Quote of the Day
If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns,
In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.
Donald J. Trump
May 18, 2024
Accepting N.R.A. Endorsement, Trump Pledges to Be Gun Owners’ Ardent Ally – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
And what about the Trump attack on the Second Amendment? Is everyone supposed to overlook the bump stock ban under the Trump administration?
I’m not saying a Biden second term would be better than a Trump second term. But casting the contest as voting for the lesser of two evils would have a fair amount of validity.
A few elections ago with no good candidates, the popular phrase was “voting for the evil of two lessers”.
I suspect a politician’s definition of “ardent ally” is disturbingly flexible.
I agree.
I voted for Trump and I’ll vote for him again but I have no illusions about him. I seriously doubt if he even knew about the Second Amendment before he became president and he realized that people cared about it. When he brought Barr on board, who really is not friendly to 2A I knew then he didn’t have a clue.
I think his support of Christians falls into the same category. Just my opinion.
Yada, yada, yada, And somehow he just won’t quite be able to defund the ATF. Nor stop the murders.
Looks to me like they’re going to let Trump win so as to blame the collapse on right-wing-hater-white supremist, nazi-deplorable-homophobic-colonizers. (Though I am perplexed on how importing millions of criminal aliens isn’t colonizing??? I mean if you hate Chris Columbus and all?)
The real power is in the swamp. And what Chinese/clownworld pays the swamp to do.
You ain’t voting your way out of nuth’in gentle reader.
Trump isn’t a gun guy. Never has been. What he is, is a guy who makes deals in order to get what he wants. When it came time to cut a deal to prevent gun rights from getting steamrolled in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, he went to the NRA and asked them what they were willing to give up in order to protect gun rights.
The NRA’s answer was bump stocks. The NRA’s answer is always to give up something in a holding action, and they have always been one of America’s most pro-gun control groups.
The NRA has a long history of screwing over gun owners. In the 1920s, the National Revolver Association, the arm of the NRA responsible for handgun training, proposed regulations later adopted by nine states, requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, five years additional prison time if the gun was used in a crime, a ban on gun sales to non-citizens, a one day waiting period between the purchase and receipt of a gun, and that records of gun sales be made available to police. Florida becoming the 26th state to get rid of concealed weapons carry as a crime meant getting rid of that NRA proposal after 100 years.
During the 1930’s, the NRA helped shape the National Firearms Act of 1934. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make gun control a feature of the New Deal. The NRA assisted Roosevelt in drafting National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act, the first federal gun control laws. These laws placed heavy taxes and regulation requirements on firearms that were associated with crime, such as machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. Gun sellers and owners were required to register with the federal government and felons were banned from owning weapons. Not only was the legislation unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in 1939, but Karl T. Frederick, the president of the NRA, testified before Congress stating, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
After the assasination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald with an Italian military surplus rifle purchased from a NRA mail-order advertisement, NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth agreed at a congressional hearing that mail-order sales should be banned stating, “We do 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.”
The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967.
Then came 1968. The assassinations of JFK, jr and Martin Luther King prompted Congress to enact the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act brought back some proposed laws from 1934, to include minimum age and serial number requirements, and extended the gun ban to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In addition, it restricted the shipping of guns across state lines to collectors and federally licensed dealers. The only part of the proposed law that was opposed by the NRA was a national gun registry. In an interview in American Rifleman, Franklin Orth stated that despite portions of the law appearing “unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”
It wasn’t until a mini-revolt was staged at the 1977 NRA convention that there was a change in direction. A group of gun owners pushed back and deposed the old leaders in a move called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” Led by former NRA President Harlon Carter and Neal Knox, the revolt ended the tenure of Maxwell Rich as NRA executive vice president and introduced new bylaws. The Revolt at Cincinnati marked a huge change in direction for the NRA. The organization thereafter changed from “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and towards the defense of the right to keep and bear arms. The catalyst for this movement was that the NRA wanted to move its headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado. The new headquarters in Colorado was to be an “Outdoors center” that was more about hunting and recreational shooting than it was the RKBA.
I became a member of the NRA about a decade later and remained an annual member, until I became a life member about 15 years later. I believed for years that the NRA was fighting the good fight for gun owners. It wasn’t.
The NRA was always influenced by a group of Fudds who supported hunting, but hated guns that weren’t for hunting. The bureaucrats who were a part of the NRA’s organization always tried to steer towards hunting, eventually caused the organization to morph into an organization that used the threat of Democrat gun bans for fundraising.
LaPierre was able to use the large flow of money to fund his luxurious life on the company dime, including over $13 million each year for travel and a postemployment golden parachute worth $17 million. LaPierre testified in the NRA’s bankruptcy hearings about his annual weeklong trips to the Bahamas on the company dime.
All they were good at was bargaining away gun rights to the Democrat gun banners in exchange for money and power. That’s why my political donations for the past 15 years went to other gun rights organizations, and yours should, too.
Directly from the pages of the March 1968 edition of The American Rifleman, the NRA’s official monthly publication:
“the NRA has consistently supported gun legislation which it feels would penalize misuse of guns without harassing law-abiding hunters, target shooters, and collectors” – NRA president Karl T. Frederick
Note that the NRA President makes no mention of RKBA as anything other than support for the hobby of hunting. The article goes on to declare the NRA’s support for firearm registration, waiting periods, as well as prohibitions on sales of ammunition and firearms across state lines. The also express support for the prohibition of firearms to what they termed as “undesirables.”
The NRA is not, and never has been, a true supporter of the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. They should rename it the National Hunting Association. It can collapse and die for all I care. We don’t need them. There are other organizations out there doing far more for gun owners than buying private jets and expensive wardrobes for Wayne LaPierre.
As Lenin said; ” The best way to control the opposition is to lead it.”
As you say of the NRA, is the case for most all power in our country. They rarely bring up the text of 2A, and almost never read the simple words. “Shall not be infringed.”
Way to easy. No power for them in it.
Tell me when was the last presidential election that WASN’T a matter of voting for the “lesser of two evils”…..
That’s easy. 1792, which was the last time George Washington ran for President.
My state isn’t remotely purple.
As such, I’m not sure what I’m going to do but in the end it won’t really matter.
I missed the primaries this year. Shucky-dern. Most of my preferred candidates didn’t get much of anywhere anyway, and my vote wouldn’t have changed that in the slightest.
“Fix it” and “Blow the whole thing to kingdom come so we can start over again from scratch” aren’t really on the menu.
As DM (above) says, Trump is not, and never has been, a gun guy. I would be surprised if anyone marinated in NYC life and politics, or West Palm Beach society soirees, were a gun guy. I also don’t think Trump is gun guy now, and I cannot see him ever becoming a gun guy.
But I do think Trump has learned a lot since 2020. Exactly how much he has learned, and precisely about what; I would like to think he’s now been schooled on more of the gun issues, by whom and to what degree I do not know and the results remains to be seen, but I am willing to roll the dice with my ballot and find out. I know what happens in this country if the other guy wins.
As for the NRA, they became a mere footnote well over a decade ago, thanks to the Wayne & Friends Industrial Corruption and Mismanagement Complex; had I not paid for a Life Membership decades ago, and didn’t need an NRA membership for club membership, instructor certification, and to compete in some disciplines, I wouldn’t waste the money on a membership now.
As for SAF, FPC, GOA, JPFO – I have a membership with a couple and send a few bucks to each.
Don Jr. however is a gun guy.
Correct.