by RJ Young
This story became one of many that launched the man into folklore. He was in his twenties when he joined up with Andrew Jackson—then a slave-owning planter and colonel of the Tennessee militia—to fight the Creek Indians, who’d had the audacity to fight back at Fort Mims in Alabama just to the south of Crockett’s home state of Tennessee. Through his Tennessee guile and charm, and his own good looks, I suppose, he followed Andrew Jackson’s bloody footprints to rise to the rank of colonel in Tennessee’s militia. After two terms as a US congressman, Crockett still had a thirst for war. He saw fit to head to Texas to defend four walls in San Antonio, along with fewer than two hundred other poor bastards, against five thousand professional soldiers in the army of the Mexican general López de Santa Anna. Today we remember those Texan men for picking off sixteen hundred out of five thousand soldiers and losing a battle that lasted twelve days.
And boy! Could Davy Crocket ever hunt bear! “Armed with his Bowie knife and his trusty musket, ‘Old Betsy,’” according to the NRA website, “he would head out with his sons, a friend, or just himself in search of his favorite prey. Stories of Davy’s bear-hunting adventures spread far and wide—in his books as well as in books written about him.” Huzzah for the man who takes pleasure in shooting animals who can’t shoot back!
It was in his books that Crockett revealed the man he truly was, which is not the man as depicted by the NRA. At a time when many whites were looking for a way to rise above or remain above folks with a brown complexion—be they American Indian, black, or Mexican—Crockett became the first public redneck of note. The historian Laura Browder notes that Crockett’s false autobiographical accounts “included stories in which Crockett boasted of boiling an Indian to make medicine for his pet bear’s stomachache, bragged that he could ‘swallow a nigger whole without choking if you butter his head and pin his ears back,’ and described Mexicans and Cubans as ‘degenerate outlaws,’ “Indians as ‘red niggers,’ and African Americans as ‘ape-like caricatures of humanity.’”
When the nation was on the brink of civil war and racism was the currency of the day, Crockett chose to plunge into its depths. He cloaked himself in the muck of the cesspool and continued the tradition of whites making themselves feel better at the expense of people who look or think or worship differently.
Crockett would later try to distance himself from these racist statements in his authorized autobiography, A Narrative Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, published in 1834. In that volume, Crockett explains away his earlier writings, such as his pseudo-memoir Sketches and Eccentricities, as full of “catchpenny errors.” He claimed that others placed “in my mouth such language as would disgrace even an outlandish African,” either knowingly or unknowingly re-showcasing his primitive xenophobia. By this time, it had become inconvenient for him to take a stance as an avowed racist. Three decades later slavery was abolished. Crockett’s rhetoric is hateful and malicious, a historical forerunner of the brand of speech that President Donald Trump used for the same reasons to assume the highest office in the nation. It’s also the kind of rhetoric that has made the NRA a juggernaut lobbyist for “gun rights” in this country, a fear-mongering force that will never represent my concerns as a black man.
MAY 21, 1977, was the day the National Rifle Association changed, the day it revolted against its earlier goals and principles and mutated into the institution we know today. Accounts of this transformation can make it sound like a legend, a mythic event, but it was indeed a political coup carried out with zeal by white men who were concerned that the NRA had become “soft.” On that day in Cincinnati, Ohio, a long-developed plan to change the direction of the NRA was put into action over several hours and well into the night. The way guns were thought about, advertised, promoted, litigated, and perceived in America was about to change.
By the time the old-guard members of the NRA’s board figured out that a portion of the membership previously believed to be a fringe group was about to oust them, it was too late. The hostile takeover included the election of a fella named Harlon Carter as the organization’s new executive vice president. Two years earlier, Carter had founded the NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. It was responsible for first publicizing what would become the consistent forty-year stance of the NRA concerning legislation meant to curtail our country’s rampant gun violence: “We can win it on a simple concept—No compromise. No gun legislation.” This from a man who at age seventeen had admitted to shooting and killing a younger teenage boy in a questionable situation he described as self-defense. Also during the year of Carter’s ascendency, 1977, the NRA formed its now infamous super PAC, which funnels money to favored lawmakers. It is the most powerful special-interest group in the nation.
But by 1977 the NRA was under siege for what the rebels perceived as its lack of interest in and downright inability to battle forthcoming gun legislation at a time of great violence in the United States. One of the last straws for the insurgents was the NRA board’s plan to move the organization’s premises away from Washington, D.C., to the middle of the country—Colorado Springs. The old guard hoped to build a $30 million recreational facility, called the National Outdoor Center, in New Mexico, to continue the NRA’s mission of teaching sportsmen. They set this goal despite a dramatic drop in interest, as evidenced by a decrease in the number of hunting licenses issued: from 40 million in 1970 to just 14 million.
