Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: New Yorker magazine has an interesting article about history of 2nd amendment, NRA and gun control [View all]Atypical Liberal
(5,412 posts)I made it as far as page 3 looking for the meat and potatoes before I gave up.
The article seems biased anti-gun, but seemed generally well-written and factual.
About the only eyebrow I really raised in the first three pages was when the author was talking about how schools are preparing for gunmen - except, of course, by the obvious way allowing people to have the means to defend themselves from gunmen.
Anyway my personal history with guns started when I was a child. Like my father and his father before him, firearms have been in my family for generations. They've been a means to put food on an otherwise scarce-at-times table. They have been tools to defend the home, though it has never been necessary as far as I know for anyone in our family.
I don't remember exactly when my father taught me how to shoot, but Santa brought me my first gun, a Ruger 10/22 rifle, when I was 8 or 9 years old, which I was allowed to use, under his supervision, for squirrel hunting and target shooting. Shortly after that he got me my first shotgun, which we used for hunting and shooting clay pigeons. And it wasn't long after that when he bought me my first deer rifle.
I didn't buy my first handgun until I was 26 or so. I had moved into the big city of Atlanta and decided I needed a firearm for self-defense. A shotgun is probably a better choice but my Remington 1100 has a looooong barrel and really isn't suitable for the close quarters of a home. It's a hunting arm, not particularly a self-defense arm. And I won't lie, I was itching to own my first pistol, too. It was a Ruger P90, a .45 ACP pistol derived from the 1911 design. I think it cost about $375.
Around this same time the assault weapons ban arrived. This was what really put the issue of gun control on my radar. I was just starting to buy my own firearms and now the government was trying to limit the kinds of firearms I might be able to buy! So I figured I better go and buy one of the "amputated" assault rifles that were still available under the AWB while they were still possible to get. I bought a Romanian SAR1, a civilian variant of the AK-47 that had been modified to comply with the AWB - the threads on the barrel had been turned down so that a muzzle flash hider could not be installed, and the bayonet lug had been ground off so you could not mount a bayonet. And a few of the components had been replaced with US-made parts to comply in that regard. But it was still functionally a semi-automatic AK-47 and it would accept high-capacity magazines so about $350 later I owned my first assault rifle.
As I started to realize what had been done to my assault rifle to make it a "post-ban legal" AK-47 variant, I began to realize how stupid and ineffective the ban was and I figured it would not be long before the people who made the law figured that out, too, and made even more draconian laws to control firearms. So I began to get involved with the NRA and became hyper-vigilant with the politics of firearm rights.
So you could say, very correctly, that the anti-gun maneuvers like the AWB are directly what stirred me to get involved in defending my firearm rights and belonging to the NRA.
In 2006 I switched from voting Republican to voting Democratic. My biggest turning point was the obvious lie of the wars in the Middle East, and the growing inability to believe that even though they supported the individual right to keep and bear arms that the Republicans really had any going concern for regular individuals.
I've been fortunate that, living in the South, nearly all of my Democratic candidates are also pro-second-amendment. I carefully review the NRA endorsements at election time, and I vote for every Democrat I can that has high marks. I've only had to vote against one Democrat who had an F rating. I voted for President Obama in spite of the NRA rhetoric because I was fairly confident he would not be able politically to move against firearms but also the alternative of guaranteed more war overseas was unacceptable.
Over the years I have belonged to a couple of private gun clubs that require NRA membership to participate. This wasn't a big deal for me as I already was.
So that is my personal history with guns and the NRA.