A very short and useful history of the NRA's transformation since Bobby Kennedy's assassination:
https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-shooting-of-robert-kennedy-transformation-of-NRA-80605/
President Johnson was renowned as a wily political operator who could successfully shepherd legislation through an unfriendly Congress; his administration passed groundbreaking laws including the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. But even he was unable to overcome opposition from America’s gun lobby.
“By ‘68, Johnson had lost power in Congress and his prestige had gone down due to the Vietnam War,” says Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of
The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office. “It’s too bad he hadn’t pushed earlier—it was a real missed opportunity, as he probably would have succeeded in ’64 after JFK’s assassination.”
Four months after Robert Kennedy’s death, Johnson managed to secure a
gun control bill. But due to NRA
lobbying and Johnson’s diminished powers, it lacked key provisions he sought, such as national registration of guns and the licensing of owners. The 1968 bill marked the beginning of the NRA’s transformation from a gun enthusiast organization focused on marksmanship and gun safety to a political lobbying group focused on opposing gun control.
Historically, gun ownership and gun regulation had not been partisan issues, nor had they been matters of constitutional debate, historian Jill Lepore and author of
These Truths: A History of the United States, tells me in an interview. But this began to change in the 1960s, she argues, not because of the NRA but because black nationalists such as Malcolm X and the
Black Panthers began citing the right to own a rifle or shotgun to support their agendas.
As the 1970s progressed, the NRA began to take advantage of a growing conservative backlash against civil rights and feminist movements. Gun rights became a conservative political movement for whites.
“If, in the 1960s, the gun debate took place in the shadow of the Black Power movement, in the 1970s it took place in the shadow of a growing White Power movement,” Lepore says.
In the years following Johnson’s 1968 gun control legislation, the NRA has fought steadily to roll it back. Despite these efforts, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act
passed in 1993 after an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, followed in 1994 by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. But the assault weapons ban
included a sunset provision, meaning it would expire after ten years. Since it sunsetted in 2004, no politician has managed to reinstate it.
