-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Andrew C McKevitt, Patrick J. Charles. Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1252–1253, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae274
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Arguably, the National Rifle Association has been the most effective political lobby in US history. Despite that, scholars have yet to make sense of how that came to be. They often rely on a near-mythical narrative about the organization’s politicization in the 1970s, culminating in the “Revolt at Cincinnati” in 1977. At the NRA’s annual meeting, a group of hard-liners engineered a palace coup to seize control from old-guard moderates too committed to hunting and sportsmanship to mount an uncompromising defense of gun rights at a moment when gun controllers were on the offensive. Popular histories of the NRA’s twenty-first century, such as Tim Mak’s Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA (2021) and Frank Smyth’s The NRA: An Unauthorized History (2020), accept this narrative at face value, in part because of its contemporary political utility in distinguishing a “moderate” NRA of the past from the radical organization of the last several decades. In Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States, however, Patrick J. Charles offers an essential corrective that convincingly demonstrates how the NRA was already the “gun lobby” as far back as the 1930s. Indeed, it is the most useful history of the organization’s political activities to date, and the most comprehensive historians are likely to get for years or decades to come.
