Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [90]
The association began attempting to influence legislation in 1934, in response to the increased clamor for firearms regulation that resulted in the National Firearms Act, which banned the sale of unregistered machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The act was the NRA’s first defeat, but also its first victory. As originally proposed, the act would have regulated the sale of pistols and handguns as well. But the NRA objected and, in its first demonstration of how a relative few ardent loyalists can shape a nation’s laws, launched a lobbying and letter-writing campaign that convinced Congress to limit the retrictions to “gangster” weapons.
By 1946, the association had all of 155,000 members. In 1956, the NRA amended its New York State charter to include a set of objectives broader than those it had outlined in 1871. Now it sought “to promote social welfare and public safety, law and order, and the national defense; to educate and train citizens of good repute in the safe and efficient handling of small arms,” and, broadly, “to encourage the lawful ownership and use of small arms by citizens of good repute.”
The NRA was still largely a sportsman’s organization, promoting target shooting, hunting, and hunter’s rights. It might have kept to this moderate course if not for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which prompted a horrified and heartbroken nation to call for gun control. The NRA, now galvanized by a threat to its members’ favorite pastimes, began attacking controls and pressuring legislators to oppose them, while sidestepping the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acquired his rifle by mail through an advertisement in the American Rifleman. Nonetheless, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968.
The NRA’s hard-liners, who despised the Gun Control Act, began working to ensure that such an infringement of the constitutional right to bear arms would not occur again. And soon the bald, bullet-headed figure of Harlon Carter took the helm. He was the perfect leader for an organization steeped in the myths of the American frontier. As an officer and later chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, he came as close to being an Old West lawman as anyone could in the twentieth century.
But he also symbolized the darker aspects of America’s enthusiasm for guns. For Carter was a convicted murderer.
In 1931, when he was seventeen, Carter shot and killed a Mexican boy with his shotgun under circumstances that prompted a jury to convict him of murder. Carter claimed he killed the boy in self-defense, after he brandished a knife. An appellate court overturned the conviction, charging the lower-court judge had improperly instructed the jury as to what constituted a valid claim of self-defense. The charges were never refiled.
After Carter and his allies seized control of the NRA in the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt, the NRA heeled sharply to the right. It shifted emphasis from promoting the shooting sports to battling firearm regulations, a shift made official in 1977 when the association amended its New York State charter to include the goal of promoting “the right of the individual of good repute to keep and bear arms as a common law and constitutional right both of the individual citizen and of the collective militia.”
A study conducted a few years earlier by the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, California, for Remington Arms Company, warned that the NRA’s “right-wingers are becoming increasingly isolated from the society of today.” The report continued: “Dismissing