Political factions hijacked the NRA
Let’s get things straight about the Second Amendment, the NRA and gun control.
In 1991, retired Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative Nixon Supreme Court appointee, said the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special interest groups “
Before it became politicized, the NRA helped write and lobby for our first federal gun control laws, the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act. In 1938, NRA President Karl T. Frederick testified before Congress: “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” But today the NRA insists these laws are “the epitome of federal rights infringement and tyranny.” Today’s gun-totin’, shoot-’em-up mentality emerged after the takeover of the NRA by the firearms industry and the Republican right wing in the 1970s and ’80s. Just as the Southern evangelical fundamentalists were seduced by the GOP to cut their own economic throats, a long, honorable, patriotic NRA tradition has been hijacked by a small but powerful political faction founded on unmitigated greed.
George B. Reed Jr.