The NRA had been founded by a journalist and Civil War veteran to teach marksmanship as a skill for sportsmen and hunters. In 1939, the NRA president, Karl Frederick, couldn’t conceive of a reason why a person should openly carry a gun. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” Frederick testified before Congress. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” Frederick even believed the right to a gun for the means of self-defense is “not to be found in the Constitution.” This statement is even more interesting if you know that Frederick won the gold medal in individual and team pistol events at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games and captained the US Olympic shooting team in 1948.
With the 1977 “Cincinnati Revolution,” the old-school NRA was history. The hardline mutineers soon cracked down on members of Congress all over the country. Even the Republican senator from Kansas, Bob Dole, felt the tight grip of the NRA during his 1980 presidential run. “You have to have a litmus test every five minutes or you’re considered wavering,” he said.
This kind of squeezing helped the NRA successfully push through the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, which made it legal to sell rifles and handguns across state lines while making it impossible for the federal government to institute a nationwide database for guns and gun owners—a feature of other technologically and economically advanced countries. Legislators who didn’t like the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act voted for it anyway, fearing what the NRA might do to them if they didn’t. When the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act—which mandated a five-day waiting period for any person looking to purchase a firearm and mandated a federal background check—was near to becoming law in 1991 (it was not finally enacted until 1994), the vice president of the NRA, Robert Corbin, invoked the Alamo during a speech at the association’s annual meeting in San Antonio, speaking to more than ten thousand members: “What if there had been a Brady Bill 150 years ago?” he said. “What if they had to wait seven days to get their rifles to come to the Alamo and fight?”
“This bill is treachery,” the NRA member Elodie McKee told the Washington Post at the same meeting. “It’s the ugly foot in the door. If President Bush doesn’t veto this bill, he will betray women, and women won’t let him forget it.”
This passionate rhetoric marked the birth of the NRA as we know it today. An NRA with a fifteen-person shooting range in the basement of its headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia. An NRA that can boast a membership that has included not only eight former presidents but celebrities such as Tom Selleck, Karl Malone, and one-time association
president Charlton Heston. An NRA that declared more than $227 million on its 2010 IRS Form 990, with $100 million coming from membership fees alone. This is how the NRA can afford to pay ten of its top executives more than $250,000 annually, with its executive director of general operations, Kayne B. Robinson, making just over $1 million. With nearly five million members, today’s NRA exists almost exclusively to raise hell and fight against legislation of any kind that could institute any measure of gun control. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has said as much over and over again. Here’s how he put it at the NRA’s annual meeting in 2002:
We must declare that there are no shades of gray in American freedom. It’s black and white, all or nothing, you’re with us or against us. There are not flavors of freedom. You can’t like yours, but not mine. There are not classes of freedom. You can’t have more, or less, than me. And there is no temporary suspension of freedom. Once on loan, you never get it back. Americans who think freedom is negotiable or malleable are, by our Founding Fathers’ standards, not Americans.
In 2012 LaPierre cautioned NRA members against President Obama’s election. “America as we know it will be on its way to being lost forever.” When Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011, along with others in Tucson, Arizona, he said, “the acts of a deranged madman” could not impede the rights of lawful citizens to bear arms. As LaPierre once wrote in a column for the NRA’s in-house magazine, American Rifleman, “When you’re at war, you do what it takes to win.”
He knows this is the type of speech that works for the NRA’s core membership—rural Americans—and for many whites in America. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll shows that 61 percent of whites prefer gun rights to gun control. In comparison, just 31 percent of blacks prefer gun rights to gun control. The problem for the NRA is that the country is becoming more urban and less rural. Some cities have experienced bumps in growth larger than 10 percent in recent years, and 59 percent of folks who live in urban areas want more gun control. These numbers are also tied to education: 55 percent of Americans with a college degree favor more gun control. As we grow more diverse and more educated as a nation, the NRA continues to play to its base. It refuses to acknowledge black men like me except in dog-whistle terms, and that can have unforeseen consequences—such as the creation of a black version of the NRA.
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Black NRA
THE OUTCRY WAS heard across the nation after thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile, yet another black man, was shot and killed by police officer Jeronimo Yanez of St. Anthony, Minnesota. Castile was licensed to carry the concealed firearm in his possession on July 6, 2016, when Officer Yanez pulled him over in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Castile alerted Yanez to his concealed gun and was reaching for his driver’s license during what should’ve been a routine traffic stop over a busted taillight. When the officer told him not to move, Castile put his hands up, and Yanez shot him dead. We know this only because Castile’s girlfriend had the presence of mind to broadcast her lover’s death live on Facebook. The media storm to follow covered everything from marchers chanting in the street to a statement from Minnesota’s governor: “Nobody should be shot and killed in Minnesota . . . for a tail light being out of function. Nobody should be shot and killed while seated still in their car. I’m heartbroken.” The nation was in an uproar, and everyone had something to say—except the leadership of the NRA.
