My calling the leadership of the National Rifle Association “extremist” has generated a few nasty, how-dare-you emails. Unfortunately for these critics, the organization that I was a member of until 1988 continues to prove the accuracy of that label.
The latest evidence can be found in the August 3 edition of the NRA’s America’s 1st Freedom publication. It’s full of praise for the late Jeff Cooper on the 40th anniversary of Gunsite, the shooting academy he founded. Cooper long served on the NRA board and as a member of the NRA Executive Council. Editor Fred Winn urges readers to check out the archive of Cooper’s website, which contains his writing from 1993 until his death in 2006.
The articles there, writes Winn, “are insightful, wide-ranging and quite frequently laugh-out-loud funny” and many of his pieces are “astute and timely, particularly in advance of the 2016 presidential election.”
Uh-huh. In fact, as Timothy Johnson at Media Matters notes, those “insightful” and “astute” articles are brimful of brazenly racist spew:
Cooper often used racial slurs in his newsletter, including calling people of Middle Eastern descent “ragheads,” black children “pickaninnies” and “goblins,” Japanese people “nips,” Vietnamese people “gooks,” American Indians “pesky redskins” and “Injuns,” and black South Africans “kaffirs” -- a term equivalent to the slur “nigger” in the United States.
After the Transvaal Province in South Africa was renamed to the Gauteng Province during the 1994 post-Apartheid elections which were open to all races, Cooper suggested that the province's inhabitants should be referred to as “Oranggautengs.” [...]
A recurring theme in Cooper’s newsletter was defending the institution of slavery. In one instance, Cooper claimed that “slavery has been the normal condition of mankind for most of history. What do you do with the losers? You either kill them outright or put them to work.”
Not a big gap between that and what NRA CEO and Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said at the April 2015 annual meeting of the organization:
"As he prepares to leave office and leave his final legacy, there's no telling how far President Obama will go to dismantle our freedoms and reshape America into an America that you and I will not even recognize," he said.
And when Obama is done, he wants to put that legacy into the hands of Hillary Rodham Clinton," LaPierre warned. [...]
"I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough," he said.
A clear message. No more uppity you-know-whats in the White House. And no women either.
But, nah, the NRA isn’t run by extremists.