The Hidden History of the NRA

Those of us who are a certain age can remember the National Rifle Association back in the 1950s as being different from the NRA today.

Back then the emphasis was on gun safety and marksmanship and recreational shooting. The organization was even behind a number of gun control laws that developed as a reaction to the lawless 1920s (they helped to outlaw machine guns) and urban unrest of the 1960s (too many black people having easy access to guns). As hard as it is to believe today, there was no undue reliance on an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment.

There's an excellent history lesson on the NRA and how it got taken over by the paranoid libertarian wing of American politics as recently as 1977, The Surprising Unknown History of the NRA that is well worth the read.