I do not know to what extent I a simply in the dark, or was about the origins of the NRA. But today's diary regarding a non-pumber's comments made me begin to wonder. Legal questions, and others. And google fueled my confusion/curiosity.
I suppose most striking (and perhaps ultimately it's funding and non-profit status may be worth looking at) is that the NRA favored Congress' most sweeping gun-control bills for a very long time.
Surprising Unknown History of the NRA
For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro-gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.
More on the Coup, Money, Historical positions, and head scratching below
Including . . . THE NRA was once an Anti-KKK group? . . .
While African Americans were being terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan, where the Klan were sometimes aided by local law enforcement, the NRA setup charters to help train local African American communities to be able protect themselves. The most prominent case being in 1960 in Monroe, N.C. where the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People head Robert Williams also chartered an NRA Rifle Club that successully defended an assault on one of their leader's homes by the KKK without casualties.
http://www.policymic.com/...
I honestly am going to have to edit this as I started off a bit bored and I understand the surrounding rhetoric of and belief in the circular relationship of the NRA to guns. But I am surprised at how absolutely blatant it is. Some may not be. But seeing it written down, seeing that the NRA is now taking non-firearms industry money against the interests of its members is just I suppose shocking to me. This is A lot of information and I apologize for the difficulty behind stating it. . . (And not all related) but from several hours of "Huh" even if the Huh is too obvious.
Once Upon A Time…
The NRA was founded in 1871 by two Yankee Civil War veterans, including an ex-New York Times reporter . . .
These gentleman felt that war dragged on because more urban northerners could not shoot as well as rural southerners. It’s motto and focus until 1977 was not fighting for constitutional rights to own and use guns, but “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation,” which was displayed in its national headquarters.
Really I was then first surprised the NRA was not the political Frankenstein it is today, it was I suppose built like that by Frankenstein.
The NRA’s first president was a northern Army General, Ambrose Burnside. He was chosen to reflect this civilian-militia mission, as envisioned in the Second Amendment.
I have tried to include some information I found interesting especially in discussing with the sorts of 2nd Amendment Enthusiasts I am sure we all know.
The understanding of the Amendment at the time concerned having a prepared citizenry to assist in domestic military matters, such as repelling raids on federal arsenals like 1786’s Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts or the British in the War of 1812. Its focus was not asserting individual gun rights as today, but a ready citizenry prepared by target shooting. The NRA accepted $25,000 from New York State to buy a firing range ($500,000 today). For decades, the U.S. military gave surplus guns to the NRA and sponsored shooting contests.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the NRA’s leaders helped write and lobby for the first federal gun control laws—t
he very kinds of laws that the modern NRA labels as the height of tryanny.
In the early 1920s, the National Revolver Association—the NRA’s handgun training counterpart—proposed model legislation for states that included requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, adding five years to a prison sentence if a gun was used in a crime, and banning non-citizens from buying a handgun. They also proposed that gun dealers turn over sales records to police and created a one-day waiting period between buying a gun and getting it—two provisions that the NRA opposes today.
. . .
Nine states adopted these laws: West Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Oregon, California, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Connecticut. Meanwhile, the American Bar Association had been working to create uniform state laws, and built upon the proposal but made the waiting period two days. Nine more states adopted it: Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Montana, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
The cowboy towns that Hollywood lionized as the ‘Wild West’ actually required all guns be turned in to sheriffs while people were within local city limits.
FDR oversaw the Bonnie and Clyde/Capone era. The NRA actually helped him draft the first federal gun controls: 1934’s National Firearms Act and 1938’s Gun Control Act
The NRA President at the time, Karl T. Frederick, a 1920 Olympic gold-medal winner for marksmanship who became a lawyer, praised the new state gun controls in Congress. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” he testified before the 1938 law was passed. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
These federal firearms laws imposed high taxes and registration requirements on certain classes of weapons—those used in gang violence like machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers—making it all-but impossible for average people to own them. Gun makers and sellers had to register with the federal government, and certain classes of people—notably convicted felons—were barred from gun ownership. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld these laws in 1939.
The legal doctrine of gun rights balanced by gun controls held for nearly a half-century.
In November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy with an Italian military surplus rifle that Owsald bought from a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine. In congressional hearings that soon followed, NRA Executive Vice-President Frankin Orth supported a ban in mail-order sales, saying, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
The Gun Control Act of 1968 reauthorized and deepened the FDR-era gun control laws. It added a minimum age for gun buyers, required guns have serial numbers and expanded people barred from owning guns from felons to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. Only federally licensed dealers and collectors could ship guns over state lines. People buying certain kinds of bullets had to show I.D. But the most stringent proposals—a national registry of all guns (which some states had in colonial times) and mandatory licenses for all gun carriers—were not in it. The NRA blocked these measures. Orth told America Riflemen magazine that while part of the law “appears unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”
WHAT HAPPENED?
