, it is likely that none of us would have anything more than singles shot rifles and black powder weapons today if that.
I do not even consider the
American Rifleman article to be all that damning back in 1968. The truth is that since it had to deviate from its founding mission of improving American marksmanship into defending weapons access to the lawabiding, the NRA has been fighting a rearguard action.
In 1871, one could and did afford, any type of firearm within his or her means unless subject to some Jim Crow style restriction.
Let us start from this premise then: In 1871, the average white male American gunowner had the world as his oyster. Any size, any caliber, any range, any rate of fire, any concealbility feature desired, facing only the odd local restriction in Dodge City and other notable places.
When one has everything and one's opponents have nothing, and one cannot kill one's opponents, there is only one direction the fight is going to go in the long term. The nascent antis started nowhere and could only get somewhere at gunowners' expense.
It is an interesting feature of the Orth article that it uses the word
undesireables. Like any conservative institution staffed by humans, the NRA took on the cast of its membership of the times. There was a broad WASPish consensus that
undesireables not be armed at all, and as a byproduct, only unseemly women went armed. Those positions wouldn't have been controversial even amongst the membership of the day and in no way does modern second guessing make the old-timers "wrong."
The gang wars of the Prohibition Era only intensified this culture biased reaction. "True Americans" had always sought to disarm the alien "other," be they Native Americans, blacks, Catholic European immigrants or Jews. One could not properly allow the teeming masses to have the tools of violent revolutionary overthrow and crime. Such we see things such as NY's Sullivan Law and the NFA.
I will attempt to check the legislative history soon, but I am confident that the NRA agreed with the NFA to the extent that they wanted to tune the bill within the framework of knowing it was going to be passed with or without them. A group gets its say by getting in on the process rather than being shunned as outside of it.
Another interesting item in the damning Orth article was a couple of terms attributed to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He called the NRA "extremists," and furthermore a piece of agitprop, the so-called "mail order murder" (loophole no doubt) was employed. What rings so familiar about that these days? One can only wonder.
So a 1968 presidential candiate with an much beloved assassinated president brother accuses the NRA of being extremist and by implication, anti-American, catering to lowlifes and undesireables who have been linked to the death of his brother with a mail order Italian surplus rifle. Seems like a major political problem even today. Orth responds that push come to shove, the NRA has worked with its opponents in an attempt to ensure that the law-abiding weren't too harmed by pending gun control legislation by trying to frame it and steer it in a direction they could live with. There is a fundamental difference between enthusiastically supporting a hated cause of the opposition, and compromise with opponents to preserve something of what one wants when defeat is a distinct possibility. Remember the NRA started with everything, a total loss through inflexibility was probably never even comtemplated in those more genteel times.
Today's view of the NRA from certain absolutist quarters says much more about the coarsening of public debate than it does about the NRA historically. People could respect an ancient NRA that could have moved itself into early marginalization a long time ago and left the field clear for the gun haters? That is, quite frankly, nuts. One cannot decontextualize either people or their organizations from the times in which they were operating and expect the parallels made between today and yesteryear to hold.
So go ahead and judge the NRA through a lens of warped history if it gets you NRA haters through another day on the fringes. I "forgive" them of their past "transgressions" because I have little doubt that the heights of liberal power spasms during the New Deal and The Great Society would have eviscerated the Second Amendment into uselessness by now save for the NRA.
