As students and victims of shooting violence push for stronger laws, Oliver North compares NRA’s struggles to the civil rights movement

Activists pushing for stronger gun laws are engaged in “civil terrorism”, Oliver North, the former Fox News commentator appointed as the next president of the National Rifle Association, has claimed.

The former Reagan-era security adviser, who was once convicted on charges related to the Iran-Contra affair, also claimed the NRA was the target of a “cyberwar”.

“They’re not activists – this is civil terrorism. This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” Oliver North told the Washington Examiner, a conservative newspaper. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things – even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”

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During the era of Jim Crow segregation, American civil rights activists were beaten and murdered. In 1963, four black children were killed when white supremacists bombed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The civil terrorism the NRA has faced, according to North’s interview with the Washington Examiner, includes having fake blood splashed on the Virginia home of an NRA official and personal “threats” aimed at NRA leaders.

Q&A Why is the National Rifle Association so powerful? Show Hide It’s not (just) about the money. In 2017, the NRA spent at least $4.1m on lobbying – more than the $3.1m it spent in all of 2016. But for comparison, the dairy industry has spent $4.4m in the same period, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The National Association of Realtors, one of the biggest spenders, has paid out $32.2m lobbying on housing issues. The NRA has plenty of cash to spend. It bet big on the 2016 US elections, pouring $14.4m into supporting 44 candidates who won and $34.4m opposing 19 candidates who lost, according to CRP. But “the real source of its power, I believe, comes from voters,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA professor of constitutional law. The 145-year-old organization claims 5 million active members, that number is disputed, but whatever its actual size, membership is a powerful tool, said Robert Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland. “They have a very powerful ability to mobilize a grassroots support and to engage in politics when most Americans can barely be bothered to vote,” he said. “And because so few Americans do those things, if you get a bunch of people in a locality who are all prepared to go out to a meeting they can have a big effect." Read more Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

Since the 14 February school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead, teenage survivors of the shooting have repeatedly criticized the NRA on Twitter for its decades-long campaign to block stricter gun laws. They have also pushed for companies to break ties with the NRA and companies that manufacture military-style weapons.

“They can do all the cyberwar against us – they’re doing it,” North said. “They can use the media against us – they are. They’ve gone after our bank accounts, our finances, our donors and obviously individual members,” North said. “It’s got to stop.”

North, a former Reagan administration aide, was convicted in 1989 in the Iran-Contra scandal where profits from weapons sold to Iran were covertly channeled to rightwing guerrillas in Nicaragua, who were fighting the leftwing government. North’s conviction was later dismissed and he went on to build career as an author and conservative pundit.

He said he aimed to increase the NRA’s membership, which the group recently claimed was nearing six million people, by another million.

In March, survivors of the Parkland shooting joined with other American teenagers who face the threat of gun violence to organize a global day of protest that brought hundreds of thousands of people to rallies in hundreds of cities.

Oliver North, Reagan aide implicated in Iran-Contra, to be new NRA president Read more

“What they did very successfully with a frontal assault, and now intimidation and harassment and lawbreaking, is they confused the American people,” North said of gun control activists. “Our job is to get the straight story out about what happened there, and to make sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen again because the proper things are being done with the advocacy of the NRA.”

Parkland student advocates have focused on the 2018 midterms as an opportunity to vote NRA supporters out of office, proving that gun control can be a winning issue, not a liability.

“There are people running in fear from what happened down in Parkland thinking that the NRA is on its heels – it’s not,” Oliver said. “What we have to do is assure them that being associated with the NRA is a good thing for their re-election chances. It’s a positive thing.”