Evolution Of The NRA Since Reagan

 Heather Cox Richardson hits it ot of the park again. Click here for her diary entry for December 14. 

Senator Joe Manchin (Democrat, West Virginia) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 -- simultaneously proving his machismo, his hatred of environmental regulation, and his support for the Second Amendment, I guess -- but no Democrat has used a gun in an ad since then. In 2020, there were 100 Republican ads which featured a gun.

The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan. 

Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.

Since its formation after the Civil War, the NRA had been a basically nonpolitical association, promoting marksmanship and gun safety. But that all changed in the mid-'70s -- and Ronald Reagan became the pro-gun candidate for president in 1980.

In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

The PAC formed in 1975 became a financial and political powerhouse:

Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Ten years ago, 20 children aged six and seven and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, were murdered by a deranged gunman. People thought the NRA would be chastened, but the opposite was true: They came out, guns blazing (forgive the metaphor), proclaiming their unwavering support for "the right to keep and bear arms." Even after that horrific massacre, a modest gun control bill proposed by Obama's Democratic House of Representatives was thwarted by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

If the atrocity at Sandy Hook could not curb the NRA and Republican blood lust, what can? In 2021, Richardson says, there were 692 mass shootings in the U.S. (a mass shooting being defined as four people shot, not including the shooter). 

Merry Christmas.