Beating Guns

by Shane Claiborne

  The NRA was established to advance marksmanship and teach firearm competence, and it was run mostly by former military folks. In the early days, the focus was setting up rifle clubs and recruiting for the military.

  For nearly seventy years the NRA had very little to do with lobbying or legislation. Then, in 1934, they were confronted with one of the first federal gun control laws—the National Firearms Act. It regulated machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers. NRA president Karl Frederick had this to say during the hearings: “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. . . . I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”1 It’s true, the NRA once believed in commonsense gun laws.

  In a similar move in the 1960s, the NRA supported another historic gun control bill—the Gun Control Act of 1968. This law required dealers to have a license; created a way to regulate firearms, transfers, and sales among gun dealers around the country; and regulated what guns they could sell. It got the NRA’s stamp of approval.

  Until the mid-1970s, the NRA mainly focused on sportsmen, hunters, and target shooters and didn’t have much to do with gun control issues. It was also around that time that the Political Victory Fund was established, just in time for the 1976 elections.

  The 1977 NRA annual convention is often called “The Cincinnati Revolution.” At that convention was one of the NRA’s charismatic leaders, Harlon Carter, who had been president for a couple of years during the late 1960s, during the civil rights movement. He wasn’t just a sportsman; he was a vigilante and had killed a fifteen-year-old kid when he was seventeen. At the convention, he declared a new day before a cheering crowd: “Beginning in this place and at this hour, this period of NRA history is finished.” It’s safe to say he was taking the organization in a new direction. What he meant by his convention statements was clear to everybody. No longer would the NRA be focused on hunting courses and safety lessons, or target shooting and marksmanship. It was going to become a political force to be reckoned with. The NRA was going to fight to make sure that nothing stood in the way of Americans and guns. The Second Amendment moved front and center—and one of the goals became squashing gun control laws just like the ones they had supported a decade earlier.2

  THE TEEN KILLER WHO RADICALIZED THE NRA

  (Note) Harlon Carter was arrested and convicted of murdering a fifteen-year-old Hispanic youth named Ramon Casiano. He was sentenced to three years in jail but was released after two years when a higher court ruled that the judge in the case had issued incorrect instructions regarding self-defense. He would later become the US Border Patrol chief in 1950. He championed an operation to remove undocumented immigrants—it was called Operation Wetback. Eventually he would become the head of the NRA’s legislative action arm, one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the country.

  The 1970s were the golden age for the NRA, as membership leaped from nine hundred thousand to three million. Under the leadership of Harlon Carter, Neal Knox, and Charlton Heston, the NRA won some major political battles that have led us to the crisis we are in right now. For instance, in the 1980s the association led the way to reduce the powers and cut the finances of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). They basically overpowered the largest federal agency that stood in their way. It would be like the mafia getting rid of the local police. Years later NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre referred to ATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs.” George H. W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership in the NRA over that comment.3

  Memorial to the Lost

  VIRGINIA TECH (APRIL 16, 2007)

  The morning of April 16, 2007, a senior at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University opened fire on two individuals in a dorm. A couple hours later the gunman proceeded to an academic building with a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol, a Walther P22 semiautomatic pistol, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. After nine minutes of shooting, thirty-two people were killed. As of this writing it is the deadliest mass shooting on a college campus in the US. These are the names of the victims who died from the shooting that day:

  Ross Alameddine, 20 Rachael Hill, 18 Minal Panchal, 26

  Jamie Bishop, 35 Emily Hilscher, 19 Erin Peterson, 18

  Brian Bluhm, 25 Matthew La Porte, 20 Michael Pohle Jr., 23

  Ryan Clark, 22 Jarrett Lane, 22 Julia Pryde, 23

  Austin Cloyd, 18 Henry Lee, 20 Mary Karen Read, 19

  Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49 Liviu Librescu, 76 Reema Samaha, 18

  Daniel Perez Cueva, 21 G. V. Loganathan, 53 Waleed Shaalan, 32

  Kevin Granata, 45 Partahi Lumbantoruan, 34 Leslie Sherman, 20

  Matthew Gwaltney, 24 Lauren McCain, 20 Maxine Turner, 22

  Caitlin Hammaren, 19 Daniel O’Neil, 22 Nicole White, 20

  Jeremy Herbstritt, 27 Juan Ortiz, 26

  Things continued to ramp up over the next two decades, even though the NRA lost one of its major political battles in 1994 when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban passed. But the pendulum swung back in their direction as they successfully lobbied for the bill to expire in 2004. A year later they had another major victory that has set the tone for where we are now. In 2005 they backed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which George W. Bush signed into law, preventing firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable for any negligence when crimes have been committed with their products. No other industry enjoys the protection that the gun industry does.

  The NRA backed their first presidential candidate in 1980—Ronald Reagan. To show how wildly things have devolved, even from the 1980s, keep in mind that Reagan once said, “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.”4 Reagan also said, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons. . . . [Guns are] a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”5

  In 1998 the NRA became the biggest contributor in congressional elections.6 Only a decade later, the NRA spent $40 million on US elections, including $10 million in opposition to Barack Obama. And of course, in 2016 they endorsed Donald Trump and broke another record, donating over $30 million to help him get elected.

