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  • 2018-03-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Was the NRA Founded to Protect Black People from the Ku Klux Klan? (en)
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  • Since its inception as a group dedicated to providing marksmanship training in 1871, the National Rifle Association has grown into a powerful lobbying organization with a single overriding purpose: to promote and defend the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Some of the NRA's rhetorical tactics on behalf of gun ownership have been condemned as racially divisive, exploiting wedge issues such as illegal immigration and urban crime to sow fear and increase membership, critics say. In one frequently cited instance, the NRA's executive vice president Wayne LaPierre penned an editorial encouraging Americans to buy more guns than ever to meet a purported threat of border-crossing gang members bent on the murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping of law-abiding citizens. He went on to describe south Brooklyn in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (when the borough actually underwent a lull in violent crime) as a hellish world where looters ran wild and anyone who failed to get home before dark might not get home at all. Some NRA supporters have countered accusations that the group has been racially insensitive by claiming the opposite is true — that the organization was, in fact, founded in order to combat racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and ensure that African Americans, particularly freed slaves, could defend themselves against racist attacks: One version of this revisionist narrative was laid out by conservative Christian author David Barton during a 2013 appearance on Glenn Beck's television show, The Blaze, and summarized on Beck's web site as follows: Barton's statement echoed one made by Harry Alford, the president and chief executive officer of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, who had praised the National Rifle Association during a February 2013 press conference on gun control: The same claim has turned up in the form of social media memes emphasizing the NRA's purported role in training black Americans to fight back against the Ku Klux Klan: These sources fall short when it comes to providing evidence to support their claims, however. Indeed, the notion that the National Rifle Association originated as a group devoted to protecting freed slaves and driving out the Ku Klux Klan contradicts the NRA's own account of its origin (as posted on their web site): According to NRA co-founder George Wingate's own account in his 1896 History of the Twenty-Second Regiment of the National Guard of the State of New York, the organization was founded to fulfill a perceived need to provide marksmanship training for members of the armed forces, prompting his authorship of a rifle training manual and participation in the creation of the National Rifle Association: The NRA's mission statement, as published in the organization's 1873 Annual Report, tells the same story in greater detail: We found similar accounts in any number of books on the history of firearms and gun politics in the United States, including Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (2012), Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control (2003), and Gun Politics in America (2016). All of them cited the need for organized firearms training in the military as the primary motivation for the NRA's creation; none of them mentioned protecting freed slaves or doing battle against the Ku Klux Klan. While it is not impossible that some black Americans were indirect beneficiaries of the NRA's firearms training evangelism after the Civil War, we rate these revisionist notions about the group's founding purpose False. (en)
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