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Before you read any further, you want to know how I feel about guns. I am with Alice Bull, a gifted riflewoman and first woman elected to the NRA’s Board of Directors in 1949: I “[appreciate] the workings of firearms”. “I like mechanical things. A finely made gun is like a well-made micrometer. It is a very fine piece of machinery and beautiful to look at.” Smyth, Frank. The NRA (p. 60). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
And I would like my family to learn to shoot. People I love, family and friends, have and regularly use or carry guns, for sport, hunting,defense. I live in a state with strong gun control laws, of which I approve.
And you will want to know who wrote this book.
Mr. Smyth is a gun owner (“a Glock 19, an Austrian-designed 9mm semiautomatic pistol.
This is a tactical, high-capacity weapon…”) and NRA member. He is an independent investigative
journalist, specializing in armed conflict; a former arms trafficking investigator, and the CEO of a US based firm which offers training for hostile environments. He was captured and imprisoned in Iraq with fellow journalists, one of whom was executed. He has written for publications including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Village Voice, New Republic, The Nation, Harvard International Review, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Reader, Texas Observer, Economist, Christian Science Monitor and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has testified before the US House and Senate and
the Helsinki Commission. Smyth has worked all over the world in dangerous environments including the Gulf War, Colombia, Beirut/Lebanon, El Salvador, Guatemala, and has written on Africa and
central Asia.
In other words, no Elmer Fudd here. I can’t wait for the movie.
Know that “unauthorized”, here, does not mean the book is invented. Smyth has exhaustively researched the tale, including the NRA’s own buried publications such as the collector’s editions of American Rifleman.
Here’s why you, proud gun owning American hunters and sport shooters and home defenders, my family and friends, will love and learn from this book.
The NRA has noble, patriotic origins and a long, proud and fascinating history. Members can be proud of its history but they do not know the history, because evidently the current power-gripping elite of the organization have locked away this history in some kind of vault, or erased it, depriving current members and gun owners of its own institutional knowledge. As happens around the world in tiresome repetition, the tactic of preserving ignorance in the rank and file of an organization protects its elite, maintaining the power of the controlling individuals and enabling their financial abuses at organizational expense to line their own pockets.
Hence, the “unauthorized” nature of this recounting.
The NRA was initially founded in New York after the Civil War. Union Army officers concluded the standing armies of the USA needed to learn sharp shooting, after their terrible experience fighting the confederacy, and in preparation for foreign wars in Europe. Its principal purpose for over a hundred years was to support the armed forces of the United States.
The organization propagated rifle shooting sporting matches against teams around the world. WWI vindicated the founders’ aims. At the 1920 Olympic Games the US was on top of the world in most team shooting events.
The NRA conducted competitions for soldiers and police from across the country, trained railroad mail clerks, Boy Scouts and the 4-H. Senior ranks of the organization consisted of decorated military officers who made better riflery a national goal. It maintained standards for marksmanship through training and competition, working with every branch of military service and the national guards, and subsidized by federal funds.
In addition to the NRA’s century of patriotic service, the organization promoted “hunter conservation”, promoting environmentally sound policies in the interest of hunters and sportsmen, and ethical practices in the hunting of animals.
One remarkable aspect of the history is the NRA’s historic support of reasonable degrees of gun control. Given the rise of organized crime and gangland violence in the 20s and 30s, the NRA acknowledged the need for regulations of the sale and use of firearms, including the need for a registry
of sales. The NRA endorsed a bill aiming to restrict and tax machine guns, and ban sawed off shotguns and silencers, which became law in 1934. In 1937 it argued that only trained police should handle the Smith and Wesson Magnum. The NRA had never promoted the arming of
ordinary citizenry at a police level of firepower.
In 1968, the era of tragic assassinations, the NRA Executive Vice President (the traditional position of power within the organization) urged the passage of the new gun control law to curb mail-order sales, and all sales to juveniles, convicts, and individuals adjudicated mentally unsound, and which stopped the import of surplus military weapons.
