POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The following are two excerpts from an article compiled by the staff of the magazine The Week. The article provides a succinct overview of how the National Rifle Association has evolved, and it is worth reading in full. But I found these two excerpts (which are not sequential) especially enlightening because I had only a very sketchy sense of the organization’s history:

When was the NRA founded?
In 1871, by two Civil War veterans in New York — one of them a former New York Times reporter. They, along with the National Rifle Association’s first president, Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside, hoped to improve the dismal shooting abilities of the average Union soldier. (Yankee troops fired 1,000 rounds for every bullet that struck a Confederate soldier, according to an official study.) Their original mission focused on hunting, conservation, and marksmanship; there was no mention of protecting the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Indeed, for nearly a century, the NRA actively lobbied for gun control — ​co-authoring gun restrictions with the government right up until the 1970s. “Historically,” says UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, “the leadership of the NRA was more open-minded about gun control than someone familiar with the modern NRA might imagine.”

When did things change?
By 1968, there were rumbles of rebellion against gun control within the NRA. Though the organization supported the Gun Control Act, it blocked attempts to include a national gun registry and a requirement for all gun carriers to hold a license. Then in 1971, federal agents shot and paralyzed longtime NRA member Kenyon Ballew during a gun raid at his home in Maryland. Anti-government sentiment surged within the ranks, and hard-liners became increasingly impatient with the leadership’s “soft” stance. Things came to a head on the night of May 21, 1977 — known in NRA lore as the Revolt at Cincinnati — when gun-rights radicals stormed the group’s annual meeting in Ohio and demanded changes to the governing structure. The old guard was ousted, and new Executive Vice President Harlon Carter, who had served time for shooting dead a Mexican teenager, spelled out the new approach: “No compromise. No gun legislation.” The NRA would become an organization “so strong,” said Carter, “that no politician in America mindful of his political career would want to challenge [our] goals.”

In reading the first item, I almost immediately wondered whether the NRA will ultimately resort to the same tactic that the Far Right has employed in response to charges that it has become racist–pointing out that the GOP was the “party of Lincoln” and in the forefront of the Civil Rights fight when Southern segregationists were a major force within the Democratic Party, without any acknowledgement of how things have long since changed.

The complete text of “The Surprising History of the NRA” is available at: http://theweek.com/articles/761135/surprising-history-nra?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm.