how did the NRA morph

[Doc Holliday 1950]

As I researched the start & why the NRA came into exist, I found that it's no longer existing as it was when it was started. As I understood it, the NRA was started to be the voice of farmers & hunters & founded to advance rifle marksmanship, the modern NRA, which has evolved, continues to teach firearm safety and competency. The organization also publishes several magazines and sponsors competitive marksmanship events.[8] According to the NRA, it has 6 million members as of May 2018.[3]
However, it seems to me that, like many organizations,the NRA has changed to be not the voice of our citizens, but the voice of the companies that makes firearms. Obviously I have no problem with the ability to own & carry weapons. I would guess that 99% of the Forum readers/posters are very responsible gun owners & this post has nothing to do with them.
My biggest concern is that too many people who should never have access to firearms can do so. I give you evidence that the shooter in Stoneman Fl. school
was mentally unfit to have access to any firearms. He was in special classes since childhood & as he grew up, the State of Florida denied service him when he changed schools & when he needed help the most. He lost the only lifeline that kept him from doing great harm to others. Now, how does this affect the NRA?? Instead of demanding that people like him should never have the ability to own a gun, Our NRA came out & wanted our schools to arm our teachers. Am I the only person who sees the disconnect of this? Arming our teachers?????????????
Last, I'd like the Forum to weigh into this & how do we protect our children and our general population from people who have no darn rights to own/carry guns?

 

[Ruga Booga]

They will be protected by teachers with guns, at school anyway

 

[zxcvbob]

The organization that's the voice of the gun manufacturers (there actually is one) is the NSSF, not the NRA.

I don't think there's any serious call to arm the teachers. Just stop disarming them; that's just one part of the solution, but it's a very inexpensive part.

 

[Onward Allusion]

I don't see anything wrong with teachers being armed in the classroom as long as it was of their own volition and the teachers participate in required training (typically 40 hours) for auxiliary LE and maintain annual qualifications, including physical fitness.

Heck, if parents trust their kids to the schools, why shouldn't parents trust qualified teaches with guns to protect their kids?

Last, I'd like the Forum to weigh into this & how do we protect our children and our general population from people who have no darn rights to own/carry guns?

Uphold current laws, hold our LE agencies accountable when they drop the ball, and invest in mental health?

 

[44 AMP]

Last, I'd like the Forum to weigh into this & how do we protect our children and our general population from people who have no darn rights to own/carry guns?

ok, I'll tackle this one first...

Since this is the Law and Civil Rights forum, I'll try to focus on that.

"people who have no darn rights to own/carry guns" are called prohibited persons, and the law is clear what legal steps have to happen before they are legally prohibited persons.

There is a huge difference between them, and people who, in your, or my opinion have no business having a gun. And, abso-fracking-lutely there are people who should not have guns..
BUT, until the legal system makes them prohibited persons, they have the same rights as the rest of us.

Period.

It's far from perfect, but it is our system. If you've got a better idea, I'm willing to listen.

However, it seems to me that, like many organizations,the NRA has changed to be not the voice of our citizens, but the voice of the companies that makes firearms.

I would point out the distinction that the NRA is not the voice of our citizens, but a membership organization. Nearly all the members are our citizens, but there is no requirement that I know of to be a US citizen in order to belong to the NRA.

if you are wondering how & why the NRA changed from an organization focused solely on marksmanship and gun safety, you need to do a little research into the history of gun control in the US.

Essentially, the NRA wound up in the role of watchdog of our rights and political activism by default. There was no one else capable of taking on the task at the time.

"The NRA works for the gun makers" is a mantra the anti-gun people have been pushing, and pushing hard for decades. If you are already drinking that Kool-Aid, it may be too late...

My biggest concern is that too many people who should never have access to firearms can do so. I give you evidence that the shooter in Stoneman Fl. school
was mentally unfit to have access to any firearms. He was in special classes since childhood & as he grew up, the State of Florida denied service him when he changed schools & when he needed help the most. He lost the only lifeline that kept him from doing great harm to others. Now, how does this affect the NRA?? Instead of demanding that people like him should never have the ability to own a gun, Our NRA came out & wanted our schools to arm our teachers. Am I the only person who sees the disconnect of this? Arming our teachers?????????????

Ok, I do understand the concern, there are LOTS of people in this world who should not have access to dangerous objects.

