.... A man calling himself “A. Hidell” clipped the coupon and sent $21·45 to a Chicago-based mail order house to buy the military rifle. Hidell was Lee Harvey Oswald. After the assassination in Dallas, investigations angrily focused on the fact that it was possible to buy a rifle and ammunition sight unseen through the mail. Congress considered new gun laws. An NRA official testified, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Gun owners, however, contacted Congress to bury the bill. Lawmakers vowed an investigation of the gun lobby itself. As the decade unfolded, political divisions took on deep cultural dimensions, pitting rural and suburban culturally conservative white voters against younger, more diverse city dwellers. Race invariably intruded. American Rifleman started a new column, “The Armed Citizen,” which profiled vigilantes. Guns & Ammo magazine said supporters of tighter gun rules were “criminal-coddling do-gooders, borderline psychotics, as well as Communists and leftists who want to lead us into the one-world welfare state.” As Newark, Watts and Washington, DC, burned in urban rioting, and leading American public figures were assassinated, Americans began to worry we were distinctly violent. Historian Richard Hofstadter ruminated on America’s gun culture in a widely read article in the otherwise apolitical American Heritage. Gun politics deepened cultural divides, he noted. “The most gun-addicted sections of the United States are the South and the Southwest. In 1968, when the House voted for a mild bill to restrict the mail-order sale of rifles, shotguns and ammunition, all but a few of the 118 votes against it came from these regions. This no doubt has something to do with the rural character of these regions, but it also stems from another consideration: in the historic system of the South, having a gun was a white prerogative.” In a time of backlash, the NRA grew increasingly vocal. When lawmakers trifled with it, the gun lobby showed it could retaliate at the ballot box. For years after, politicians would whisper about the intense passion of gun owners, and how they “took out” a pro-gun control senator from Maryland, Joseph Tydings, whose pelt might as well have been mounted in the NRA’s waiting room. billmoyers/2014/06/12/the-rise-of-the-nra-2/
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 03:07:04 +0000
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