How Guns Captured America: Journey Through Time

Hello and welcome.

Today we're going to tell you about another goal hanger podcast, Journey Through Time, which is hosted by David Olishoga and Sarah Churchwell.

The podcast tells history from the bottom up by trying to understand pivotal moments through the eyes of those who lived them.

We're joined by Sarah today to discuss the podcast and their new series, which is on the history of the National Rifle Association.

So Sarah, start by talking a little bit about the National Rifle Association.

For those who don't know it, this very important gun lobby group in the United States and why you wanted to focus on the history of the NRA.

Yeah, thanks very much.

So the NRA is the National Rifle Association and it is the gun lobby.

It is an incredibly powerful political lobbying organization that over the last 50 years has been arguing for gun rights in America.

And it's done so with such success that I think most people around the world, and you know, correct me, you know, if you see this differently, but I think that most people around the world now assume that the idea of gun rights is so entrenched in American culture that gun regulation is just not possible.

It's never happened.

It's never going to happen.

But the fact is, is the history of the NRA shows that that is categorically not true.

And in fact, the National Rifle Association in the United States began as a gun safety organization.

It was established for gun regulation.

It was set up in order to promote the safe handling and storage and use of guns.

And, you know, what's really interesting, Gadda, is it was actually modeled on the National Rifle Association of the UK, which it's safe to say has not become a massive gun lobby.

And so what we're doing in this series really is telling the story of that reversal of how it came to take a 180-degree turn and start promoting gun rights rather than gun safety.

It's interesting that you talk about that switch in what it was designed for and then what it became when I first moved to the United States in the mid-1990s.

Of course, there was an assault weapons ban in place.

There was a 10-year assault weapons ban that came into effect during President Clinton's time.

And for me living in America now, that just seems like a pipe dream that you could ever have an assault weapons ban again.

So when did the kind of change happen and why?

Well, it happened across the 90s and into the early 21st century.

And one of the things that we've been watching is this really powerful rewriting of history and kind of rewriting of all of our memories.

Because as you say, all of us who are old enough to remember, and certainly all of us who lived in the states before these reversals of the 21st century know that this wasn't true.

I didn't grow up with active shooter drills.

I didn't grow up with, you know, gunmen in the schools.

And now it seems like this inescapable reality.

So the reasons that it changed have a lot to do with this shift in the NRA.

It has to do actually with the civil rights movement, as so much in in American politics today does.

It has to do with the ways in which conservative American politics redesign themselves in relationship particularly to the Supreme Court.

And then how this very powerful lobby through money and influence was able to change a long-standing constitutional understanding to what we recognize now.

And, you know, basically what they did was everybody's always shouting about the Second Amendment, right?

But all we ever hear about is the right to bear arms.

But as you know, the first part of the Second Amendment begins with a well-regulated militia being necessary, right?

So to the security of a free state.

So the idea that guns can be regulated or even well-regulated is certainly constitutional because the words well-regulated begin the amendment.

And effectively, what the NRA did was over the course of 50 years, work to erase that first half of the amendment.

So what does it mean for politicians today?

I mean, if you're running for political office in America in 2025, how important is the NRA to your chances of being elected?

Well, what's really interesting is incredibly important to Trump, as I don't have to tell you, particularly in 2016, although less important in the last election, because the NRA has been actually undergoing a great deal of turmoil.

And as an organization itself right now, it isn't the inescapable force that it was even 10 years ago.

Its CEO was ousted last year.

It's got all of these allegations of fraud and all kinds of financial improprieties that it's dealing with, internal lawsuits.

But what it has done is create something that goes well beyond its own lobbying now, doesn't it?

I mean, it lives in the belief system of millions of Americans.

And so it's kind of exceeded its own

need for being.

The NRA could collapse tomorrow and much of its mission would continue.

But that's why I think that uncovering the history is so important, because we've inherited this kind of sense of paralysis, right?

We all believe that it simply can't change, but they have a vested interest in telling us that it can't change.

And I think that at least looking at the history, it shows you that it was always different.

It's only very recently that it's been like this.

So if it's only very recently been like this, it is possible to reverse it.

Certainly not easy.

Certainly not something that can be done overnight.

Certainly not something that will happen without a huge struggle.

But it is not impossible.

And I think it's really important for us to remind ourselves and each other of that.

Yeah, I think, I mean, this is such a big subject for Americans, but also for the rest of the world, looking at America, America's relationship with guns and the NRA's role in it.

I can't wait to listen to the series.

Tell me a bit more about the podcast, Sarah, and how it is that you, there are so many stories that have an impact on pivotal moments in our lives and in our politics.

How is it that you choose which ones to focus on?

It's not necessarily which stories, but it's also which perspectives.

So that it's about looking at how ordinary people are changing history or changed by history or how that process works so that, you know, history isn't just kings and queens and presidents and statesmen or generals.

It's soldiers on the battlefield.

It's women and families on the home front.

That's the story of war as well.

And so it's looking at things from the perspective of the people who lived through them and who shaped them.

And so saying that not all of this stuff begins from the top down, but a lot of it begins from the ground up.

