Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States, by Patrick J. Charles, Columbia University Press, 488 pages, $35
The National Rifle Association (NRA) “advocated tougher gun laws” in the 1920s and 1930s, New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2018. But since the 1970s, Kristof complained, the NRA “has been hijacked by extremist leaders” whose “tough resistance” to even the mildest gun control proposals contradicts “views (much more reasonable) than their members.”
Other NRA critics told the same story. This widely accepted account, argues U.S. Air Force historian Patrick J. Charles Vote Pistol, is “based more on myth than substance.” In fact, he shows, the NRA’s fight against gun control dates back to the 1920s. But in waging this battle, the organization has sought to project a reasonable image by presenting itself as open to compromise. This public relations effort, Charles says, is the main source of the mistaken impression that “the NRA was once the leading advocate for gun control.”
Charles also aims to dispel the idea that the NRA’s power comes from its ability to mobilize voters against elected officials who defy its wishes. Since “commanding the political fight against firearms controls from the Revolver Association of the United States” a century ago, he says, the NRA has been adept at defeating proposed gun restrictions by encouraging its members to grill lawmakers with complaints. While such direct communications tend to make a big impression, Charles argues, they are a misleading measure of the electoral penalty that politicians risk suffering by supporting gun control.
Vote Pistol– covering the first eight decades of the 20th century, ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 – presents a wealth of new material to support its main theses. But the book is marred by many small errors, which appear on almost every page and typically involve words that are misused, misspelled, misplaced, or missing. More substantively, Charles is sharply critical of the NRA’s rhetoric and logic, but pays little attention to similar weaknesses in the arguments deployed by gun control advocates.
In his previous work, Charles described the NRA’s understanding of the Second Amendment as a modern invention. He alludes to that position in Vote Pistol when he claims that the “broad view of individual rights” accepted by the US Supreme Court is based on “historical sleight of hand”.
Contrary to the Court’s claims, Charles believes that the Second Amendment was not originally intended to protect an individual right unrelated to service in the militia. That idea, according to his 2018 book Armed in America, first emerged in the 19th century. Even then, Charles says, the Second Amendment was considered consistent with norms opposed by the contemporary gun rights movement. His lack of sympathy for the idea that the right to armed self-defense should be treated like other colors of civil liberties Vote Pistolit is a seemingly neutral account.
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As early as 1924, NRA secretary-treasurer C.B. Lister declared that “anti-gun law can intelligently be viewed only from the point of view of a public menace.” The organization soon began to act on this attitude by opposing new gun legislation.
Charles argues that the conventional narrative exaggerates the significance of the 1977 NRA convention in Cincinnati, where “hardline gun rights advocates” replaced leaders they perceived as insufficiently zealous in protecting the Second Amendment. “Many academics,” he says, see this development as “a kind of gun rights revolution, forever transforming the NRA from a politically moderate sports, hunting, and conservation organization into an extreme, uncompromising lobbying arm.” “. This view, he suggests, is belied by the NRA’s previous fifty years of lobbying against gun restrictions and its explicit adoption of a “no compromise” position seven years earlier.
Here Charles’s sloppy writing obscures his meaning. “This is not to say that the Cincinnati riot is insignificant in the pantheon of gun rights history,” he writes. “It certainly is.” He presumably means that it is Not insignificant. This is just one of several errors that would have been detected by any reasonably observant editor or proofreader. While generally minor, they sometimes raise doubts about the book’s sources.
According to Charles, for example, a survey conducted by the NRA in 1975 included this question: “Do you believe your local police should carry firearms to arrest and kill suspects?” We can assume that the word AND, which radically changes the meaning of the question, was inserted accidentally. But it’s unclear whether the incident was blamed on Charles or the NRA.
Despite such conundrums, Charles is on solid ground in arguing that the NRA has often described even relatively modest regulations as the first step toward mass disarmament. But he also shows that the NRA has blocked policies that would have substantially limited the right to keep and bear arms. Charles seems reluctant to acknowledge that such proposals have given credence to the NRA’s warnings.
The National Firearms Act of 1934, for example, originally would have covered pistols, machine guns, and short-barreled rifles. The law required registration of those guns and imposed a $200 tax on transfers, designed to be prohibitive, equivalent to about $4,600 today. If Congress had adopted the original version of that bill, ownership of what the Supreme Court would later describe as “the quintessential self-defense weapon” would have been severely restricted.
More generally, Charles describes the NRA’s concerns about gun registration as overblown, bordering on paranoia. But while registration is not necessarily a prelude to prohibition, it is a practical prerequisite for any effective confiscation scheme, and such schemes have been given serious consideration even since the debate over the National Firearms Act.
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In 1969, a bipartisan majority of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, appointed the previous year by President Lyndon B. Johnson, recommended confiscation of firearms from those who had not demonstrated “a special need for self-protection.” Charles says that Richard Nixon, Johnson’s successor, was initially inclined to support a gun ban. Although “his advisors convinced him otherwise”, politics remained an open question.
The National Coalition to Ban Handguns was founded in 1974. Two years later, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson urged Congress to “immediately ban the importation, manufacture, sale, and possession of all firearms.” Congress never did. But cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., banned firearms through laws that the Supreme Court ultimately struck down. In this context, it is not difficult to understand why the NRA opposed national gun registration, which was supported by prominent lawmakers such as Senator Joseph Tydings (D–Md.) and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R–Pa. .).
Charles notes that Scott repudiated his support for registration in 1970 because he feared it might cost him reelection, and describes several similar reversals. But Charles claims the NRA’s barking was worse than his biting. Although the idea that the NRA and other gun rights groups could swing elections became widely accepted starting in 1968, he says, a closer look at the races in which they allegedly did so makes that proposition dubious.
Charles is equally skeptical of the idea that policies such as federal restrictions on inexpensive guns known as “Saturday Night Specials” and California’s 1967 ban on carrying loaded firearms without a permit harken back to gun control’s racist roots. Scholars such as Fordham University law professor Nicholas Johnson and UCLA law professor Adam Winkler have suggested that a racial motivation can be inferred from the context of such policies. While the circumstantial evidence in both cases seems quite strong to me, Charles would apparently only be satisfied by explicit statements of anti-black animus.
Charles’ skepticism does not extend to the reasoning behind gun restrictions that the NRA has often opposed and sometimes accepted. Once Congress eliminated handguns from the National Firearms Act, for example, the rationale for limiting short-barreled rifles – which were relatively easy to conceal – became nonsensical. And does anyone seriously assume that the 1968 ban on mail-order rifles had any significant impact on violent crime?
Nor does Charles delve into the logic of the categories of “prohibited persons” established by the Gun Control Act of 1968 and expanded by subsequent legislation. You might think that a policy of disarming millions of Americans without a history of violence would merit a little more discussion, especially since the NRA supports that policy, despite the organization’s supposedly steadfast defense of gun rights.
Such compromises, which subordinate the right to armed self-defense to legislative fiat, help explain the emergence of groups that position themselves as more assertive than the NRA, such as the Second Amendment Foundation and Gun Owners of America. Charles presents compelling evidence that the NRA’s resistance to gun control long predates the 1970s. But so does the NRA’s acquiescence in gun control, which continues to this day.
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