The Florida case is a case that involves the first point I addressed. You can say the system failed, or failed to act in time, but did it really?? You or I might think so, because the shooting wasn't prevented. But is that really a realistic opinion?? No system if infallible, and no one can accurately see another's true thoughts.

Maybe that kid snapped because he "lost his lifeline" but without a statement from him saying so, its all just a guess.

Why didn't the NRA jump on the wagon and rave about how people like him should never have the ability to have a gun???

MAYBE, because the fact is, that until he pulled the trigger on innocent people, he had not committed any crime serious enough to be made a prohibited person.
The point I'm trying to make here is that no matter if you or I or someone else thinks someone is a "ticking timebomb", until/unless you can get the system to see that as well, they cannot legally be prevented from exercising their civil rights. ALL of their civil rights.

Anything else is prior restraint. The NRA isn't going to argue for that. No rational person would. DO take a moment and look at the difference between what the NRA says, and what the media says the NRA says.

Arming teachers? Not quite the same thing as allowing teachers to arm themselves at work.

and then there's this..

I don't see anything wrong with teachers being armed in the classroom as long as it was of their own volition and the teachers participate in required training (typically 40 hours) for auxiliary LE and maintain annual qualifications, including physical fitness.

I don't see anything wrong with teachers being armed in the classroom as long as it was of their own volition and the teachers met all the standard state CCW requirements.

IF the state issues you a license to be armed in public, why do you think extra requirements are needed to be armed at a school?? If you want teachers trained to the level of cops before you feel safe letting them be armed, then you better ensure your school only hires cops to be teachers.

And wouldn't that make everyone happy???
(the question is meant to be rhetorical, but if you have to have an answer, the answer is "no, it wouldn't.")

 

[Don P]

The Florida case is a case that involves the first point I addressed. You can say the system failed, or failed to act in time, but did it really?? You or I might think so, because the shooting wasn't prevented. But is that really a realistic opinion?? No system if infallible, and no one can accurately see another's true thoughts.

For what it's worth, on last nights local news (here in central FL) the shooter was having issues as early as the 3rd grade so I'll say the system failed BIG TIME. Just my point of view from what the media is presenting on the subject for what that's worth.

 

[rickyrick]

I don’t get why everyone is cool with Joe Blow carrying in the Walmart but somehow teachers can’t be trusted and trained to use a gun. If a person can’t be trusted with a gun, they probably shouldn’t be around children anyway.

Not saying they have to carry a gun.

 

[Wag]

What 44 Amp said.

Freedom comes with risks. If you want the freedom to own a gun, you have to grant that freedom to others who may not exercise that freedom as responsibly as you do. Same with driving cars, owning a house, writing articles for the news, etc.

It's like the old saw about wanting to give up your freedom for safety and security and losing them all in the long run.

--Wag--

 

[Longhorn1986]

Seems to me that the First Amendment is a whole lot more dangerous than the Second. Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Mao Tse Tung are credited with killing about 30-50 million or so. Doubt more than a handful died at their hand. All they did was give speeches.

 

[Pahoo]

If I totally agreed, we would both be wrong

Doc,
I have read a number of your previous post and generally in step. This post, not so much and this time, If I agree with you we would both be wrong....

Every animal That runs, swims or flies has been the natural God given right of self protection. My Bible says so and so far, so does my Constitution.

One of daughters is a school teacher, in a very liberal state and I check with thought on this and we agree that teachers should not be forced armed themselves but when and if she has to kick it up, she will be ready. Evil is getting closer to our doors. ……


Wishing you well and
Be Safe

 

[rickyrick]

As soon as they figure out how to farm out 2nd amendment rights , violations out to tech companies like they have with the 1st amendment, they’ll implement ASAP.

Right now the tech companies have control of the 1st amendment... that’s a pretty good start at eroding the constitution.

 

[turkeestalker]

I know that 44 AMP's statement about Kool-Aid is meant jokingly, but he's serious about what he's saying and I agree.
I believe that the point where the real problem comes in is when our own brothers in arms, (so to speak), begin to believe all of the propaganda shoved so relentlessly down our collective throats by our opposition.
They play on our fear and emotions so effectively that Goebbels would've been impressed by their cunning and manipulative prowess.

 

[rickyrick]

Well said!

