May 31, 2018
The NRA peddles conspiracy
theories about shadowy “big government” thugs coming to take its members’ guns
away — but its new president is notorious for actually being a deep-state
conspirator, writes Danny
Katch.
WHEN THE National Rifle
Association (NRA) selected Oliver North as its president last month, you
probably reacted with what has become the baseline emotion of the Trump era:
entirely unsurprised shock.
It may seem strange for an
organization that claims to stand for the right
to arm “good guys” against criminals to choose someone best known for
illegally running guns and drugs on three continents. But in reality, North and
the NRA are made for each other.
For one thing, he’s perfect
for an organization that needs to step up its trolling game. The NRA relies on
generating outrage in order to make its members feel under siege so they...buy
more guns.
No disrespect to the
organization’s current leaders working tirelessly to further the trauma of
school-shooting victims by calling them crisis actors and demanding that their
teachers be armed, but they needed someone with cable news star power to
compete for airtime with the Troll-in-Chief.
By bringing in North for a
largely ceremonial position, the NRA hopes to copy the White House’s winning
formula: Aging C-list Fox News celebrity? Shameless self-promoting con artist?
Check and check!
Oliver North is basically
Donald Trump without the draft dodging. He even has his own dodgy
charity run jointly with presidential pal Sean Hannity.
North got his debut as the new
voice of gun fundamentalism came after the May 18 school shooting in Santa Fe,
Texas, but he came out firing blanks:
The problem that we got is we
are trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease.
The disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters
who are steeped in a culture of violence.
They have been drugged in many
cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male, and they are young teenagers
in most cases. And they have come through a culture where violence is
commonplace. All you need to do is turn on the TV, go to a movie. If you look
at what has happened to the young people, many of these young boys have been on
Ritalin since they were in kindergarten.
Gotta do better than that,
Ollie. NRA preachers are supposed to bring the fire and brimstone — like when
you labeled protesting
Parkland students “terrorists.”
Instead, your “it’s these
newfangled TV shows, dagnabbit!” routine sounded like a cranky old man. You
probably would have added that these whippersnappers are spoiled by
participation trophies — if your new bosses didn’t offer almost 200 trophies at
its national shooting “championships.” (At the NRA, everyone who isn’t
an animal, a criminal, a socialist, a gangbanger or a terrorist...is a winner!)
Fortunately for the NRA, and
tragically for everyone else, Ollie will have plenty more mass shootings in the
coming months to work on his game.
NORTH DREW widespread
media scorn for his hypocrisy in calling out violent media without
mentioning his own history as a paid shill for the “first-person shooter” video
game Call of Duty.
But it would be nice to see
more attention paid to the far larger issue that the nation’s largest “gun
rights” organization is now being headed — okay, figure-headed — by someone
with a long record of gun wrongs.
It’s referred to as the
Iran-Contra Scandal or Iran-Contra Affair, but scandaland affair are
frustratingly tame words that don’t do justice to North’s crimes, and even feed
his self-styled reputation as a bad-boy 1980s action hero who played by his own
rules to get the job done.
I can’t think of a single word
that does the trick, unfortunately, so let’s go with: The Iran-Contra
Conspiracy to Give Killers Machine Guns and Flood the U.S. with Crack.
The “contras” were death
squads formed from the ranks of the hated Nicaraguan regime that was overthrown
in the 1979 Sandinista revolution. Over the next decade, they would kill 40,000
people and be labeled the “worst human rights violators in all of Latin
America” by the
Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
Naturally, the Reagan
administration hailed them as “freedom fighters” — just like Osama bin Laden’s
Mujahideen Islamist insurgents challenging the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan —
and armed them to the teeth in the early 1980s.
But by 1984, reports that the
CIA had mined Nicaraguan harbors and advised the contras in how
to kidnap and kill government officials led Congress to cut off
military aid to the contras.
So what did the White House
do? It simply went around Congress.
