National Rifle Association Quotes

Then the Communists set up a front organization, the National Rifle Association, to encourage the wide usage of guns of all sorts, and to battle any attempt to control guns as “unconstitutional.” Thus, they guaranteed that the murder rate in Unistat would always be the highest in the world. This kept the citizens in perpetual anxiety about their safety both on the streets and in their homes. The citizens then tolerated the rapid growth of the Police State, which controlled almost everything, except the sale of guns, the chief cause of crime.

Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids.

Where is outrage from the National Rifle Association? Where’s the damned NRA? The NRA claims to believe the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States grants all of our citizens the right to survive and protect their families with any gun they want. I guess that’s only true when those citizens are Caucasian! Does the Second Amendment apply if you’re a black man driving through a white neighborhood?

IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC’s editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.1 Batman had debuted in Detective Com-ics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman’s organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR’s solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2

This is comparable to the long fought battle over the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) and a popular stance that automatic weapons should be illegal while handguns should be permitted. Similarly, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, fought a hard battle in the 1970s and 1980s over the First Amendment and his right to publish any material regardless of content as it was a matter related to the freedom of expression. Gun control opponents, such as members of the National Rifle Association (NRA), do not want to outlaw fully automatic weapons because of the “what is next?” argument, which can be a slippery slope.

My mom had told me the stories about the first few years she’d lived here. The way she told it, she was such a criminal even the most God-fearing church ladies got bored of reporting on her; she did the marketing on Sunday, dropped by any church she liked or none at all, was a feminist (which Mrs. Asher sometimes confused with communist), a Democrat (which Mrs. Lincoln pointed out practically had “demon” in the word itself), and worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow). Beyond that, beyond not being a member of the right church or the DAR or the National Rifle Association, was the fact that my mom was an outsider.

Any revolutionary movement that builds a mass following will have to contend with the kind of state-orchestrated vilification and vigilante violence that plagued Paine’s life. Vitriol and violence will be unleashed, with the tacit approval of the state, on all who resist, even nonviolently. These reactionary movements, while defining themselves as the guardians of patriotism and the Christian faith, will draw on the deep reserves of racial hostility. The hidden agenda of right-wing militias, the Tea Party, the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association, and the survivalist cults is to ensure that guns will keep the home and family from being overrun by the crazed black hordes that will escape from their colonies in our urban slums.

There was also a little pamphlet, with a half page of instructions for putting the rifle together, six pages of instructions for joining the National Rifle Association. I could have figured out how to join the N.R.A. without those instructions, particularly since the pamphlet included an application for membership.

The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.

On Piers Morgan Tonight, Alan Dershowitz claimed, “[W]hat’s happening is the NRA is buying their data. They’re buying their facts. They’re hiring and commissioning so-called scholars to come up with the kinds of lies.”8 In another appearance he declared, “Your [John Lott’s] conclusions are paid for and financed by the National Rifle Association . . . This [Lott’s research] is junk science at its worst. Paid for and financed by the National Rifle Association . . . It [the NRA] only funds research that will lead to these conclusions.”9 But the NRA doesn’t fund empirical research for a simple reason—the media would ignore it.

the United States government was at the mercy of special-interest groups, lobbies like the National Rifle Association and the American Medical Association, the automobile and oil industries, every kind of defense manufacturer, how could democracy be served?

In the minds of many hunters , especially those who subscribe to the alarmist reckonings of the National Rifle Association, the primary threat to hunting is not suburban sprawl or wilderness destruction or the poisoning of our air and water. Rather, they believe that the primary threat to hunting lies within the government’s desire to take all the guns away. Animals will be running around everywhere, elk and bears will be banging down our doors, and there won’t be a thing we can do about it because of those damn liberals with their gun-control laws.

It’s hard to know exactly how many children are killed or maimed by guns because in 1996, Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark., at the behest of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and weapons manufacturers, attached the Dickey Amendment to a must-pass omnibus spending bill, making it illegal for the CDC to keep track of or analyze the data. Congress simultaneously cut the CDC’s budget by the exact amount it had been spending to track gun violence.10 (Sixteen years later, Dickey essentially apologized in a Washington Post op-ed, calling for research into gun violence.11 As he later told ABC, “I wish I had not been so reactionary.”12)

Derivatives salesmen typically played chess or mathematical computer games in their spare time. Derivatives salesmen typically did not shoot things. Scarecrow was the antithesis of the prototypical derivatives salesman. His nickname was apt. He had neither a math degree nor an enormous brain. When Scarecrow aimlessly whistled “If I Only Had a Brain,” no one stepped forward to disagree. What, then, was he doing in derivatives? Over time the salesmen asked that question less and less as they realized why Scarecrow had succeeded in selling derivatives. Ultimately, Scarecrow’s military talents proved far more valuable than mere math skills. He and others were able to persuade the rocket scientists that shooting was more effective than thinking. This was the key to Morgan Stanley’s new philosophy. As Scarecrow’s views proliferated, mathematical theorems were replaced by pseudo National Rifle Association slogans: Derivatives don’t kill people, people kill people. When derivatives are outlawed, only outlaws will have derivatives. The traders and salesmen tossed their math journals in the garbage and bought copies of Sun Tzu and other military how-to books. The results were favorable. As Scarecrow’s ideas about the art of war caught on, the derivatives group started to make some serious money.

What are confessions of faith to some are policy positions to others, identical to those espoused and promulgated by the National Rifle Association

In the recent article “The Secret of Scale” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Peter Murray looked at how advocacy organizations achieved true scale and predictable revenue.6 He found that organizations like AARP and the National Rifle Association (NRA) have expanded to provide lifestyle benefits, like group insurance, product discounts, and access to special events—going well beyond traditional advocacy.

The five million members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) are at the forefront of shooting and promoting shooting safety. And they have a proud record of achievement as well as activism. Perhaps you were not aware that: • More than 120,000 certified NRA instructors train about 750,000 gun owners every year.

caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle Association.

legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a mess, I said.

That explains in part why we go to great expense to rescue children who fall down mine shafts, but not children dying from preventable diseases. Economists call this the “rule of rescue.” If you know that someone is in danger and you know that you can help, you have a moral obligation to do so. If you don’t know about it, however, you have no obligation. Columnist Roger Simon speculates that’s one reason the National Rifle Association lobbied successfully to eliminate the program at the Centers for Disease Control that keeps track of gun deaths. If we don’t have to face what’s happening, we won’t feel obligated to do anything about it.

Frustrated at never being able to figure out which silver Prius was mine, I put a second Obama sticker on the bumper, because having only one made it indistinguishable from the rest. I suppose, if I really wanted to make it easier to find, I’d slap a National Rifle Association sticker on it.

Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a mess, I said. On this front, I had nothing terribly uplifting or encouraging to say.

Restricting the sale and use of guns became a salient political issue only after the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. The gun control laws enacted or seriously proposed were modest. When Congress was passing gun regulation in 1968, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president wrote that “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.” The GOP platforms of 1968 and 1972 supported gun regulation—and President Nixon, his speechwriter William Safire recalled, told him that “guns are an abomination” and that he would have outlawed handguns if he could. But violent crime had tripled in a decade, and in the late 1970s hysterics managed to take over the NRA, replacing its motto “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” with the second half of the Second Amendment—“The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” Within a decade, the official Republican position shifted almost 180 degrees to oppose any federal registration of firearms. In other words, fantasy was starting to hold its own against reason.