  In recent years, the NRA has gone on the offensive. The NRA lobbied for a bill that granted them and other gun advocacy groups the right to sue municipalities in order to overturn local firearm regulations. The (still-embattled) bill stated that if a city passes laws in attempts to curb gun violence—such as banning high-capacity cartridges or semiautomatics—the NRA can sue them. The NRA sued Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Lancaster, contending that new regulations passed by those municipalities violated the Constitution. The regulations included things like reporting stolen guns within twenty-four hours. Similar lawsuits were also filed in California. The city of Sunnyvale passed an ordinance banning certain weapons, limiting guns to only ten bullets. It also required that guns in homes be locked up, that gun dealers keep logs of ammunition sales, and that stolen guns be reported within two days. And the NRA took them to court! Thank goodness those offensive moves have proved unsuccessful so far.7

  [Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle Herald]

  In 2018, of the seventy-six members of the NRA board of directors, sixty-three were males. All but seven of the board members were white. The NRA has a major identity crisis when it comes to race. In 2017, NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch released a video ad attacking an unspecified group of people referred to as “they.” The ad shows images of protests and marches and slams “the resistance,” with accusations that they “smash windows, burn cars, . . . bully and terrorize the law abiding”—all of this on the heels of the movement for black lives. Here’s her full statement:

  They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach
children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars, and singers, and comedy shows, and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding. Until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.8

  As this ad reveals, some within the NRA are militantly opposed to the movement surrounding Black Lives Matter. And the NRA hasn’t been consistent with their support for African American gun rights, as we see in the outrageous case of Philando Castile. In 2017 (the same year that the video ad quoted above came out), Castile was pulled over for a traffic stop. He had a valid firearm permit and informed the officer. Without any provocation or warning, the officer shot him seven times, in front of his girlfriend and four-year-old daughter, as Castile was retrieving his wallet. As much of the country raged over the injustice, the NRA was awkwardly silent. Over a year later, an NRA spokesperson called it “a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided.”9 The NRA has supported some new initiatives, though, such as Black Guns Matter, that it hopes will connect with a “new constituency.” We shall see.

  One thing we can say to their credit is that the NRA doesn’t sit around and wait on politicians. They make stuff happen. In a recent study, nearly half of NRA members say they have contacted a public official to express their opinions on guns, and about a quarter of them say they’ve done that this year. When the same question was asked of folks not in the NRA, only 15 percent said they had, and only 5 percent this year.10 It reminds me of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Those of us who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as the war hawks.”11

  There have been moments of truth-telling within the ranks of the NRA, but those have come at a great cost. One classic example is of Jim Zumbo. He is arguably one of the most influential and skilled gun enthusiasts in the country. But Zumbo began to raise some basic, commonsense questions like, Why do hunters need assault rifles? He said this in one of his last articles, which pretty much ended his professional career: “As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and the woods.”12

  The gun empire turned on Zumbo and launched a “Dump Zumbo” website. Their wrath was vicious and unrelenting. Despite his public apology, sponsors dropped him, many of them major players such as Remington. It was the end of his top-rated weekly TV show and the end of his longtime career at Outdoor Life, one of the nation’s leading outdoor magazines. Even those who defended Zumbo became targets of the NRA and felt the backlash.13 The NRA made its message strikingly clear—if you question the goodness of any gun, including assault rifles, the NRA will do its best to destroy you, whether you are a politician or a lifetime member of the NRA like Jim Zumbo. The kids in Florida after the Parkland shooting felt the wrath of the NRA and endured countless death threats. Ten years after the Zumbo incident, the NRA still has the Zumbo statement on its website, applauding the “wave of grassroots response” that led to Zumbo’s downfall. It includes a warning to the “new Congress” to take heed lest anyone else fall prey “to the tragic demonization of gun owners.”14

  But times do seem to be changing.

  In a recent survey, 74 percent of NRA members supported universal background checks on all gun sales, compared to 84 percent of gun owners in general (and 90 percent of all Americans).15 When asked about prohibiting gun ownership for ten years after a person is convicted of violating a domestic-violence restraining order, 62 percent of NRA members, 76 percent of gun owners, and 83 percent of non–gun owners supported the notion. When asked if someone convicted of selling an illegal gun should have a mandatory minimum of two years in prison, 70 percent of NRA members said yes (along with 71 percent of gun owners generally and 78 percent of non–gun owners).16 Hopefully, the NRA will follow the lead of its members, return to its roots, and advocate for some sensible changes.

  The tide may be turning: the NRA recently reported that it might go broke due to legal fees from ongoing lawsuits and that it has lost its insurance coverage, claiming that its carrier wouldn’t renew for “any price.”17

  five

  Do Black Guns Matter?

  The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.

