What do people get wrong about the history of gun control? Are there any myths you find yourself debunking? The gun issue hadn’t been politicized in the ’60s the way it has been in the last few decades, where it has become even more angry and strident 1968 was a year of political assassinations that shocked the nation. If that’s the case, why do you think that’s so? It seems harder to pass federal gun-control legislation now than it was back then. had nothing to say about assault weapons sales were tiny until the mid 1980s, when the Chinese dumped cheap assault weapons on the American market and sales began to take off. It doesn’t connect up with that phenomenon, which started in 1989 when a gunman shot up an elementary school. How does the Gun Control Act of 1968 relate to the political debate in recent years, in particular the conversation about mass shootings? The NRA didn’t endorse candidates before 1980. Reagan is the first president to speak at the NRA’s annual convention, and he was the first presidential candidate ever endorsed by the NRA, although past presidents were NRA members. The 1986 federal law was the culmination of the effort to try to roll back the 1968 law. by amending the ’68 law to allow for the interstate sale of rifles and shotguns as long as it was legal in the states of the buyer and seller, eliminating certain record-keeping requirements for ammunition dealers, and making it easier for individuals selling guns to do so without a license. It didn’t succeed, but the 1986 law does repeal or modify or blunt some of the aspects of the ’68 law. Portions of the ’68 law were modified by a law passed by Congress in 1986, the Firearms Owners Protections Act, which sought to repeal even more of the law. So how did that larger change eventually happen? It didn’t result in any political sea change - that doesn’t happen or another decade - but you could point to the law as one factor that eventually causes more dissident gun owners to say, ‘We’re getting beat up, our leaders aren’t doing the right kind of job, and we need a change.’ So the 1968 law was part of a larger political process that eventually led to a change of leadership within the NRA. A group of dissidents within the NRA felt the leaders were out of touch, not political enough and that the NRA wasn’t stepping in to defend gun owners, This dissident faction took over, and since then, the NRA became more political. From the nation’s beginnings, in fact and fiction, the gun has been provider and protector.”Ī change of leadership occurred at the NRA’s annual convention in 1977 in Cincinnati. folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them. The image, of course, is wildly overblown, but America’s own mythmakers are largely to blame. “All too widely, the country is regarded as a blood-drenched, continent-wide shooting range where toddlers blast off with real rifles, housewives pack pearl-handled revolvers, and political assassins stalk their victims at will. Remember, instead, the Gun,” the magazine had noted earlier that year, in a cover story about the role of guns in the United States, which was prompted by the assassination of Robert F. Forget, too, the affluence (vast, if still not general enough) and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. “Forget the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the U.S. It was the first major gun control measure in the United States in 30 years, but its passage earned this dismissive take in the pages of TIME: “better than nothing.” Johnson signed the Gun Control Act of 1968 into law on Oct. This week marks 50 years since President Lyndon B.
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