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One side story I'm learning about with this project that I think is not well known is how the federal government essentially armed white supremacist groups in the 1950s and 1960s via the NRA.
Story goes that for much of the 20th century, the NRA had the exclusive right to sell surplus guns from the US military. In fact, the only way you could buy surplus military firearms was to be an NRA member. The federal govt essentially subsidized the NRA's existence in this way.
In addition to the surplus guns at a discount rate for NRA members, the federal govt gave (*gave*, not sold) guns to the NRA for the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which was (and remains) a quasi-govt organization essentially run by the NRA for decades.
The NRA then distributed those free guns to affiliate chapters all over the country, ostensibly to encourage marksmanship practice and competitions. But the bar to be a local "affiliate" was set really low: basically you just had to prove you had a group of ten NRA members.
Also, ostensibly, NRA membership was restricted to "upstanding" citizens, who needed someone like another member or a military officer to vouch for their upstanding character, but journalists in the 1960s showed that this was meaningless and basically anyone could be a member.
So it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you want the federal govt to give you guns for free, you just need the NRA to recognize you and nine of your gun-loving friends as a local "affiliate." Guess which kinds of groups figure out pretty quickly how to do this?
The Klan, various right-wing extremist groups like the John Birch Society, the Minutemen militia movement-- they realize that it's pretty easy to establish a local NRA "affiliate" and get the NRA to ship them *free* US military surplus guns.
Some people, a few journalists and politicians, tried to sound the alarm on this, but as the 1960s moved on, white Americans were much more concerned with armed left-wing groups, particularly militant black organizations, than they were with white extremists.
So there's a story out there about the govt giving white supremacists and other right-wing extremists free guns via the NRA in the 1950s and 1960s that I think remains to be told at length. Anybody need a dissertation topic?
