In the wake of last year's shooting in Las Vegas, which saw 58 concertgoers murdered and 800+ injured, Donald Trump promised that we'd be soon "be talking about gun laws." It was really easy to call bullshit on that promise, but then ... we started talking about gun laws. Namely, a bill to ban "bump stocks," the modification used by the shooter to up the kill-itude of his weapons. Just as quickly as that happened, however, we stopped talking about gun laws and the bill died with no explanation.

I was going to say something, but then a churchload of people was gunned down in Sutherland Springs. I thought we were then going to start talking about gun laws again. After all, it'd be pretty screwed up of the government to ignore the deadliest and third-most deadliest mass shootings ever ... but then Donald Trump said that wasn't "a gun situation" and everyone stopped talking about it.

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We're now seven weeks into 2018, and we've already had 30 mass shooting incidents, including Parkland. It kinda seems like we're in the middle of a gun situation, you guys.

To hear gun control proponents out, one might think that the best, fastest solution to the mass shootings plaguing our country would be to take a shiny litigatory scalpel and excise the NRA -- with their bottomless lobbying coffers, poisonous conspiracy theories, promotion of violence against protesters, and all-around assholery -- from politics and wider society. It's hard to argue against that. We certainly wouldn't stand for that shit from, say, the dairy industry. But the NRA somehow gets a pass every damn time.

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That's a pretty reductionist view of the problem, though. We don't need to completely tear down the NRA. But we do need to de-crazy those motherfluffers and take them back to the good ol' days when they were a force for good in society.

NRA

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When the NRA was founded in 1871, its primary purpose was to teach "urban northerners" how to use guns as well as their Southern counterparts could, figuring that this disparity lengthened the Civil War by several years. The organization taught basic marksmanship and firearm maintenance, funded the construction of shooting ranges, partnered with the War Department to host tournaments, and sparked the interest of a thoroughly traumatized nation in need of some semblance of security.

They weren't just teaching hunters how not to blow their balls off, however. They were also big players on Capitol Hill, where (and hold on to this next sentence like a wish that your heart makes) they spent their time politicking for both sides of the gun control debate. They campaigned against legislation that would have impugned their core membership base, hunters and sportsmen. But they also proposed and sponsored gun control bills. In the 1920s, for instance, they drafted handgun regulations not too dissimilar from those that they campaign against today: regulations requiring a permit for concealed weapons, a mandatory waiting period, and making records of gun sales available to law enforcement. In the 1930s, they went further and sponsored both the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act, which, among other things, banned felons from owning guns, required gun sellers and owners to register with the government, and placed heavy tax levies on guns associated with the likes of Bonnie & Clyde, and John Dillinger.

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Heck, take this quote from Karl Frederick, the President of the Freaking NRA, in 1939:

"I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

It all started to go wrong in the 1960s. As part of establishment efforts to spite the Black Panthers -- who in 1967 marched on the California State Capitol building as part of a pushback against efforts to restrict the rights of black people to own guns -- the NRA sponsored the Mulford Act, which banned the carrying of loaded weapons across California. They also sponsored the Gun Control Act of 1968, a piece of legislation which restricted the shipping of firearms and ammunition, placed a minimum age requirement on gun purchases, and banned drug addicts and the mentally ill from owning firearms. You'll note that two of these three measures appear to have stuck around.