My apologizes for not making a point. I was a bit rushed when I did it. I assumed that the table of context would lead to reading Knox's testimony as he was kind of the current subject of the thread.
No biggie. I did read some of his opening statement, but I'm pretty sure the whole transcript that you linked to included more of him during the Q&A period, and unless I was addressing a specific quote or analysis of what he had to say, I wasn't about to delve into it.
If you read the Washington Post article(which was short)....
Short? It's 7,600 words! Your link went to Page 5, which was 10 times the number of words than on the other four pages, which were 500 ea. compared to 5,500 on Page 5 (rounded off). I wouldn't have even figured it out except I wanted to know when it was written, and there wasn't a date at the top of the page you linked to, so I scrolled to the bottom (seeing how long Page 5 was in the process) and noticed that not only was there not a date at the bottom of the page either, there was a page-turner button with four other pages listed. At that point I was curious how long the whole thing was, so I copied and pasted the text into Word and it counts them automatically. It's 16 pages long with standard, default margins and 11 point type! (If anyone's interested, the congressional testimony link was 72 pages with the same setup.)
I'm really not normally a word-counter, and under some circumstances both of those links might be something I'd be interested in going through, but for now I'll just reply to some of the rest of your synopsis of it below.
.....the reporter discusses the issues that lead to Harlan Carter's rise and the new era of the NRA along with Neal Knox who according to the article did quite abit in regards to the 2A as a lobbyist. They knew that the NRA sided too much with the government in regards to the 2A and they(Carter & Knox) decided that they were going to change the way the NRA functioned. The reporter also made note that there was a level of increases and decreases in memberships.
I agree that there was a time that the NRA was involved with gun control both in the thirties and late sixties. Those were different times. The 68 GCA is 45 years old. Yes the NRA allowed things to happen that shouldn't have but they were weak at that time and let it happen. Plus they were dealing with the effects of three high level assinations one of which the rifle was ordered from an ad in the "American Rifleman". That was 45 years ago. That is almost a generation behind us and those who shaped the gun control act of the thirties are no longer even alive. If we want to throw stones at organizations there are plenty of them out there that have changed their stances in 45 years... Shall we chastise the "Southern Democrat" for their beliefs into the 60's? If I remember correctly there were plenty of "Southern Democrats" that felt segregation was the right thing.
Let me take the last issue/question first, and that answer is not only yes, but HELL YES! The Dems' abysmal racist record is every bit as ripe a target in exposing their roots and history as exposing that Planned Parenthood was founded by a genocidal, rabid racist/eugenicist name
Margaret Sanger as a form of reducing births of blacks and mental/physical defectives. The racist history of the Dems can be just as easily used to explain their modern positions as Planned Parenthood's most prestigious award,
The Margaret Sanger Award, can be legitimately used to show the impunity with which they continue to flaunt their racist history. The only difference between what Hitler did to millions of Jews and what Sanger hoped to "accomplish" with Planned Parenthood is that Hitler had more power and bigger ovens. Otherwise, they were ideological contemporaries, as were they both ideological contemporaries of the Dixiecrats, and just as Planned Parenthood shows without a doubt that its racism has traveled with it through time, just look at who is hurt the worst by Democrat, progressive policy being consistently implemented; blacks. The overwhelming majority of cities that have been Dem-controlled for generations, Detroit, Chicago, DC and on and on, blacks suffer the highest unemployment, the highest single-parent households, the highest per-capita percentage of public assisstance, high alcohol and drug abuse, and as a result of that, high percentages of incarcerated young working-aged men, many of whom are also fathers.
In short, of course using the Dems' racist history to demonstrate how it relates to current events is fair game. Likewise with the N R A. And on that issue, you say they've changed so much since the '70s, but just a few days ago I
posted a thread quoting current President David Keene telling a bunch of leftists.....
41:00 - 42:00 - Legitimate that machine guns be banned as they have been. This in answer to a question about the "
Slide Fire Stock," a mechanical device that has been
approved by BATFE since June of 2010 and remains legal to this day, and towards the end of Keene's answer he says they should get
more scrutiny from BATFE if they effectively convert from semi to full-auto, which they don't, but hey, banning machine guns
was legitimate, so who cares, right?
There's more in the thread, including a link to the video I was talking about, and that video was shot and is current as of Jan. 31, 2013, so whatever WaPo describes as some major change in resistance to government-imposed gun control on the part of the N R A back in 2000 doesn't really carry any weight with me.