 

[dogtown tom]

Doc Holliday 1950 As I researched the start & why the NRA came into exist, I found that it's no longer existing as it was when it was started. As I understood it, the NRA was started to be the voice of farmers & hunters & founded to advance rifle marksmanship, the modern NRA, which has evolved, continues to teach firearm safety and competency.

while I'm sure that some of the original NRA members were farmers, I know with certainty that being "their voice" wasn't the express purpose of the organization.

However, it seems to me that, like many organizations, the NRA has changed to be not the voice of our citizens, but the voice of the companies that makes firearms.

What anti gun website did you find this statement? While firearms manufacturers certainly provide major funding for political lobbying efforts, the actual membership elects the board of directors of the organization that for all practical purposes IS OUR SECOND AMENDMENT VOICE.

Obviously I have no problem with the ability to own & carry weapons. I would guess that 99% of the Forum readers/posters are very responsible gun owners & this post has nothing to do with them.

But you have a problem with the only organization who effectively fights for those rights on a national scale?

My biggest concern is that too many people who should never have access to firearms can do so. I give you evidence that the shooter in Stoneman Fl. school was mentally unfit to have access to any firearms.

You thinking he was mentally unfit isn't a prohibiting factor under federal law. A person must first be adjudicated as such via due process of law. Nicholas Cruz, despite warnings never went through such a process.

He was in special classes since childhood & as he grew up, the State of Florida denied service him when he changed schools & when he needed help the most. He lost the only lifeline that kept him from doing great harm to others.

That's not exactly what happened.

Now, how does this affect the NRA?? Instead of demanding that people like him should never have the ability to own a gun,

You mean deny his civil rights before he received due process? Hindsight is always much clearer...…….do you have a list of names of people you think should lose their civil rights although they have never violated any law or been convicted of any crime?

Our NRA came out & wanted our schools to arm our teachers. Am I the only person who sees the disconnect of this? Arming our teachers?????????????

<-----public school teacher whose school district prohibits employees from carrying a firearm on campus. A teacher who along with thousands of others would love to have the ability to protect themselves and their students from the evil doers who don't ask permission to do bad things.

The "disconnect" I see is that you only believe those who meet your criteria should be able to exercise their Second Amendment rights. That's shameful.

Last, I'd like the Forum to weigh into this & how do we protect our children and our general population from people who have no darn rights to own/carry guns?

1. Allow teachers and any other citizen to fully exercise their rights under the Constitution.
2. For once stop blaming the gun and blame the person. We don't blame Chevrolet when a drunk runs over a pedestrian do we? We don't even blame Budweiser.
3. Stop passing the buck on the mentally ill.

 

[Unclenick]

My biggest concern is that too many people who should never have access to firearms can do so. I give you evidence that the shooter in Stoneman Fl. school was mentally unfit to have access to any firearms.

He was unfit and should have been blocked from purchasing guns and would have been if the system had not been circumvented. The reason he was not prohibited is not that he was ignored or fell through "cracks" in the system. The system had all it needed to prevent his buying guns legally handed to it on a silver plater. Instead, the school system and county opted to take a bribe of over fifty million dollars from the Federal Government through the Promise program which required them to refuse to arrest too many young people committing crimes for fear of stigmatizing them for life, the fact they were a danger to society notwithstanding. Cruz and his brother were detained for arrestable offenses a total of something like 48 times between them but were never formally arrested and charged because of how that would conflict with the Promise program objectives that authorities had taken the money to comply with. If Cruz had just been formally arrested and charged at any one of his qualifying incidents it would have created the record that needs to be reported to the FBI to put someone on the prohibited purchaser list.

In the end, this was a case of different branches of government working toward two mutually exclusive purposes; creating NICS on the one hand, which was supposed to stop prohibited buyers, then sabotaging the ability of NICS to work by means of another well-intentioned but naive program that was supposed to help youth. But it's not the only conflict. In the case of the dangerously mentally ill in general, the system depends on the completely voluntary revelation by a treating doctor of the subject's condition, as the HIPAA law prevents the records from being accessed by NICS. Enact NICS, enact HIPAA, and bingo, another conflict.

Government is frequently at cross-purposes with itself. Milton Friedman pointed that out long ago. It's part of government's intrinsic propensity to waste money and resources.

