Sen. Rand Paul greets supporters during a presidential campaign rally at the University of Iowa. (Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)

In celebration of the Second Amendment, former congressman and three-time presidential aspirant Ron Paul is giving away a brand new, customized AR-15, complete with his engraved signature.

“The Founders knew there can be no freedom without the ability to defend it,” he wrote in an email to supporters of the non-profit Campaign for Liberty Friday, announcing the raffle. “So they concluded the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution as a bulwark against government tyranny.”

Screenshot of an email sent to supporters of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, announcing the AR-15 giveaway. (Photo: Yahoo News)

The Campaign for Liberty, or C4L, described its mission as “standing up for freedom every day by fighting to Audit the Fed, repeal ObamaCare, stop NSA spying, and reclaim our Republic.”

It’s pretty much exactly the kind of agenda one would expect from the outspoken libertarian and the organization he founded toward the end of his 2008 presidential bid.

But it’s also a reminder of Rand Paul’s roots and the newly-minted presidential hopeful’s path to political prominence.

The elder Paul’s relative absence from his son’s national coming out party has hardly gone unnoticed. Instead, it’s only furthered speculation about how Rand plans to distance himself from his father’s sometimes controversial views and continued high-profile independent organizing efforts, in an effort to garner broader appeal. National Journal’s handy “Paul-o-Meter” perhaps best illustrates how Rand has strayed from his dad on issues like Iran, border security, and Vladimir Putin in recent years.

The apple hasn’t always rolled so far from the tree. The younger Paul grew up stumping for his father, playing an active role in Ron’s campaigns (as illustrated by a series of videos unearthed by The Wall Street Journal), up until he made his own bid for the Senate in 2010. After Rand was elected, the father-son congressional duo shared a condo in Virginia and participated in joint interviews. And Rand has spoken at every Liberty Political Action Conference—the Libertarian answer to CPAC—since 2011, when it was first hosted by Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty (the group behind the gun giveaway).

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Perhaps because his father never made it to the White House, Paul has managed to escape the kind of criticism lobbed at political legacies like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, eagerly hopping on the anti-dynasty bandwagon himself. But there’s no denying that Rand Paul is the product of a political family— even if it is scrappier and less mainstream than the Clintons or the Bushes.

In fact, the two men and their groups have shared a number of ideologically committed staffers over the years. “Many of the central players in Paul World hail from the National Right to Work Committee, the leading anti-union group where these operatives spent their formative political years,” Mother Jones writer Andy Kroll noted this week. “Doug Stafford, who is Rand Paul’s Karl Rove, is a former NRTWC vice president. John Tate, Ron Paul’s former campaign manager, worked with Stafford at the NRTWC; he is now the president of Campaign for Liberty, the political group founded by the elder Paul. [Dimitri] Kesari—described by someone who knows him as “like Radar from M*A*S*H"—previously led the NRTWC’s government affairs department. Mike Rothfeld headed the committee’s direct-mail operation in the late ‘80s and early '90s; he now runs the fundraising firm of choice for Rand Paul’s PAC, as well as the NRTWC and Campaign for Liberty.”

Rand Paul’s rapid political ascendance is widely attributed to his father’s influence. After all, in the The New York Times’ words, Rand was “an ophthalmologist who had never been elected to anything” when he made a run for the Senate in 2010.

But, as Mother Jones and others have pointed out, those family ties could come back to bite the younger Paul. Long story short: members of Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign team stand accused of helping to pay Iowa state Senator Kent Sorenson — an influential Republican in an influential state — to defect from Michele Bachmann’s campaign right before the January 2012 Iowa caucuses in order to back Paul.

After tipsters from within both Paul’s and Bachmann’s presidential campaigns brought the ploy to light in 2013, a memo to Paul campaign manager John Tate from Sorenson’s team revealed months-long negotiations between the two camps, with the state senator demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself, a colleague and his political action committee, in exchange for his support in the 2012 election as well as his commitment to help “build a major state-based movement that will involve far more people into a future Rand Paul presidential run.”

The scandal prompted investigations at the state and local level, as well as Sorenson’s retirement and guilty plea to federal election crimes, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. Whether the Ron Paul campaign’s actions are time bomb episode that will explode all over the younger Paul’s ambitions, as Mother Jones suggests, is unclear. But it certainly offers insight into the culture Rand Paul comes from — and why he’s now trying to branch out on his own.