I guess we are figuring it out. Money. Ultra Conservativism. Money. Gun Industry.
How One Meeting Changed The NRA
(ALSO NOTE WAYNE LAPIERRE TOOK UP HIS POSITION IN THIS YEAR and is paid about $1,000,000 a year now)
In November 1976, the NRA’s 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 NRA’s annual meeting in Cincinatti in May 1977.
Harlon Carter (Who I believe they have grants/levels of contribution in his honor) Had been a George Zimmerman Shooting a man who pulled a knife on him. I believe he changed his name, and basically staged a coup, perhaps idealistic but since then I fail to see anything cynical not being the most reasonable about the NRA.
So where along the way did it change? According to Toobin, it started changing where lots of laws do: At the board meeting of lobbyists—in this case, the N.R.A. Toobin writes:
A coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power. …The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill battle.
The NRA’s fabricated but escalating view of the Second Amendment was ridiculed by former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger—a conservative appointed by President Richard Nixon—in a PBS Newshour interview in 1991, where he called it “one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
(From earlier article)This seems to make some sense as I was surprised by a number of Gallup polls from the past the fading view of guns (I do wonder why in the wake of JFK, increasing wars and deaths, perhaps threats from the relics of pre-civil rights, price? I was not around but as no surprise this coup seems to correlate to some views):
http://www.gallup.com/...
Most interestingly there being seemingly more gun ownership per house as far back as some polls on the first page.
The question asked for example "Do you believe hand guns should be limited to only Police" or something of the like:
1959 60% Yes
1965 49%
1979 31% (again recall the push in 1977, that's a 29% change as if it were a given before that Handguns were not ok in the 50's to the opposite despite greater ownership I believe (per home percentage wise in the 50's).
MONEY AND POLITICS (Now Not just Gun Money)
It's been widely reported that the NRA's April convention drew 29,000 people. But largely left unsaid is the fact that virtually all of them were curious gun collectors, target shooters, and hunters with little interest in politics. Only a handful of hard-core activists attended the widely advertised political sessions. At a special session of the Institute for Legislative Action, for example, only 300 people showed up at an arena designed to hold 10,000.
This low turnout might worry the NRA except for one thing: In recent years, the group's political fortunes have depended not on its membership but on its money. Disguised as a powerful grassroots organization, the NRA is first and foremost a money machine. Despite the group's large membership, few members are political activists.
Good Morning Gun Lobby
Lobbying- I suppose Matters less post SCOTUS rulings.
Under Federal Election Commission rules, no individual is allowed to contribute more than $5,000 to a PAC for use in political campaigns. To get around this rule, the NRA essentially "launders" its large donations. Wealthy NRA patrons make major contributions -- say, $10,000, $100,000, or more -- which the NRA then spends on expensive direct mail solicitations that result in large numbers of smaller contributions to its PAC.
In addition, the NRA Foundation, a supposedly charitable organization created by the NRA six years ago, raises millions of dollars more for "educational" purposes. But an analysis by Mother Jones of the foundation's 1994 annual report shows that of the $2.8 million in grants given out by the tax-free charity, at least $2.3 million was granted back to the NRA itself, to finance programs such as "Collegiate Shooting," "Shooting Range Development," and "Eddie Eagle Elementary Gun Safety." Such expenditures free up other NRA money for political purposes, from PAC fundraising to soft money political gifts.
(NOTE FROM a 1996 Article)
I looked at the 2010 data and it was something like 13 million went back to the NRA itself for gun Control Safety programs?
PDF
According to Goodwin, the organization's cash reserves have dropped from $125 million in 1990 to about $40 million, with nearly all of that pledged as collateral on a shiny new headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia. The NRA, he says, has squandered most of the money on costly membership recruitments and political causes.
Perhaps that led to their arm that seeks corporate sponsors and increasingly selling what they were once for to the highest bidder (see energy and conservation contribution).
Fast Forwarding
Oil Money and the NRA
The NRA calls itself "the number-one hunter's organization in America." But two new reports published by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Gun Truth Project and Corporate Accountability International show that, following contributions from oil and gas companies, the NRA lent its support to legislation that would open up more federal public lands to fossil-fuel extraction, compromising the wilderness that many hunters value.
http://www.guntruthproject.org/...
http://www.americanprogress.org/...
The NRA's heftiest energy contributor by far is Clayton Williams Energy. CWE is the NRA's largest corporate donor outside of the firearm industry, and one of its six largest overall donors.
http://www.murphy.senate.gov/...
Not long after CWE donated $1 million to the NRA in 2010, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) introduced the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act. The bill was a big deal as far as anti-conservation bills go: "It posed a very real threat to backcountry areas around the country," says Matt Lee-Ashley, a CAP senior fellow and the author of the think tank's report. The bill would have enabled logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, and road building on protected federal lands.
