by Chris Bodenner
In the latest Atlantic, Adam Winkler crafts a concise and compelling history of guns in America. One of the many ironies addressed:
In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. … Frederick’s model law had three basic elements.
The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.
The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms.
Another great nugget:
As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”
Then, in one short generation between the 1960s and ’80s, that poster boy morphed from a black urban radical to white rural radical. And who was one of the most consequential advocates for gun control during that shift? Governor Reagan.
Winkler’s whole piece is worth your time.
The Dish 