THE NATIONAL RIFLE Association (NRA) “favored tighter gun laws” in the 1920s and ’30s, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2018. But since the 1970s, Kristof complained, the NRA “has been hijacked by extremist leaders” whose “hardline resistance” to even the mildest gun control proposals contradicts “their members’ (much more reasonable) views.”
Other NRA critics have told the same story. That widely accepted account, U.S. Air Force historian Patrick J. Charles argues in , is “based more on myth than on substance.” In reality, he shows, the NRA’s fight against gun control dates back to the 1920s. But in waging that battle, the organization tried to project a reasonable image by presenting itself as open to compromise. That P.R. effort, Charles says, is the main source of the erroneous impression that “the NRA was once the chief proponent of firearms controls.”