As to arming teachers, I don't think its a magic bullet, but I do think it's better than doing nothing at all, as it causes a prospective shooter to consider his fantasy of controlling the power of life and death over others may be interrupted by his own incapacitation before it gets very far. I think you'd be surprised, despite the incredulous responses to the idea by members of the mainstream news media, to learn how common it already was at the time of the Stoneman shooting. When Stoneman was still in the news cycle, I know I was surprised to read that something like 84% of school districts here in Ohio already had one or more armed teachers or staff on campus. Texas has a rural district that has had armed teachers for over a decade and who began to do so because of how much time it takes first responders to get to them (20 minutes; though I would point out there are cities where it can take that long, too). They found arming teachers preferable to having uniformed armed guards that would create what they see as a prison atmosphere they believed would not be conducive to learning. This is an issue with complexities that aren't revealed by cursory examination.

One of the other moderators found this article, which explains how to really stop school shootings. Apparently, we've known how for 20 years but refused to fund it.

All crimes have the elements of means, motive, and opportunity. People are evolved to solve problems. Take away a particular means or a particular opportunity and a criminal sees problems to solve and can figure out workarounds. It is if and only if you eliminate his motive that you are certain to stop criminal from committing a crime. The above-linked article is a way to do that in the case of school shooters.

Gun control suffers two disadvantages in addressing the means, motive, and opportunity triangle. First, it doesn't eliminate a means, but rather eliminates just one path to that means. Second, because, as Kleck et al and others have shown, opportunistic criminals will abort crimes if they think the victim might be armed, so gun ownership is, ironically, an often silent means of self-defense. Thus, when you eliminate gun ownership, criminal opportunities increase, and this strikes me as likely one reason gun laws turn out to be so ineffective at turning crime stats. In the end, no more effective than drug laws have proven to be.

I recently looked at some historic crime data and found that when England enacted its first gun control law (1903) the U.S. to England/Wales homicide rate was about 10:1. Today the ratio has dropped to about 4.5:1. You'd think that if either the U.K.'s original and subsequent additional gun control laws worked or the U.S.'s massive gun ownership caused crime, the ratio would have grown overall, not declined. To be sure, it's been back at the original 10:1, give or take a little, during our homicide rate peak years of 1980, 1993 and 1995, but England and Wales today have a homicide rate about 50% higher than in 1903 and the US rate is about 33% lower, which changes are the inverse of one another. Sure, that ratio has varied a good bit in the intervening peak years, as the UK's homicide rates are generally more stable than ours, but the fact it is possible at any time for us to wind up better off than a hundred and fifteen years ago and despite all of England's additional gun laws and all of our much greater gun ownership seems to me to be a pretty severe indictment of the notion gun laws are effective crime and violence control measures.

 

[Mike38]

…..how do we protect our children and our general population from people who have no darn rights to own/carry guns?

I believe it was the NRA that coined the phrase:

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.

The system fails on a daily basis. Mental Health issues are seldom to no longer addressed by the Government, local state or Federal. Every mental health facility with in a 100 miles radius of me here in north central Illinois has closed in the past 30 years, and there used to be many of them.

 

[44 AMP]

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.

While its a bit simplistic, and ridiculed by the other side, it is essentially true, and perhaps, more to the point, a bit easier for 21st century minds to understand than the classic quote,

All that is needful for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing

 

[RETG]

You cannot protect your children at all times. If a shooting happens it does not have to happen inside a school, it can happen in the parking lot or the nearest mall.
You cannot take the guns away from those who should not have them, cause they will still get them (look at England/Australia, etc).

People have to understand that no matter how well you look after your children, they can always be harmed or killed. If not via a gun, then a drunk driver and that one I know for a fact can happen.

 

[Unclenick]

It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to protect them. Modern vaccinations and child safety seats and flame retardant treated clothing are all examples of doing better about this than parents could a century ago. But when people say they want gun control to "guarantee" there will never be another school shooting, they are experiencing a utopian fantasy. As David Bergland once pointed out: "Utopia is a place where everyone always has everything they want and nothing ever goes wrong. Utopia is not one of the options."

 

[turkeestalker]

Bottom line is that freedom is dangerous.
For myself the benefits of living 'free', far outweigh the risks.
Some things simply aren't within our power to control, no matter how deeply we wish them to be.