Power changes within the organization mirrored the culture wars of the 70s. The NRA leadership shakeup resulted in the accession to power of a murder convict upon his release after appeal. Harlon (name spelling changed after prison) Carter had also been Chief of the Border Patrol in Texas. His right hand man was Neal Knox, who with his wife was a “gun buff”.
The times saw the slaughter of police officers in New York City with cheap “Saturday night specials”, handguns purchased legally out of state and illegally brought across state lines. The NRA leadership saw the threat of handgun regulation coming and saw the need to rally unified support from hunters, competitive shooters, sport shooters, and those concerned with self-defense.
While there was never a threat to the right of Americans to their firearms for these purposes, the only way to prevent the splintering of interests within the organization was, cynically, to make gun owners believe the government was coming for their guns, all their guns.
[This reminds me so much of the way some in the right wing used to manipulate the religious right over abortion, family values, and law and order, in order to use the support of this base to shore up a front for protecting its own financial and political interests.]
And finally the fascinating character, the contemporary power at the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, started out as a lobbyist for the organization and ultimately became the power in the organization. Prior to his role within the NRA, LaPierre had successfully twice avoided the draft during the Vietnamese war, and worked as a volunteer for the presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. He had also worked as a legislative aide in Virginia for a Democrat.
The change of the guard within the NRA resulted in new leadership of people known as “slob hunters”, who hunted baited waterfowl, shot crows, hunted deer with big handguns, and who shamelessly
portrayed the NRA on TV hunting marsh hens from a motorboat under power, in violation of game laws and the NRA’s hunting code of ethics. It lobbied for the sale at discount to its members of surplus military weapons.
By 2002 the organization was concealing its financial influence in elections and in Supreme Court amicus briefs.
The book details the NRA response to the litany of mass shootings with which we are too familiar today, promoting more guns.
The mission of the NRA seems to have devolved from its original patriotism and service, with the purpose of defending America, to a lobby benefiting the gun manufacture industry and the interest of some private individuals in turning guns directly against the U.S. government, this last arising right out of white supremacist militia movements.
Similar to today’s hijacking of the news for divisive, outrageous speech as a diversion from issues which need close attendance, the loud, angry and celebrity face of the NRA garners its members’ and the nation’s attention. Tellingly, while LaPierre makes personal millions, the NRA’s annual financial report, which had always been published annually for its members, has disappeared from publication.
Hence, the “unauthorized” nature of this book.
President Reagan, himself the victim of an assassination attempt, publicly and vocally broke with the NRA in the 90’s in his support for the Brady Bill. His position was consistent with the now
buried from sight NRA tradition: “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”
The book contains plenty to make me feel frustrated and depressed about the issue. Too bad, I could so easily love a gun. But as to the NRA, like so many of our institutions which I want to love as an American, its membership is tarnished by the hollow greed and perverted values of its leadership.
And more Zombies
https://www.netflix.com/title/80117824
Another depressing popular culture entertainment can be zombie movies. After the fine original Night of the Living Dead, my family tried viewing the sequel,--the one set in the mall? We became uncomfortable. We decided that the whole zombie trend feels, maybe, like just an excuse to shoot at human beings.
We felt differently viewing Train to Busan. What was different about this zombies-on-a-train movie?
The good guys didn’t have guns--until the cliffhanger moment of truth at the end of the movie, when the last survivors faced the military protectors with their guns.
There was lots of zombie fighting and sufficient gore. There was awe-inspiring courage as the dads and boyfriend engaged in hand to hand combat and sacrifice to defend their families/date, respectively. They also learned to leverage their courage and strength with strategies to outwit their virus-transformed foes.
Why was I okay with the war against these zombies, who had been their friends, relatives and fellow passengers before the contagious disease which turned them into flesh-eating zombie enemies? (Timely movie!)
I can’t pretend pacifism, as I love war movies. I love--heroes. In Busan, The combat sans firepower felt like the knights and vikings at war, like Lord of the Rings. Appreciating a fine firearm should be like appreciating a good sword. The weapon is an extension of the man. Busan gave us perhaps more flesh in the game, less long range blood spattering machine gun power.
Like Alice Bull from Smyth’s NRA, in appreciating a fine weapon, “I don’t love it because it goes boom.”
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