thinky stuff

The National Rifle Association was founded by men who were distressed that young men from the cities were so unskilled with firearms when they served in the Civil War that they thought that there should be an organization devoted to teaching the skilled use of firearms in case of another war. Karl Telford Frederick, one of early NRA Presidents, was himself a skilled marksman having won several shooting events in the Olympics. NRA officers and the organization were mostly apolitical in the early days and received free ammunition from the Federal Government with which to train and certify young men in shooting accuracy. The organization, alarmed at the high rage of gun accidents causing death and serious injury added gun safety to their program and this was followed by teaching and certifying Hunting Safety as well. Not only was the original NRA up through the 1960s not militant about so called “gun rights” but the organization strongly advocated various forms of gun control including licensing for reasonable purposes. Their vision was that marksmanship and safety through their courses and programs would be implemented by schools, camps, scouts, clubs and other intermediary organizations which were certified by the NRA. The NRA in particular was opposed to the general practice of carrying weapons. There was a takeover of the NRA and the organization shifted away from its original purposes and became heavily political and partisan fighting the very kind of reasonable gun control that the NRA had been advocating for years.

 

The NRA formed its Legislative Affairs Division to update members with facts and analysis of upcoming bills [2] after the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) became the first federal gun-control law passed in the U.S. [3].  The NRA supported the NFA along with the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA), which together created a system to federally license gun dealers and established restrictions on particular categories and classes of firearms [4].
 

Until the middle 1970s, the NRA mainly focused on sportsmen, hunters and target shooters, and downplayed gun control issues.