[falk]

Yep. There's a great article by the Atlantic called The Secret History of Guns. [1] I'll go over a couple of interesting points.

- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."

- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.

- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."

- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"

[1] http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-h...

[hga]

A bit of unmentioned history: the NRA wasn't in the business, so to speak, of endorsing candidates until after the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt (at the annual meeting), so Reagan or Carter were the first Presidents they could possibly endorse. Carter was anti-gun but smart enough not to be visibly, Reagan signed the Gun Owners Protection Act of 1986 reigning in the BATF, without which we very possibly wouldn't have a gun culture today (or perhaps we'd have tested out this thesis of armed resistance and revolt).

ADDED: Every major party Presidential candidate after 1977 has been a gun grabber with the possible exception of Romney (details on request), the NRA's only been able to endorse the least worst, or in 1992 and 1996 endorse neither.

The bit about the "1920s and '30s" is more fair, but if you read the full text and know about all that the NRA didn't support, including the cited inclusion of handguns in the NFA of '34, "forefront" falls short of the mark. And of course per the Cincinnati Revolt that NRA isn't the modern NRA, which nowadays has done a 180 on concealed carry, the gravamen of this article's claim. Major NRA figure Marion Hammer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Hammer) was the leader in establishing Florida's 1987 shall issue law, which opened the floodgates so that today 42 states, soon to be 43 with Illinois, have shall issue regimes.

Circling back to MLK, today he wouldn't have much difficulty getting a concealed carry permit (or set of them) good in most of the nation, including all of the South.