Meet Harlon Carter: Teenage Murderer and the Man Who Gave Us the Modern NRA

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https://timeline.com/harlon-carter-nra-murder-2f8227f2434f

...Carter and Casiano started swearing at each other. Casiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramón’s chest. According to testimony from the time, Ramon told him not to do it, and pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back and laughed. Annoyed by Ramón’s lack of fear, Carter asked if he thought he wasn’t going to shoot. Then he did. Casiano lay dying on the ground with a two-inch shotgun wound in his chest.

In many ways, you couldn’t script a better a origin myth for the modern NRA. The scene had everything that would come to define the organization: home and family, a fervent sense of self-protection, vigilantism, and standing your ground. For the NRA’s critics, it exemplifies the association’s tacit approval of race-based violence and white impunity.

Carter was arrested, tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to three years. But when he had only served two, his conviction was overturned by a higher court that ruled that the “trial judge’s jury instructions had been incomplete.” The judge, the higher court said, hadn’t adequately explained the definition of self-defense.

Rather than steering clear of Mexicans and guns after his murder conviction, he doubled down. Harlon Bronson Carter would go on to become first the head of U.S. Border Patrol, serve on President Truman’s commission on migratory labor, and an Olympic committee. But it was his nine years as the head of the National Rifle Association — overseeing the organization’s radical transformation from marksmanship organization to one of the most powerful political groups in the country — where Carter truly made his mark...

Those only good thing about this Harlon Carter is that he's dead.