Search found 4 matches for NRA

Oswald, Hidell and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency

As per the new #NRA and following up on my earlier comments I would recommend a 2020 book, The NRA: The Unauthorized History by Frank Smyth published by Flatiron Books. It's the very first critical history of the organization.

Among the interesting things in the book I learned: the NRA is named after the UK's National Rifle Association established in 1859, which "organized rifle practice for the Home Guard civilian defense force, established the same year" (p. 25). It supported and rearmed the British Home Guard before WWII as well (p. 57). It's important to recognize that the civil defense aspect of the NRA is baked-in, so to speak.

Longtime American Rifleman editor C.B. Lister, whom I mentioned in previous posts as proposing a domestic paramilitary force called The Minutemen, gets some coverage in the book as well. His increasingly apocalyptic anti-communism and paranoia during his 17 month tenure as president of the NRA (while still editing American Rifleman) is briefly covered, as are his strident arguments against gun control, which were way ahead of their time in that they mimic contemporary arguments by the NRA that any form of firearm regulation is inherently totalitarian.

Smyth writes, "By 1947 Lister was escalating his warnings about communists. Until they were strong enough to take power, he said, 'they [would] resort to every form of trickery, subterfuge and lying that will enable them to advance the cause. All this is in the record. It is widely known'" (p. 59). Smyth wonders whether the brain cancer that killed Lister in 1951 heightened his paranoia. "Lister's editorials took on an ever more alarmist tone. He connected 'the Communist and the criminal,' saying that both 'prefer dealing with a disarmed citizenry'" (p. 59).

His leadership of the NRA is treated as both a harbinger and an anomoly for the time period by Smyth. I've often wondered, though, whether Lister's ideas resonated throughout certain murky corners of the American military-industrial complex during the '50s and early '60s, whether someone decided to realize his plans for a group called The Minutemen that would behave in the way he advocated. (It's also worth mentioning that far-right former Marine Corps officer Pedro del Valle also proposed a similar group, also known as The Minutemen, in the 1950s to the CIA, as mentioned in his autobiography.)

On page 71 we read, "President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 was one of the watershed moments in American life. Among the changes it ushered in was a movement to further restrict firearms-- especially those purchased through the mail. Earlier in the year, Lee Harvey Oswald had ordered a cheap surplus foreign military rifle advertised in the back pages of the American Rifleman. The fact that he obtained the weapon through an ad in the NRA's own magazine put the Association itself against the wall and fueled the call for reform in Washington."

Then Smyth mentions the Dodd regulatory bills that failed in committee in 1964 and 1965. Fears of Black gun ownership as well as of right-wing paramilitaries (such as The Minutemen and California Rangers) stockpiling weapons obtained through the NRA lead the NRA to disavow the latter publicly in 1964. Prospective NRA members were required to swear that they are not members of any organization seeking "the overthrow by force and violence of the Government of the United States or any of its political subdivisions" (p. 73). Nevertheless, paramilitary groups in the US continued to take advantage of NRA weapons programs for decades.

NRA chief executive Franklin Orth would disagree with Dodd's bills and openly clash with RFK, then a Senator, who said,"I think it is a terrible indictment of the National Rifle Association that they haven't supported any legislation to try and control the misuse of rifles and pistols in this country." RFK and MLK's assassinations would facilitate the passage of Dodd's third bill (p. 76).

Magazine Mafia At Alba's Garage

Have added #NRA to this and a related thread to make it easy to find both.

Oswald, Hidell and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency

The opposition to Dodd's bill from the NRA and concerns about sportsmen having access to the rifles they need recalls the activities and ideology of the very obscure Office of Civilian Marksmanship, which basically has been mandated over the years to get more guns into the hands of civilians.

Their efforts were feeding the paramilitary group The Minutemen throughout the '60s, intentionally or not, and some of the official concern about interstate firearms traffic probably resulted from that relationship. A similar flood of weapons to rightwing paramilitaries and state militias happened in the 1980s, at another acme of cold war tension when WWIII seemed imminent. It's almost as if there's a quasi-official "gun spigot" that seems to turn on when the remote possibility of a land invasion of the continental US looms a little nearer.

Also, bear in mind that the NRA historically enjoyed many official privileges no other private organization did, so much so that there once were a number of quasi-public aspects to the organization.

The ideology of arming American civilians as a goal in and of itself is obscure nowadays but has quite a history that precedes the 20th century, wedded to American concepts of individual liberty as well as civil defense.

#NRA