And the NRA is a perfect example of that.

That's the story that we tell throughout this: this is a grassroots movement, very much about ordinary people making certain kinds of changes.

Now it's enforced by the Supreme Court, but that's not where it began.

So we're kind of interested in, you know, flipping the script and thinking about the ways that activists and workers and as I say, kind of ordinary people, how their interventions in history also shape history.

And it isn't just the people in positions of great power who do that.

We're all shaping history and we're all active participants in it.

I love this.

I've just finished reading Testament to Youth, which is, I think, the only book written by a woman about the First World War.

And it's a totally different story that she tells.

It's not about the battles.

It's about the families and the women and the people and what they went through.

And it really is.

It's that different perspective.

And as you say, the different perspective makes it a different story.

You think you know the story, but actually it becomes a different story because it's got different people and different plots, right?

Different things are happening.

And so that perspective changes the story.

Such a compelling idea.

Thank you, Sarah, for telling us about the podcast and for telling us about this new series.

Okay, as a treat for all of you listeners, we have got a clip of this week's Journey Through Time.

Take a listen.

Last week, some Texans celebrated their state's open carry law by bringing their long guns into fast food restaurants.

A National Rifle Association

staffer called this stunt downright weird.

But the NRA's chief lobbyist later apologized to the rifleman.

In 1934, the NRA president Carl Frederick said during congressional testimony on a bill to regulate sawn-off shotguns and machine guns, I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons.

I do not believe in the promiscuous toting of guns.

I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.

That's a passage from a newspaper report from 2014.

Commenting on the fact that the NRA, the National Rifle Association of the United States, which most people around the world associate with support for gun rights, has a long history of supporting gun controls.

And even as recently as 2014, a staffer in the NRA could make a statement like that, condemning people for bringing guns into a restaurant.

I'm David Olashuga, and welcome to Journey Through Time.

And I'm Sarah Churchwell.

And that's right, David.

Today we're looking at the history of an organization that in the United States is absolutely synonymous with gun rights, with rabid support for the constitutional right to bear arms, and is behind all of the legislation and all of the kind of Supreme Court decisions that people outside of the United States find so bewildering about gun control in the U.S.

or the lack thereof.

And basically what everybody thinks that they know around the world, really in my experience, about how guns have always been in the United States is due to this group, the NRA.

And what we're going to talk about is the way in which this group that everybody thinks has always been for gun rights, totally about gun rights, actually started out being about gun regulation, about gun safety.

And we're going to tell the story about how that has completely changed on its head and why and the consequences that that's had for the U.S.

So it's a history of the NRA itself, but also of the misuse of history to create this false impression of the place of guns in American society.

Absolutely.

It's the story of a mythology, how a mythology was created cynically, deliberately.

And there's a really surprising history, a lot of surprising histories embedded into this.

So our mission over the next three episodes is really to unpack this surprising history, not just of this organization, but really of guns in America is really what we're going to be talking about, about how we got from there to here.

It's actually the story of how a convicted killer helped turn a group that was originally around sportsmen.

It was around guns as sports and how it got turned into this for-profit group that is all about militant defiance and deeply ideological.

So yeah, it's a story about myth-making, as you said, and a story about marketing.

It's a story about how guns have been marketed to Americans.

And become consumer products.

Absolutely.

And they've become a kind of must-have consumer product for a lot of Americans that they see as kind of tied to their identity, that this is what it means to be an American is to carry an AR-15.

And in particular, they see it as being related to freedom, that it is strongly associated now in America's national imagination with freedom.

But guns did not always mean freedom in America.

And that's a really important part of the story that we're going to be telling.

But all of these ideas, the idea that guns are about freedom, that it's all about your right to do this, that has been fueled by the NRA, the National Rifle Association, this has supported things like the militias that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, you know, in 2021.

It's helped prop up leaders like Trump, and it's bleeding into law enforcement.

That's part of the story that we're going to tell.

So the things that people are seeing in the news right now about, you know, ICE agents in ski masks who are like, you know, wielding assault weapons, militarized, kidnapping civilians in unmarked vans, this all kind of is part of the same history.

And it means that, you know, people toting guns around America make it very unsafe, not just for its own citizens, of course, but for anybody visiting.

I mean, I don't know about you, David, but more and more as I speak to Europeans about, you know, visiting the U.S., they just say they're scared and they don't want to go because they think it's dangerous.

I'm so glad we're doing this history because, as a British and American host, one of the kind of oddities, one of the huge differences between Europe and America, number one, has got to be the relationship with guns.

It's the thing that Europeans struggle to understand about the United States.

And as you say, this is a present-day reality that has been built on a distortion of history.

And as historians, I think this is, you know, our critical job is to show that history has been used and abused to create this mythology.

But also, this is such a big history and such a big story that this is our biggest series so far.

This is three episodes.

It's fittingly three episodes.

And it's also a kind of social history because it gets us into lots of aspects of American and world history.

It's about race, it's about the relationship between politicians and the people.

And it's a story that takes us way, way back, not just into American history but before the United States.

To hear more, listen to Journey Through Time, wherever you get your podcasts.