Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director Bob Kukla, in an extremely courageous act, confirmed that the independence of ILA, and its effectiveness in fighting repressive gun legislation had been threatened by the Management Committee, composed of the three top officers. As proof, Kukla played an openly recorded tape of the February 26 Management Committee meeting in which he was criticized for ILA’s opposition to Smith & Wesson’s proposal for national handgun licensing, and ILA’s opposition to the National Education Association’s anti-handgun position. Kukla’s evidence convinced the neutral members of the seriousness of the problems within NRA; although relatively few members in the meeting had known of the Federation’s reform program, they supported it overwhelmingly.
Neal Knox
July 1977
From The Gun Rights War, page 311.
[I have often heard of “The Cincinnati Revolution” within the NRA but had never gotten any details. The Gun Rights War has several articles by Neal Knox about the revolt. Wow! No wonder there was a revolt.
Smith & Wesson proposed national handgun licensing? Was there a boycott then? Or was the first boycott in early 2000 when they tried to force all dealers and distributors to abide by a “code of conduct”? The “code of conduct” would have required all sales at gun shows to go through a background check, prohibited dealers and distributors from selling “assault weapons” or standard capacity magazines, and numerous other backdoor Second Amendment infringements. Gun owners decided then and there that Smith & Wesson must die and we almost did it too. Why wasn’t it well publicized that the Smith & Wesson betrayal was nothing new and had sided with the anti-gun people 23 years earlier?
If there was a boycott in 1977 Smith & Wesson apparently had forgotten about it. Let’s hope all gun manufactures learned their lesson in 2000 and we don’t have to repeat it. We need to be fighting the enemies of freedom rather than our own.—Joe]