The NRA's lobbying on these bills appears to contradict the express commitment of of its lobbying arm to "be involved in any issue that directly or indirectly affects firearms ownership and use. These involve such topics as hunting and access to hunting lands [and] wilderness and wildlife conservation." So now this energy Co are up there with Gun Sellers, etc. to get the supposed protectors of hunters on board lobbying a bill is "ok". It seems this is the first such example.
So we have not only the funneling of gun money that we know of but now basically post-1977 the convergence of Conservative Think Tank Extremists throwing a coup to change the direction. Money caches being recycled. And Money grabbing wherever needed. And gun lobbying advocacy that goes expressly against the post-Kennedy NRA's views.
The NRA also made $20.9 million — about 10 percent of its revenue — from selling advertising to industry companies marketing products in its many publications in 2010, according to the IRS Form 990.
Additionally, some companies donate portions of sales directly to the NRA. Crimson Trace, which makes laser sights, donates 10 percent of each sale to the NRA. Taurus buys an NRA membership for everyone who buys one of their guns. Sturm Rugar gives $1 to the NRA for each gun sold, which amounts to millions. The NRA's revenues are intrinsically linked to the success of the gun business.
Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/...
http://www.businessinsider.com/...
If tying sales to contributions weren't enough. Consider first that the educational element "NRA Foundation, Inc" is headed by these people. I don't know a fair equivalency, other than perhaps having a Beer Advocacy group teaching Children how to not be binge drinkers headed by the Owners of Coors?
Not getting into the NRA's board, just the FOundation (that gives the NRA 10+ million)
Consider some of it's Members/Trustees (almost all NRA VP's or Presidents formerly) I left some off the list.
Frank Brownell
http://www.brownells.com/...
Sells:
Rifle Parts Etc
Outside the industry, Frank has served on the Montezuma, Iowa, City Council since 1966 and is active with a number of boards, foundations and councils ranging from church groups, youth homes and collegiate institutions to public safety, hospitals and civic organizations. As time allows, Frank is an avid outdoorsman who delights in prairie dog and big game hunting and fly fishing.
Frank Honrady
http://www.hornady.com/...
David Keene
http://www.politico.com/...
Wash Time sKeene later worked as a political assistant to Vice President Spiro Agnew during the Nixon administration, and then in Congress as executive assistant to Senator James L. Buckley.
George Kollitides
is Chairman and CEO of Freedom Group, Inc. (FGI), the largest firearms and ammunition manufacturer in the world, which includes such iconic brands as Remington, Bushmaster, DPMS and Marlin. Mr. Kollitides is also Chairman of Tier 1 Group, a Special Forces training business.
Owen Mills
http://www.owenmills.com/
Owen Mills Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Defense Industries International, Inc., provides subcontracted military and industrial design as well as heavy-duty sewing services and high-tech fabric-based products. During its 59 year history Owen Mills Company has provided services and products to prime and subcontractors and end users in the military, aerospace, law enforcement, industrial production and medical industries.
James Porter
P
orter, 64, whose father was NRA president from 1959-1961, is part of the small, Birmingham, Ala., law firm of Porter, Porter & Hassinger. The firm's website notes its expertise in defending gun manufacturers in lawsuits.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
threatened to ban firearm manufacturing in Illinois.
Dennis Reese
Co-CEO of Springfield Armory Dennis Reese announced on July 13, 2008, that Springfield Armory will provide $1,000,000 to kick off the National Rifle Association's new Competitive Shooting & National Championships Endowment.
Springfield Armory, Inc. is a firearms manufacturer and importer based in Geneseo, Illinois, founded in 1974. It is one of the largest firearm companies in the world.[citation needed] Four-time recipient of the National Rifle Association American Rifleman Golden Bullseye award.[1]
John Sigler
He is also the current president of the Fifty Caliber Institute, an organization that attempts to downplay the danger posed to the public by civilian access to .50 caliber sniper rifles (a weapon invented by fellow NRA board member Ronnie G. Barrett).
I don't know if I learned anything but I intend to read more. I hope that somehow whatever I have written prompts the same as I look closer. I am guessing and know none of this eye opening (except perhaps to those who only need lay information to make a conclusion). But it shocks me still that the people in the more charitable ring are CEO's of huge gun manufacturers (mostly because it's so transparent I suppose). I understand that Law Schools get free "Westlaw" so students like and use. But, having the Gun Industry in Charge of a 501(c)(3) that promotes safety? Well probably least shocking of anything I have rolling in my head.
I apologize for the long and perhaps non-organized writing. I read so much I wanted to ellucidate something. As there must be more like me who don't know of the ludicrously direct connection (of course people didn't care about the seeming ties between Prescott Bush and overthrow for Fascism, or making money off of). No Smoking gun, just taking a step back I suppose to think and consider as Money tends to implode at some point, and I am shocked at one point the NRA was something.