The NRA once supported gun control
For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among Americas foremost pro-gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against governmentif not armed insurrectionemerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.
In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better markmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to societys worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown, while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.
It is hard to believe that the NRA was committed to gun-control laws for most of the 20th centuryhelping to write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s.
Historically, the leadership of the NRA was more open-minded about gun control than someone familiar with the modern NRA might imagine, wrote Adam Winkler, a Second Amendment scholar at U.C.L.A. Law School, in his 2011 book, Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right To Bear Arms In America. The Second Amendment was not nearly as central to the NRAs identity for most of the organizations history.
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_control/
Historic NY
(37,449 posts)In March 2012, the Indiana GOP passed an Amendment to their Castle Doctrine that literally allows civilians to kill police officers ... and any other "public servant" that a person feels is entering their home "unlawfully."
It turns out, the Bills author, Republican State Sen. R. Michael Young, is extremely paranoid which makes him easy to be bought by the NRA.
Young said that before his Cop-Killing Bill, "there was no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police officers."
NRA-owned Rep Young said, he devised the idea for the law after an Indiana Supreme court ruling that the NRA did not like.
The "unfavorable court decision" that the NRA did not like and had their pawn Young write their Cop-Killer Bill for was the 2011 Indiana Supreme Court decision that upheld a Class A misdemeanor battery of a man who assaulted a police officer when the officer entered the man's apartment while responding to a domestic-violence call from the man's wife.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/28/1174361/-NRA-backed-law-allows-civilians-to-kill-police-officers
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)snip* State gun control laws were not controversialthey were the norm.
samsingh
(17,599 posts)Douglas Carpenter
(20,226 posts)It is interesting that these two issues which became the two principle wedge issue that pulled away many natural Democrats into the Republican Party were not the standard positions of there main constituencies of today - until the rise of the new right.
My Take: When evangelicals were pro-choice
Editor's Note: Jonathan Dudley is the author of "Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics."
By Jonathan Dudley
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/30/my-take-when-evangelicals-were-pro-choice/
The reality is that what conservative Christians now say is the Bibles clear teaching on the matter was not a widespread interpretation until the late 20th century.
In 1968, Christianity Today published a special issue on contraception and abortion, encapsulating the consensus among evangelical thinkers at the time. In the leading article, professor Bruce Waltke, of the famously conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, explained the Bible plainly teaches that life begins at birth:
God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: 'If a man kills any human life he will be put to death' (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:2224, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
The magazine Christian Life agreed, insisting, The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of a fetus and an adult. And the Southern Baptist Convention passed a 1971 resolution affirming abortion should be legal not only to protect the life of the mother, but to protect her emotional health as well.