The day before Keene made his appearance,
LaPierre was shredded by Leahy (video at bottom of page) during a Senate Q&A session in a major flip-flop on background checks. LaPierre admitted to being four-square in favor of background checks for
every sale or transfer of guns, meaning private sales at gun shows etc., by saying, "No loopholes for anyone, anywhere" back in '99, but then completely reversed that stance just a few seconds later, not because the checks are an infringement on the 2nd Amendment, but because the system the N R A itself helped to create isn't working!
There are greater or lesser examples of the current N R A being either dishonest in what they actually have accomplished, or supporting legislation that is counter to the original intent of the 2nd Amendment. Maybe they get some media coverage, maybe they don't, but just because it doesn't get splashed across your computer screen without having to go looking for it, doesn't mean it's not happening on a regular basis. I stopped paying dues back about the time that that WaPo article was first released (2000), and that was because of being made aware of some of the things I've tried to make y'all aware of. Some examples were old, some were current to that time, just like some are current to today now. They have been as consistent in supporting gun control as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West day in, and day out.
The second link long as it may be the first twenty pages is what we should be looking at. Knox really did have a h***n for the BATF. He jumped into the fray with that in mind. He proves it with his testimony to Congress. He called the BATF on the carpet for their reckless law enforcement. He knew when they drafted the McClure-Volkmer act he would draw the ire of the BATF. The BATF has never changed and when Congress decided they should be filtered into the FBI for budgetary reasons they went on some wild raid in Waco to justify their existence. They should have been immediately disbanned after that fiasco.
If there is any governmental agency we should be worried about it is them. How many high ranking BATF officers have resigned amid charges of gross violations of the very laws they enforce.
Well, before I get as long as Page 5 of that WaPo link, let me say this about that. In this very thread, all the way back on Page 1,
I posted about the N R A's incestuous relationship with BATFE. I first linked to the same JPFO article,
"With Friends Like The NRA..." that I['ve linked several times in hopes that most of you would actually read it, but see little evidence that many of you have. So where the N R A's and BATFE's relationship is concerned, I'm just going to paste in four paragraphs from it in reply to your above claim that they have some adversarial relationship, because, clearly, it's more like co-dependent heroin addicts. But anyway:
In 1968, the NRA "signed off" on Thomas Dodd's Nazi-inspired Gun Control Act, a story of deceit and treachery we've told here before - as covered in the book "
Gateway to Tyranny". (JPFO discovered this nasty connection, and that Dodd requested a translation of Hitler's gun laws from the Library of Congress.) And never forget how the NRA actually helped resurrect the Brady Bill (the whole story is told at
Link Removed ) -- under which you must now beg for and receive the government's permission to buy a gun -- after it was considered to be as dead as a doornail in Congress.
The very existence of the BATFE, and therefore everything it does, violates the Second Amendment, and is therefore illegal. And yet, at
http://jpfo.org/pdf/nraletter.pdf you can see for yourself, in the NRA's own words, how and why it defends the existence of this criminal gang, and what the more highly principled Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, has to say about that. Vin Suprynowicz, columnist and assistant editorial page editor at the
Las Vegas Review Journal simply calls the NRA "the world's oldest and largest gun control organization".
While it often calls publically for BATFE reforms (
that turn out to be empty rhetoric because the agency's value as an NRA fundraising device must never be compromised), the NRA has never called for -- and will never call for -- abolition of this unconstitutional agency, repeal of the tangled mass of unconstitutional laws it enforces, or even such badly-needed interim reforms as standardized, published firearms testing procedures, and fully recorded tests, accessible to public review,
crucial issues over which perfectly innocent, law- abiding Americans are presently wasting huge chunks of their lives in prison.
Read that letter again:
http://jpfo.org/pdf/nraletter.pdf and see the terrible truth. The NRA doesn't care at all about the Second Amendment, the Constitution, the rights and safety of its members, or even the individuals rotting in jail thanks to NRA indifference and inaction. All the NRA cares about is membership money, tax-free contributions, expensive advertising in its magazines from cowardly, compromising corporations (
as opposed to smaller gunmakers who truly believe in the Second Amendment), benefits packages and "golden parachutes" for its executives, and its obscene relationship with the BATFE.
(Emphasis mine)
I can't make anybody read what I post or follow the links I provide or interpret what they read the same way I do. But I can fully explain my positions, and provide substantive material to explain how and why I adopted them. The above citation covers letters and analysis from '02 to '06. Hardly ancient history. The links to the letter they reference is still good. I suggest anyone who wants to know the truth about where your money goes when you send it to the N R A reads it.
BTW, since both Etkini and I provided links to auctions of vintage issues of The American Rifleman that contain a lot of documentation of their gun control history, but neither of us had the copies to scan and prove the veracity of the quotes we cited, I bought both of those issues earlier tonight, and should be able to prove my (our) assertions by Saturday sometime. Thank me. I'm welcome.
Blues
