The Gun Lobby Responsible for Trump: Journey Through Time

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Hello, and welcome to The Rest is Politics, but not a normal episode.

This is a little bonus for you.

We're going to tell you about another goal hanger podcast, Journey Through Time, which is hosted by the historians David Olisoga and Sarah Churchill.

It tells history from the bottom up by trying to understand pivotal moments through the eyes of those who live them.

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

Now, NRA, Sarah, I know what NRA is.

And if you say NRA in the context of American politics, it's kind of neuralgic.

It's like, I guess the only equivalent we have in our politics is NHS.

If you mess with the NHS, you better stand by for some political flack.

But NRA has sort of got a life of its own.

Just tell us all about it.

Why are you doing this series?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks.

So it is like the NHS.

So it's sort of like the opposite of the NHS because it does a lot of harm.

But it is indeed, you know, a magnet, as you say, for political opinion, a lightning rod.

So it's the gun lobby group in America, right?

It's this incredibly powerful lobbying arm, and it has shaped the reality of guns in America today.

And everybody around the world watches the reality of guns in America today, trying to understand what on earth is going on.

And if you follow the history of the NRA, you can start to understand how and why we got to where we are.

And the really important part of this, from my point of view, and the reason why we're doing this series on it, is that the history of the NRA shows is that guns in America have not always been this way.

That's one of the lines that everybody always hears is, you know, well, it's in the Constitution.

It's always been this way.

And it simply isn't true.

And the history of the NRA and the history of guns disproves that, which I think is incredibly important for all kinds of reasons.

Have they managed to persuade the country and the world that the Constitution says something different to what it was actually intended at the time?

Absolutely.

They have done that.

We can show them doing that.

And they've done it by basically chopping the Second Amendment in half.

They've just erased the first half of the Second Amendment.

So, what people outside of the U.S.

probably don't know is that the Second Amendment begins with the phrase, a well-regulated militia being necessary, right?

So, the idea that gun regulation is unconstitutional doesn't make any sense.

It not only does it say that you can have regulation, it mandates it being well-regulated.

It says it's necessary.

So, the idea that the Constitution says you can't regulate guns is words mean something, you know?

And that's what what those words say.

But what's happened over the course of the history of the NRA is that they've worked to literally like expunge that from people's popular understanding of what the Constitution says.

So Americans love to say that they honor and obey and respect the Constitution.

They love the Constitution.

But all you say is they don't actually know what it means.

Well, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who have been invested in changing their minds about what it means, and they've done that over a long period of time.

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Berger, who was appointed by Nixon, he was a conservative

Chief Justice, he said that the NRA's changing the American mind about guns, he called it the greatest fraud.

And then he said, I repeat the word fraud that has ever been perpetrated by a special interest group on the American public.

So it is, and that idea of the special interest is crucial, right?

There was a financial interest and a political interest in doing it this way.

And that's a conservative Chief Justice of the U.S.

Supreme Court calling it that.

So the financial interest, is that just about the trade in guns?

Yeah, well, so it certainly started out that way.

So it was about selling guns in a consumer market when they discovered in the 19th century that there was this market for firearms and that just trying to sell it to foreign governments wasn't going to make them as much money as marketing it to individuals.

So they start selling it to civilians.

And one of the things that's remarkable about the history of the NRA, and why I think it's a story worth telling, is that what most people don't realize, even those who are familiar with the history as you are, and I'll be interested, Alistair, if you know this part of the history, is that the NRA began not as a gun rights organization, but as a gun safety organization.

It was staunchly pro-regulation.

And for most of its history, it was staunchly pro-regulation.

It was all about actually making guns safer.

When did it tip?

In the 70s.

So in the 1970s, there was an internal hostile takeover of the NRA.

They had a huge internal battle, and there was an effort effort by the moderate wing to keep it what it had always been, which was a sportsman's club.

Tyson Elsalister, it was modeled on the British National Rifle Association.

It was some Americans in Britain who said, this looks like a good idea.

It's a safety organization.

It's about marksmanship and sportsmanship and we'll make sure that guns are safe for the people who are using them.

Yeah.

And that began.

life that way.

And then 150 years later, we find ourselves here.

And that reversal, I think, is such an important story to understand.

Wow.

We were in opposition in the UK in the mid-90s when we had the Dunblane massacre.

John Major was Prime Minister.

The next day, he and Tony Blair travelled together to Dunblane, and we won the next election.

And one of the first things we did was to essentially ban the sale of handguns, okay?

On the back of one

terrible school killing.