  —Ida B. Wells

  MAYBE IT’S NOT SURPRISING that the NRA is supporting a new movement called Black Guns Matter. A disproportionate 84 percent of gun owners are white (whites make up 61 percent of the US population).1 Expanding its constituency beyond white folks will be a challenge for the NRA given its history—and, well, US history in general. As of 2018, of the seventy-six members of the board of directors, all but seven are white. Sixty-three are males. It is about 90 percent white and 83 percent men.2

  Guns and the NRA have a complex history with regard to racial subjugation and slavery in America. Any book on guns would be incomplete if it didn’t look at these dynamics of race.

  Some of the first arguments in support of armed militias and the Second Amendment were primarily concerned with keeping enslaved people subjugated, squashing any armed rebellion, and capturing fugitive slaves. In the words of Reverend William Barber, “The law [i.e., the Second Amendment] that was used to put on the books to kill slaves is now killing our children, white and black.”3 For many decades, that is what “policing” looked like in America—armed slave patrols. We still have a long way to go to heal those wounds of history.

  It’s hard to imagine America existing today without the existence of guns. Guns were used to take land from Natives and to keep enslaved Africans subjugated as the new experiment called the United States of America was being conceived and born. There are countless stories, and many more that we don’t even know about, of conquest and the horrors of slavery. In Blackfoot territory, white miners riddled Native bodies with bullets with the help of the then-new invention of repeat-firing rifles (repeat-firing referred to guns capable of shooting multiple bullets without reloading) and arranged the bodies in an evil, seditious manner “so that survivors might . . . contemplate the fatal results of their terrible encounter with weapons that obviously appeared never to be reloaded at all.” After the massacre, the Blackfeet were so horrified that they believed such a vindictive instrument could only come from a malevolent deity and so they called the rifles “spirit guns.”4

  George Schofield, after whom one of the most legendary guns in history—the Schofield revolver—is named, said that he wanted “no other occupation in life than to ward off the savage and kill off his food until there should no longer be an Indian frontier in our beautiful country.”5 Guns have an ugly and evil past in the birthing of this country. It’s hard to confront the truth, but the truth sets us free. Telling the truth about the past is the first step toward building a healthy future.

  A part of that history is the complex relationship of African Americans with the gun. Guns got mixed reviews to say the least. The abolition movement and civil rights movement are known for their revolutionary patience, steadfast hope, and nonviolent resistance. We think of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. as champions of nonviolent direct action, but both of them owned guns at one point in their lives. Despite the many critics of the gun, it did have some champions among African Americans. Some came to see the gun as an equalizer. What the failed government, so infected with white supremacy, could not do, the gun promised to do. Where juries and courts failed black folks, the gun promised to level the playing field and help achieve what racist, broken police an
d judicial systems could not achieve. While “Equal Justice Under Law” is inscribed on the front of the Supreme Court, it was only an aspiration. The gun promised power and protection where the government had failed. “War is diplomacy by other means, and Winchester was equality by other means,” says Pamela Haag. And as one proverb went: “God made man, and Colt made them equal.”6

  Nicholas Johnson, in his incredible book Negroes and the Gun, points out some stunning postbellum sentiments from African Americans on guns. Among gun champions in the African American community, journalist Ida B. Wells is often called the “celebrity endorsement.” She bought a pistol after a lynching, saying, “The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.”7 With lynchings happening nearly every week, and mobs of angry white men sometimes being thwarted by African Americans with guns, others echoed her call to arms. Even African American church leaders such as African Methodist Episcopal bishop Henry McNeal Turner turned to the gun for defense, saying, “Get guns Negroes, keep them loaded, and may God give you good aim when you shoot.”8 W. E. B. DuBois once wrote that he bought “a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen shells filled with buckshot,” and said, “If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass.”9

  Black folks had been traumatized by lynchings and racial terror, and at least some of them embraced the gun—sometimes passionately, sometimes with reservation, sometimes temporarily. There were plenty of voices of dissent against guns: Booker T. Washington voiced his concern about how the “custom of going armed” would undoubtedly contribute to “the high record of violent actions, most of the time directed toward other negroes.”10 Even still, the Black Panthers and other black nationalist organizations openly displayed guns and advocated for the right to carry them in public. Originally called the Black Panthers for Self-Defense, the Black Panthers organized “police patrols” to shadow police officers and share legal advice with African Americans who were stopped. The Panthers held a nuanced view on self-defense—advocating for people not just to have a gun in the privacy of their home but to openly carry a gun in public to protect from the corrupt government and racist police officers. In 1967 thirty members of the Black Panthers protested by openly carrying guns on the steps of the California statehouse (which was legal at the time) and announcing, “The time has come for black people to arm themselves.”11 This open display of weapons led to some of the strictest gun laws in US history, beginning with the Mulford Act, which prohibited the open carry of loaded firearms in California, ironically championed by Republican California governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” This is the very ideology that militant white nationalist groups use a half century later as they perform similar displays of weaponry in public and even occupy government property with weapons in hand.