Where I live, the only gun club in the city mandates NRA membership in order to join, which means if you want a range to shoot at, and you don’t wanna be in the NRA, you gotta go out of town. A lot of the local places are like that; probably because I’m in Mass and the gun culture here is super defensive about being filled with Republicans and Trump cultists, so they make it real hard for anybody who isn’t part of the cult to get access to ranges and lessons and whatnot.
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And then the claims of NRA apologists are even crazier than the NRA’s own bullshit. That the NRA was founded to fight the KKK. (LOL, no) That the NRA was instrumental in supporting the civil rights movement, specifically pointing to Robert F. Williams getting an NRA charter and fighting back against the KKK. (Except what they completely fail to mention is that he got that charter by being extremely careful to reveal no information that would indicate he was black, because had they suspected, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have gotten the charter. Strangely, people pushing this narrative can’t come up with any other examples.)
Looking at archived versions of the NRA website and how early other people were pushing this whole “civil rights” nonsense, it seems like other people started making the claim before the NRA did. Which makes me wonder who started it.
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Hoo boy! I’ll bet NRA members would not be pleased to see where their dues are going. How can we get this info to them?
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Hm… there is probably a connection where certainly people wishing to promote that ideology ended up in positions of influence in the NRA.
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No, no, this could work. Everybody gets a mansion. Well, maybe not a whole mansion per person, but certainly a better solution than only a few people having mansions.
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I think revoking their non-profit status is the FIRST thing the new administration should do. THEN launch the investigation starting at Wayne, his wife, his dog and goldfish and work your way down.
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They could try to care more about the optics of not trying to stem the body count. I am not disagreeing them might avoid doing it. However I think it is long past optics and the cancerous mass needs to be removed. If gun people want to salvage the NRA they need to take back control of the organization.
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I assume that the architectural abomination in the photo attached to the headline is the place that LaPierre purchased; not just some random McMansion (WFT is up with those buttresses?)? If so, are those massive windows bullet proof?
Well, given what their history is, being truthful would hardly paint them in a positive light; I mean, won’t somebody think of the optics!? “I had to lie about my terrible actions; otherwise people would think the worse of me! Waddaya mean, I could stop doing horrible things?!” 
The Shady Lobbymonster’s version of the Bad Cops, “I feared for my life.”
I think it is “Zoning Laws”.
Hey, look, this special snowflake needs a “safe place”, okay… it just happens to be a 10k square foot mansion-shaped “safe place”.
Well, you don’t want to train up the enemy, do you?! 
I’m sure it will be front page news on the NRA’s newsletter. 
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Headline was missed opportunity. His would-be abode should be titled “Stately Wayne Manor”.
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Its fits pretty neatly into some long standing right wing and GOP bullshit.
See also the “but Lincoln” thing where by conservatives accuse Blacks of being ungrateful for not voting GOP forever and always because Lincoln freed the slaves. And the long standing efforts to co-opt MLK, among other things.
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The irony is that it’s just the modern NRA that’s terrible. By creating this myth of being the oldest civil rights organization, for instance, they’ve created two problems: one, they’ve created a weird definition of “civil rights” and two, that weird definition didn’t even apply to their own organization for most of its history. Their definition of ‘civil rights’ is ‘being against any and all laws that put restrictions on gun ownership or use, including common sense reform,’ and for almost all the NRA’s history they were just about gun training and safety which involved being for laws that put restrictions on gun ownership & use.
It’s one level of disingenuous to imply continuity with the earlier history of an organization, when its values and positions were the opposite of those currently held - they could be doing that with the NRA’s history, but they aren’t. The NRA and its apologists are operating on a different level of disingenuousness by making up total fictions about its history. Presumably because the historical actions of the NRA (in many ways, pro-gun control, in every way) don’t work at all with the image and values of the current one (rabidly anti-gun control).
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They could care about those optics more, but nothing I’ve seen convinces me that they would. The piles of bodies aren’t new and if a bunch of dead white children didn’t move the needle, then I doubt that looking to the same players is going to work when it is other groups.
If he’s really the Batman, it’s quite a cover.
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That’s taking it a bit far. For most of its history the NRA stayed out of the subject. When they did take pro-gun control stances it was often as part of highly racialized scare campaigns. A lot of our 1900-1970 fire arms restrictions were basically proposed and passed over fears of armed Blacks and immigrants. The old fashioned NRA wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t perfect or totally nice across its whole history.
Funny enough the modern NRA likes to point at those motivations as evidence that they are a civil rights organization. As proof the laws themselves are bad, and to claim that “gun control” is just an excuse to oppress minorities. As a pleading sort of “oh why won’t black people support our cause” thing.
Which is very much what I’m trying to get at. You see a similar thing with the (always white) Anti-Choice movement going on about how all Black babies are being aborted all the time, abortion is just eugenics! (Never mind the same crowd of folks is often deeply connected to white supremacist movements and horribly fixated on white genocide). It’s part of decades long strain of shallowly re-framing conservative thought as “for Blacks”, in the expectation that it will suddenly engender massive support from those communities at the polls. Without ever addressing those people’s actual real life concerns.
And then acting put out and bitter when it doesn’t work.
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My little double meaning - gun fondlers like to talk about the only “gun control” they support being a proper shooting stance/grip on the weapon. Proper shooting accuracy being, of course, the NRA’s raison d’être and a core mission for most of its history, the other being safety. (But also that the NRA’s input on gun laws, when they finally had some, involved being agreeable to restrictions for far longer than its current stance.)
Yes, indeed, and even if it was motivated by racism, they still came down on the side of gun control - e.g. the National Firearms Act of 1934 (the then NRA president: “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”) and the Gun Control Act of 1968. Their change into their modern lobbying group form in the '70s really looks like it was caused by gun laws impacting white people, but the modern NRA lets their desire to stop all gun laws supersede their racism.
So my point was just that they’re not misleadingly harkening back to the previous mission of the organization and pretending that’s their current mission - I mean, in the '70s, the leadership explicitly repudiated the positions the organization previously held as “no good” and “not valid” - they’re actually fabricating a fictional backstory and claiming it as their history, instead. They weren’t always a “civil rights” group in their modern, warped notion of advocating for unrestricted rights to carry around guns, and they certainly weren’t, in any way, pro (black) civil rights - as you point out, quite the opposite, if anything.
Oh yeah, I take your point - they definitely are using the exact same kind of hypocrisy and false concern of other reactionary organizations, absolutely, no question. They’re using the same tricks in trying to gain African American support, but the difference is that they don’t even have a real history they can misleadingly point to in order to do so - they’re having to make one up entirely.
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Do these abolitionist groups still exist? Also, the slaves didn’t have the right to be free, so it wasn’t a civil rights issue.
Wow. Outed yourself as a bigot and authoritarian. Nice.
Also… maybe continue to go fuck yourself, as the abolitionist movement continues, since the institution of slavery continues:
https://www.freedomcenter.org/enabling-freedom/modernabolition
[ETA] But what do I know. Please, skool us on the actual humanity of enslaved peoples through out history and their humanity, since you know so much about who deserves civil rights and who doesn’t.
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According to the Enlightenment, freedom is the default setting. Who had the right to make them slaves?
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Well, obviously, white people… they made the laws, after all. And whoever makes the laws gets to dictate reality. Any resistance to that is entirely illegitimate. /s
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