Here’s how it worked: Oliver
North collaborated with Israel to supply weapons to Iran — supposedly the
arch-enemy of the U.S. and Israel — in exchange for getting Iran’s ally
Hezbollah to release hostages in Lebanon. And the proceeds of the weapons
sales were
used to supply the contras with “munitions and lethal aid.”
The dirty war on the
Sandinista government was also financed by running cocaine from Central America
into the U.S. — all
while Ronald Reagan was launching a “war on drugs” that would lead to
millions of low-level users and dealers being locked up, while anti-poverty
spending was effectively transferred into expanding police and prisons.
All this is to say that even
the most far-fetched racist fantasy about immigrants rights organizations being
led by the MS-13 street gang are roughly equivalent to what’s happened at the
NRA: an organization that claims to fight for legally responsible gun ownership
making Oliver North its leader.
Oh right, that’s another
thing. Oliver North has his fingerprints all over
the origins of MS-13 — winner of the 2018 right wing boogeyman of the
year award — which was formed behind prison walls inside the U.S. by poor
Salvadorans caught up in the drug-war dragnet after fleeing North’s dirty war
in their home country.
ALL TOLD, bringing in Oliver
North is the latest evidence that the NRA just might be completely full of
shit.
This is an organization,
remember, that claims to militantly defend individual liberty against
“government control.” Amid the post-Parkland outrage, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre
warned about shadowy enemies, whose goal “is to eliminate the Second Amendment
and our firearms freedoms, so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”
LaPierre made his name back in
the 1990s when he declared that a ban on semi-automatic weapons “gives
jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights,
break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or
kill us.”
There are, in fact, government
thugs who do just this on a daily basis in poor and nonwhite neighborhoods.
They’re called police.
But
as the Washington Post’s Radley Balko points out, the NRA is almost
always silent about police shootings — and is actually totally cool with local
police forces becoming militarized, both in weaponry and in mindset.
Making a former covert
operations spook its president is another order of cognitive dissonance for an
organization that traffics in conspiracy theories about secret government plans
to round up all the true patriots.
And that’s true even if you
don’t believe the reporting
from Wired about a conspiracy hatched in Reagan’s Federal Emergency
Management Agency to use a secret database to round up American dissidents and
throw them into detention camps...run by Oliver North.
HOW CAN the NRA be so
mind-blowingly hypocritical?
Shane
Bauer pointed out years ago in Mother Jones that the NRA
straddles a “delicate line between glorifying law enforcement and fanning fears
of big, tyrannical government” because the organization is both a
membership-based organization that wants looser gun laws for its dues-payers
and a lobbyist for weapons manufacturers that want to promote further
militarization (and sales) in police departments.
That’s all true. But it’s also
important to see the connecting lines between the NRA’s seemingly contradictory
positions. After all, it really isn’t that hard to see a common thread in
supporting racist cops and supporting racist “stand your ground” vigilantes.
Racism isn’t the entirety of
the NRA’s politics, but rather a key component of its thoroughly warped
understanding of tyranny and freedom.
By “big government,” the NRA
doesn’t mean the military, police, prisons, immigration Gestapo, spy agencies
and other forces of repression that claim the majority of government budgets in
the U.S. No, they mean elected lawmakers who (occasionally) try to represent their
constituents by passing widely supported bills to regulate guns and gun
corporations.
By tyranny, they mean
democracy. And by freedom, they mean the inalienable right for their
constituency of mostly well-off white men — who, indeed, were the only people
who the Founding Fathers intended to have democracy — to do whatever the hell
it takes to protect their property.
For years, the NRA has taken
this longstanding reactionary outlook and added the gasoline of manufactured
outrage necessary to increase sales of expensive guns to people who already own
a bunch.
Much of this outrage used to
stem from the organization’s self-image as decent, lawful citizens unfairly
treated by cultural elites. But all sorts of masks are coming off in the Trump
presidency — and by bringing in Oliver North, the NRA is making it clear which
side of the freedom/tyranny divide they’re really on.
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