Many, including some rank-and-file members of the NRA, demanded to know why this had happened. This tragedy involved what the NRA would normally call a gross infringement of constitutional rights, yet its leadership did not publicly condemn Yanez’s actions. In fact, the NRA took its sweet time responding in any way to Castile’s death. Nearly thirty-six hours passed before the nation’s fiercest defender of gun rights released a statement on its Facebook page. It neither named Castile nor took up what many believed would be the predictable stance: defending Castile’s right to not be shot simply for legally possessing a firearm.
“As the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization,” the NRA’s post read, “the NRA proudly supports the right of law-abiding Americans to carry firearms for defense of themselves and others regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. The reports from Minnesota are troubling and must be thoroughly investigated. In the meantime, it is important for the NRA not to comment while the investigation is ongoing. Rest assured, the NRA will have more to say once all the facts are known.”
The only thing I was assured of, in the aftermath of Castile’s shooting, was how truly indifferent the NRA is to the lives of black men when they exercise their rights as law-abiding citizens. But I also read posts by NRA members uniquely perturbed that the association had not stood for Castile when he could not stand for himself.
“Your lack of message concerning the Castile case disappoints me and makes me question my membership,” a fella named Marco Gallologic posted on the NRA’s Facebook page. Another named Brad Groux tweeted at the NRA’s handle: “As a life member, please condemn the murder of Philando Castile, sooner rather than later. Licensed to carry, and no felony record.”
These were just two of the voices in a small deluge following the death of Castile, calling out the suddenly muted mouth of the NRA.
It is, after all, an organization that prides itself on its bark. The NRA contributed $1,087,700 to political campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, spent $3,188,000 on lobbying efforts, and accounted for $54,747,518 in outside spending to promote the NRA’s mission. The NRA spokeswoman and conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch epitomized that NRA bark in a 2017 NRA ad, “Violence of Lies,” which incites aggression and calls for armed resistance.
“They use their media to assassinate real news,” Loesch said.
They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding—until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.
Ads like this position people who look like me, or who supported President Barack Obama, as nefarious monsters, when the truth is, we are terrified of the people who believe the hateful rhetoric that Loesch spews. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 867 incidents of hateful harassment in the ten days following Election Day 2016. Among them, 280 incidents were categorized as anti-immigrant, while 187 were categorized as antiblack. The kind of people who made and are receptive to hateful NRA rhetoric are the ones I believe might kill me because I am a black man. The “Violence of Lies” ad does not merely pit us against them. It comes dangerously close to equating the right of public protest to treachery and to recommending police violence. And it falls right in line with the NRA zeitgeist: Scared of someone? Shoot him. Don’t understand someone? Shoot him too. But the shame isn’t simply in the NRA’s inflammatory ads or rhetoric. The shame is in how willing we are to allow its ridiculous, dangerous language to distract us from facts.
NRA surrogates are quick to mention their two black board members—the army lieutenant colonel and former US representative Allen West, and the NBA hall-of-famer Karl Malone. The rock star Ted Nugent also serves on the NRA’s board, and in 2014, he wrote this Facebook post for h
is more than three million followers:
Don’t let your kids growup [sic] to be thugs who think they can steal, assault & attack cops as a way of life & badge of black (dis)honor. Don’t preach your racist bullshit “no justice no peace” as blabbered by Obama’s racist Czar Al Not So Sharpton & their black klansmen [sic]. When a cop tells you to get out of the middle of the street, obey him & don’t attack him as brainwashed by the gangsta [sic] assholes you hang with & look up to. It’s that simple unless you have no brains, no soul, no sense of decency whatsoever. And dont [sic] claim that “black lives matter” when you ignore the millions you abort & slaughter each & every day by other blacks. Those of us with a soul do indeed believe black lives matter, as all lives matter. So quit killin [sic] each other you fuckin idiots.
With its hardline conservative politics, compounded by rhetoric like this coming from a board member, the NRA has quite an image problem with liberal-leaning minority Americans. After all, the NRA threw its robust lobbying efforts behind a presidential candidate who also received support from alt-right groups, white nationalists, and hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
The NRA knows it has a minorities problem, and has made recent attempts to recruit more black members.
But it is hard to take a man like the NRA commentator Colion Noir seriously on this score. In a photo for the Los Angeles Times, Noir, a black man, can be seen wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, a black V-neck T-shirt, ripped blue jeans, and red-and-white Jordans. Also in the photo? Noir’s matte-black assault rifle, tucked between his legs—a large phallus. Noir owns a law degree from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, a Glock 17, and a custom AR-15. He’s used to being called a token for the NRA as well as an Uncle Tom by blacks. Propping up Noir as the NRA’s black ideal counts for fuck-all, given the larger context.