A Brief History of the NRA

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Trust me, ladies and gentlemen when I tell you that the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, improperly read, does breed and does inculcate and does create some of the most, if not the most, politically passionate people on the face of the planet.  It doesn’t matter what the historical record says.  It doesn’t matter the intent of the Second Amendment.  None of that matters.  The only thing that matters is that they are animated about it and it must be protected, preserved and defended as we understand it. Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  “How the NRA’s true believers converted a marksmanship group into a mighty gun lobby,” wow.  How has the NRA transformed from a group of shooting enthusiasts into the most powerful lobbying group on the face of the planet?  Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz all contributed to this story.  This thing is 13 printed pages long.  Since I don’t get a hard copy of the Washington Compost, I don’t know how many pages this would have taken up in a full newspaper.  I imagine it would have been on the front cover and three or four interior pages.  That’s a lot of ink to cover this story.  Just listen to how it starts out:

[reading]

In gun lore it’s known as the Revolt at Cincinnati. On May 21, 1977, and into the morning of May 22, a rump caucus of gun rights radicals took over the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association.

The rebels wore orange-blaze hunting caps. They spoke on walkie-talkies as they worked the floor of the sweltering convention hall. They suspected that the NRA leaders had turned off the air-conditioning in hopes that the rabble-rousers would lose enthusiasm.

The Old Guard was caught by surprise. The NRA officers sat up front, on a dais, observing their demise. The organization, about a century old already, was thoroughly mainstream and bipartisan, focusing on hunting, conservation and marksmanship. It taught Boy Scouts how to shoot safely. But the world had changed, and everything was more political now. The rebels saw the NRA leaders as elites who lacked the heart and conviction to fight against gun-control legislation.

And these leaders were about to cut and run: They had plans to relocate the headquarters from Washington to Colorado.

[end reading]

Mike:  This story, by the way, goes hand in hand with federal government and revolving door theory.  All the money and influence ultimately find their way into the confines or environment in and around Mordor on the Potomac River.  It does so because everyone that’s involved becomes a willing and witting participant in the enlargement of the State, because it’s good business.  If you’re in business, there’s an adage or two that you may be familiar with.  One is: once you start advertising, you can’t stop.  Advertising, in most instances, will increase your sales.  If you stop advertising and marketing your product or service, you will more than likely experience an immediate and precipitous decline in stature and revenues, in sales.  If you build your business as you’re advertising, you have more employees, more inventory and what have you, and then you stop it, you’re in a world of hurt.  You’re in big trouble.  You can’t stop.

It’s the same thing, once you get involved with acquiescing to big brother.  Once you then become reliant on big brother as the fountain from whence all your angst springs, which is basically what we have today in far too many instances — meaning there is government, there is menacing government, and there are groups that anoint themselves and are in the business of providing relief from government.  See the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, and the list goes on and on.  This is what I call the revolving door.  It’s why it is impossible to shrink leviathan.  It is going to resist every effort and every attempt to do so, specifically because its enlargement is too good for too many people.  There’s too much distribution and redistribution of wealth going around.  It’s guarded, in other words.  It’s like Fort Knox.  You’re probably better off trying to break into Fort Knox.  Back to the story, which is an intriguing one:

[reading]

“Before Cincinnati, you had a bunch of people who wanted to turn the NRA into a sports publishing organization and get rid of guns,” recalls one of the rebels, John D. Aquilino, speaking by phone from the border city of Brownsville, Tex.

What unfolded that hot night in Cincinnati forever reoriented the NRA. And this was an event with broader national reverberations. The NRA didn’t get swept up in the culture wars of the past century so much as it helped invent them — and kept inflaming them. In the process, the NRA overcame tremendous internal tumult and existential crises, developed an astonishing grass-roots operation and became closely aligned with the Republican Party.

Today it is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared. [Mike: That would make it the most powerful lobby and organization on the planet.] There is no single secret to its success, but what liberals loathe about the NRA is a key part of its power. These are the people who say no.

They are absolutist in their interpretation of the Second Amendment. The NRA learned that controversy isn’t a problem but rather, in many cases, a solution, a motivator, a recruitment tool, an inspiration.

[end reading]

Mike:  Trust me, ladies and gentlemen, when I tell you that the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, improperly read, does breed and does inculcate and does create some of the most, if not the most, politically passionate people on the face of the planet.  It doesn’t matter what the historical record says.  It doesn’t matter the intent of the Second Amendment.  None of that matters.  The only thing that matters is that they are animated about it and it must be protected, preserved and defended as we understand it.  So much deference is given to the founders and framers.  Oh, what great men they were!  They were so wonderful and smart and they saw into the future and they knew an Obama was going to come along and grab our guns, so they implemented the Second Amendment and it holds sway from here to the Ice World of Hoth, through the Stargate and back.  These framers, because they knew that, that’s why they gave it to us.  God told the framers to give that to us.

This is such an historical inaccuracy, ladies and gentlemen.  I would suggest to you that it is the largest distortion of the Constitution.  You love to claim that the libs have forced this abortion rights stuff on our hands, and they have, using the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to incorporate certain parts of it to justify the murdering and taking of innocent life, and that is correct.  Sans the loss of life, the perversion of the Second Amendment and this idea of incorporating, which is to say making the first eight amendments to the Constitution applicable to the states and every city in the land, is as equally heinous and perverted.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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