You've had so many school killings in America, and yet it seems there is just nobody with the wherewithal or the political will who can actually take on the NRA.

What does that say about America?

Well, it says that we're in a state of political paralysis, but we have a lot of evidence that that is the case, don't we, Alistair?

I mean, that guns are one symptom of that.

But the fact is, is the other reason why it is that way is that we had a school shooting before Dunblaine in 1988, and it happened to be in my hometown outside of Chicago.

And locally, my village passed hand-gun laws like you did after Dunblaine, saying this is unsafe.

We need to do something about it.

They were perfectly constitutional.

It was perfectly fine.

Everybody was happy that they were passed.

And then there were no shootings after that until the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that that law was unconstitutional.

And so it had to be overturned.

And so what's happened is that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has been intervening in local attempts to create those common sense laws, which, as you know, a majority of Americans actually support.

And the Supreme Court has been intervening and saying that they're unconstitutional.

And the most recent

version of that was just in 2022, just three years ago, when, as I'm sure you know, they intervened and said that a century-old law in New York that said that you had to have a good reason to carry a concealed weapon, that New York was just like, just give me a good reason why it needs to be concealed.

And the Supreme Court struck that law down, a century-old law, saying that it was unconstitutional.

But the Supreme Court had found it constitutional for a century that had no problem with it.

So it's this Supreme Court.

So that's a major part of the problem.

Do you think any politician who made gun law reform their centerpiece

would actually ever have a chance of winning power in the States at a really high level?

The distinction that we need to make, right, is because what people try to do is strawman this argument and they instantly say that if you're talking about any kind of gun control, that you're talking about banning guns.

So what they do is they instantly go to the most extreme example, right, and they start shouting, you're trying to steal my guns and they're going to take all your guns away from you.

If you actually find a way, and I obviously would be a huge challenge, but if you find a way to say, this is about common sense gun control, which the majority of Americans support, we are not trying to take your guns away.

We're trying to make them safer and we're trying to make the country safer.

There is overwhelming national support for this.

Where we have a little bit of maybe an opening in the door is that the NRA itself is falling apart.

It's under all of these investigations right now.

Its longtime CEO just got forced out.

So the NRA is no longer the force that it once was, although we're also in a situation where their ideas have taken on a life of their own.

And as we've just been saying, the Supreme Court is implementing them beyond the NRA's ability to pursue that.

So as long as we have this activist Supreme Court, guns are just one problem that we have with this Supreme Court and the political paralysis that it is affecting.

But But is there the possibility?

Of course there is.

We always have to believe in the possibility of political change, don't we, Alistair?

I mean, we all just would have to give up.

We better have.

I don't have to tell you that.

Finally, Sarah, tell me this Journey Through Time podcast that you're doing, how are you kind of deciding what are the key moments in history and how are you deciding how to tell these stories?

Because, I mean, that's part of the challenge of being a historian, isn't it?

It's sort of what you fix upon to really dive into.

Yeah, absolutely.

And kind of what your prism is, right?

our position is just that, you know, there are a lot of wonderful stories being told right now about history that frame it in terms of like, you know, what we sometimes call like great man history, right?

The history of statesmen and politicians and leaders,

kings and queens, courtiers, you know, battles from the point of view of the general.

But of course, history is shaped by ordinary people.

It's shaped by the soldier on the battlefield, but it's also shaped by people on the home front and their resistance to war or, you know, whatever it might be.

And so so we talk about history from the ground up, talking about the ways in which ordinary people can have extraordinary impacts.

And so, you know, it's people like a civil servant in London in the 17th century who is an obsessive diary keeper and captures the Great Fire of London, right?

Or a woman who boards a sailing ship in the 18th century and becomes a pirate.

Or, you know, Sophie Scholl, the university student in Nazi Germany who was executed for resisting Hitler, right?

So the stories of ordinary people, Rosa Parks, of ordinary people, how they can change history, but also the ordinary person's perspective on some of the events that are very familiar.

So, you know, it's not that you never talk about the leaders.

They are obviously, obviously, you know, often an important part of the story, but it's just a question really of perspective.

Well, I'm really looking forward to the series on the NRA.

I hope it helps their demise, if I'm allowed to say that.

Thanks so much for talking to me about that.

And as a treat for Rustis Politics listeners, we've got a clip here from this week's Journey Through Time.

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

A National Rifle Association NRA staffer called this stunt downright weird.

But the NRA's chief lobbyist later apologised 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 Orleshuger 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 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'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 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, 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, 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.

See you later.