Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: "despite objections from most Democrats..." [View all]Human101948
(3,457 posts)In November 1976, the NRAs old guard Board of Directors fired Carter and 80 other employees associated with the more expansive view of the Second Amendment and implicit distrusting any government firearm regulation. For months, the Carter cadre secretly plotted their revenge and hijacked the NRAs annual meeting in Cincinnatti in May 1977. The meeting had been moved from Washington to protest its new gun control law. Winkler writes that Carters top deputy Neal Knox was even more extreme than himwanting to roll back all existing gun laws, including bans on machine guns and saying the federal government had killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy as part of a plot to advance gun control.
....After the coup, the NRA ramped up donations to congressional campaigns. And in 1977, new articles on the Second Amendment appeared in American Rifleman, Burbick noted, rewriting American history to legitimize the armed citizen unregulated except by his own ability to buy a gun at whatever price he could afford. That revisionist perspective was endorsed by a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee chaired by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch in 1982, when staffers wrote a report concluding it had discovered long lost proof of an individuals constitutional right to bear arms.
The NRAs fabricated but escalating view of the Second Amendment was ridiculed by former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burgera conservative appointed by President Richard Nixonin a PBS Newshour interview in 1991, where he called it one of the greatest pieces of fraudI repeat the word fraudon the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_control/