How the NRA evolved into a powerful lobbying organization

[Rozlee]

7. There's a big part missing from this article.

That's the part of the Southern members of the NRA who equated "crime" and "violence" with African-Americans and wanted to increase gun ownership and relax gun restrictions to allow themselves to prepare for taking out large numbers of blacks that they were certain would be turning out in massive numbers in crime sprees and race riots around the time leading to the Civil Rights Act. The article touched briefly on this with the comments about Reagan, who indeed, did his best to incite racial tensions, but it was around this time that the NRA started it's climb from a bipartisan sporting organization into an arch conservative organization bent on gun legislation, not to mention the reliable Republican voting bloc it is today. But, the article skips over the fact that racism was a huge contributor to making the NRA what it is today.