An un-regulated militia ?: Looking back at NRA's 100-year history in favor of gun control

Let's start with some historical facts about NRA and gun control in the United States:

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

Coleman, A. (2016) "When NRA Supported Gun Control" , TIME Magazine 

A decade later,  NRA led the enactment of further gun control legislation:

In 1929, Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre saw men disguised as Chicago police kill 7 rivals with machine guns. Bonnie and Clyde’s crime-and-gun spree from 1932-34 was a national sensation. John Dillinger robbed 10 banks in 1933 and fired a machine gun as he sped away. 

A new president in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made fighting crime and gun control part of his ‘New Deal.’ The NRA helped him draft the first federal gun controls: 1934’s National Firearms Act and 1938’s Gun Control Act.

The NRA President at the time, Karl T. Frederick, a 1920 Olympic gold-medal winner for marksmanship who became a lawyer, praised the new state gun controls in Congress. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” he testified before the 1938 law was passed. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

Rosenfeldt, A. (2013) The NRA Once Supported Gun Control. Salon

The current position of the National Rifle Association (NRA) against any kind of gun control is historically speaking a red herring and, arguably, an infringement of the Second Amendment -the one that states that:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." .

 Consistent with that first sentence of the Second Amendment -usually invoked to protect the individual right to bear arms- states and federal government are charged with keeping "well regulated" militias. That is a clear mandate for strictly controlling with regulations the purchase, carrying and use of arms of any kind.

In fact, creating and keeping "a well-regulated militia" could (and perhaps should) include charging states and communities (the levels of independent government Second Amendment was meant to preserve to prevent federal tyranny) with organizing armed citizens to protect their schools, churches and neighborhoods helping and complementing the police. That would channel their enthusiasm for and expertise in guns towards positive, measurable social impact. Such as lowering mass-shootings at schools and churches near zero.

Rampant crime waves like those in the days of Capone and Luciano were addressed by the NRA by promoting successful gun control laws, such as the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, that imposed licensing and controls to sell and buy arms and was replaced by the Gun Control Act of 1968, .    In both cases, NRA supported the gun control laws. At the time of its passage in 1968, NRA executive vice president Franklin Orth wrote in American Rifleman that "the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with".

It was only in 1977 when a group with extreme anti-regulation positions seized control of NRA
and turned into political lobbying by targeting lawmakers "scoring" their votes and targeting
those who didn't agree with the new NRA positions pouring billions against them in campaigns.

Along the entire US history, Black Americans found themselves often as targets of guns and racist violence.

Then they also turned frequently pro-gun and created their own armed militias -the Black Panthers- during the same period the NRA adopted its anti-gun control and White-supremacy extremist stance. During the violent and riotous 1970s, pro-gun Black Panthers claimed the Second Amendment and gun-control Republican Party Ronald Reagan passed the Mulford Act banning public arm carrying (open or concealed).

The latest attempt to "regulate the militia" was the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, that banned precisely the AR-15 and other war weaponry for a limited period (1994-1996) . The law passed Congress under the proviso of verifying its impact in a short 3-year period. The National Institute of Justice was charged with conducting the research in states that previously had and those that hadn't gun control.

The report, published in 1996, was inconclusive, even for the short period covered,.  stating that:

It appears that the assault weapons ban had clear short-term effects on the gun market, some of which were unintended consequences: production of the banned weapons increased before the law took effect and prices fell afterward. These effects suggest that the weapons became more available generally, but they must have become less accessible to criminals because there was at least a short-term decrease in criminal use of the banned weapons. Evidently, the excess stock of grandfathered assault weapons manufactured prior to the ban is, at least for now, largely in the hands of dealers and collectors. The ban’s short-term impact on gun violence has been uncertain, due perhaps to the continuing availability of grandfathered assault weapons, close substitute guns and large capacity magazines, and the relative rarity with which the banned weapons were used in gun violence even before the ban.

Based on those tentative early findings, COTUS didn't renew the ban, which to this day makes AR-15 and other assault weapons available to private citizens.

The continuing wave of mass killings in schools and universities might force immediate measures such as protecting schools with armed guards and check up points as airports and banks currently are. 

These kind of measures, long overdue, might not suffice to protect adequately students and teachers without an equally intensive reinforcement of background checks and banning online sales of arms that make now particularly easy for the mentally deranged and terrorists (domestic or otherwise) to have access to them.

In any case, it is paradoxical that the NRA, originally chartered to prepare a "well-regulated" militia of armed citizens and promote civil and lawful use of guns have degenerated into a major obstacle to the full application of the Second Amendment.

A careful inspection of how NRA officers get "elected" for such long terms -decades- and why individuals that would hardly get elected for a school district gained control of it shows that only 7 percent of NRA membership currently votes :

To their perpetual shame, the vast majority of NRA members eligible to vote simply don’t bother.  While the NRA has the reputation of being able to deliver huge numbers of votes for, or against, politicians in state and federal elections, the members take little interest in the internal political matters of their own organization.  While every NRA member eligible to vote receives a ballot in their regular NRA magazine, fewer than 7% bother to return them.  That’s a pretty poor showing for the oldest and most powerful civil rights organization in the country.

Knox, J. ( 2011) NRA Board Elections continued. The Firearms Coalition

Perhaps it's due time to take back the NRA replacing their current leadership with other more interested in upholding the Second Amendment in full.

NRA board elections should get at least the same public and press coverage than any district with 5 million+ electors.

Meanwhile, un-regulated militias (and loonies making "armies of one") will continue to grow with the uncivil discourse on both sides of the issue and all sides of an increasingly fragmented society.

Un-regulated white supremacists or anti-government militias that operate in fact as "boot camps" for potential mass shooters:

Un-regulated gun-carrying black Americans citizens and communities caught in the middle of drug wars and living in arms-infested drug ghettos, exposed to "black on black" violence (90 % + of black victims of homicide):

Un-civil militians might eventually force governments to enact gun protection and control and gun owners to take back the NRA (and out of extremist politics) and enact the gun control  and other measures at state and community level-.

The best hope for our schools and students is that states and communities can do it sooner rather than later to cut the spread of copycat mass killings in schools and unprotected public places.

Un-regulated militias armed and kept un-regulated by the current co-opted NRA show the wisdom of the Second Amendment -if we care for read it from the beginngs.