For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro-gun control organizations.
It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.
It is hard to believe that the NRA was committed to gun-control laws for most of the 20th century—helping to write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the NRA’s leaders helped write and lobby for the first federal gun control laws - the very kinds of laws that the post-1977 NRA labels as the height of tyranny.
The post-1977 NRA’s fabricated but escalating view of the Second Amendment was ridiculed by former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger—a conservative appointed by President Richard Nixon - in a PBS Newshour interview in 1991, where he called it “one of the greatest pieces of fraud - I repeat the word ‘fraud’- on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Burger would not have imagined that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008—13 years after he died—led by libertarian activist Justice Antonin Scalia—would enshrine that “fraud” into the highest echelon of American law by decreeing that the Second Amendment included the right to own a gun for self-protection in one’s home.
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