by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
In his “Standing Guard” column in the August 2017 issue of The American Rifleman, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association of America, focuses on the ongoing “media rage” against President Donald Trump and his promise of a better nation. He also discusses the media rage against supporters of the Second Amendment and, of course, the NRA.
In his historical review of the media’s treatment of the right to keep and bear arms, LaPierre, the longest serving executive vice president in the organization’s 145-year history, recalls and comments on the pivotal moment when the association, then less than a million strong, was redirected to a focus on political and legislative operations by its grassroots membership.
In his column, LaPierre writes:
“This year, we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of what has come to be known as the “Cincinnati Revolution”—the unique and proud moment in the history of the association when members rose up in a spontaneous movement and took back their NRA from internal players who were hell-bent on abandoning the defense of the right to keep and bear arms which they found embarrassing.”
He discusses the old forces within the NRA who planned to retreat from, if not abandon, defense of the Second Amendment, sell their then headquarters building in Washington, DC, and move to a quieter sport shooting focus in Colorado. Then he notes:
“Their scheme to turn away from the Second Amendment was doomed by the rank-and-file members of the NRA through a spontaneous reaction that came to a head at the members meeting in Cincinnati in 1977. During an all-night session of the Annual Meeting of Members, ILA was saved and the NRA was out on a permanent path with a single goal—preserving the liberty uniquely reserved to individual Americans. It was a birthright moment, and it indeed changed the course of American history.”
That the members were right and the Institute for Legislative Action presented a different public face to the nation has been confirmed by the five-fold increase in membership and the political victories that the NRA has achieved.
I venture to add my comments to those of LaPierre in this anniversary year of the “Revolt” because I was part of the grassroots uprising in that hot, all-night members meeting in May 1977. While I am more directly involved in the affairs of the tax-exempt legal and educational Second Amendment Foundation today, I am still an active member of the NRA as well.
In particular, I want to add my perspective of the role the anti-Second Amendment establishment media played unintentionally in the transformation of the NRA and the later successes of its Institute for Legislative Action. Indeed, had it not been for the media, the uprising in Cincinnati 40 years ago might never have taken place.
Bear in mind that the magazines published by the NRA in the 1960s and 1970s were a far cry from those members receive today. There was little direct political commentary or news in those days. The kind you receive in the official journals today was rare, perhaps in keeping with the then-NRA leadership’s aversion to a political fight.
Further, the “Old Guard,” as we used to call them, wasn’t very forthcoming about what it was doing internally to retreat from defense of the Second Amendment. As evidence that things had changed, several years ago Prof. Edward Leddy wrote a book called “Magnum Force Lobby” in which he did a content analysis of the NRA publications before and after the Cincinnati meeting.
In spite of the NRA’s soft approach in the Capitol Hill gun control fight in the 1960s and early 1970s, the establishment media had adopted a thematic approach that depicted the NRA as the “powerful gun lobby.” Besides the news reports and commentaries about the alleged “power” of the NRA back then, political cartoonists like the Washington Post’s Herblock delighted in depicting the NRA in the same vein as the Mafia, imposing its will on Congress, and completely out of step with the general public.
Back then, the fiction in the media that a majority of Americans really want Pete Shields, Sarah Brady, and Bloomberg-style gun control was as false as the claims they serve up today.
However, back some 40 years ago, most members of the NRA were as focused on defending the Second Amendment as they were in punching holes in paper. They accepted the media’s fiction of the NRA blocking the gun control agenda du jour. So that when evidence began filtering out through a few gun publications about the NRA’s plan to withdraw from the political battle entirely, they decided to act.
The leadership of the movement to redirect the NRA, to oust the old “do little” leadership, and safeguard the objectives of the Institute for Legislative Action came from many grassroots activists in reaction to negative media reports about the NRA. The reformists came out of state associations and gun clubs all across the country. When they arrived in Cincinnati and were able to confirm reports of NRA leadership’s intent to retreat, they acted in concert.
But if the media had not already claimed the NRA had power and intentions it did not really have, perhaps the association would not have had as many members whose primary reason for becoming members was because they believed in a vigorous political defense of their rights.
It is ironic that in its perverse way, the general anti-gun media played a key role in fomenting the “Revolt at Cincinnati” which created the big and powerful pro-gun-rights adversary that they had merely imagined a few years previously.
The media isn’t often right, and it can often bite its own foot. They helped create the pro-gun powerhouse they feared.
