Former NRA President & Lawyer: The history of gun control, part 1
Date: Jun 8, 2007 8:30 PM
FYI (copy below):
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56047
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The history of gun control, part 1
Posted: June 7, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Philosopher George Santayana said that those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It’s true.
One of the reasons to study history is to avoid repeating
past mistakes. When it comes to freedom, we cannot afford
to forget the lessons of the past. So you and I need to
know the history of gun control, because history teaches us
there is a terrible price to pay when we lose our right to
keep and bear arms.

Over 200 years ago, when the Founding Fathers drafted the
Second Amendment, no one questioned the need for private gun
ownership. The Framers considered private firearms to be
essential to protecting personal liberty, both as a means of
opposing foreign threats and also as a check against
excessive government power. The Framers were passionately
devoted to the idea that a self-sufficient armed citizenry
is the best means of preserving liberty.

But many on the left do not want you to know this. They
keep the truth from being taught in public schools, and they
even write books laden with falsehoods in a dishonest
attempt to rewrite history.

Seven years ago, Emory University historian Michael
Bellesiles published a book purportedly proving there were
few guns and gun owners in early America. The book garnered
Columbia University’s coveted Bancroft Prize. Two years
later, primarily due to the efforts of a brilliant young
research historian, Clayton Cramer, who had studied that
period in history extensively, the book was revealed to be a
total fraud, full of lies and fabrications. Bellesiles was
forced to resign from Emory University and, for the first
time in history, Columbia University rescinded the Bancroft
Prize.

Every American who values his or her constitutional rights
should know something about these frauds that gun control
advocates perpetrate so we can be watchful and teach the
truth to our young ones.

Early Americans were gun owners. Private firearm ownership
was widespread from the coasts to the frontier, in both the
North and the South.

Our ancestors not only knew the value of gun rights, they
actually practiced those rights. Many early Americans
provided for their family through their skill with a
firearm, and many more Americans had a gun hanging over the
hearth or in the bedroom to protect the house and the
children against wild animals or criminals. These firearms
were also seen as an insurance policy against American
Indians, the British or French, and even against our own
central government.

This honored tradition went completely unchallenged until
the 1900s. Then New York passed the Sullivan Act in 1911,
one of the first gun control laws. This law required that
firearms small enough to be concealed on a person be
registered. This state law became a test measure for future
gun control laws.

Opponents of the Second Amendment started to mobilize at the
federal level in the 1930s. It came during the New Deal,
when the federal government was growing rapidly. Two laws
enacted during this period, the National Firearms Act of
1934 and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, established the
first federal gun controls. While most of these regulations
were uncontroversial by current standards (such as licensing
gun dealers and regulating possession of machine guns), they
introduced the concept of national regulation of firearms.

It was also during this time President Franklin Roosevelt
appointed a number of liberals to the United States Supreme
Court. Starting in 1937, the high court began moving in a
liberal direction, and by the 1960s had become a court
favoring full judicial activism, a judicial philosophy that
has threatened our Second Amendment rights ever since.

During this period, anti-Second Amendment politicians began
testing the waters on gun control. The highest-ranking
official to do this was FDR’s anti-gun attorney general,
Homer Cummings. Attorney General Cummings started planning
for federal gun control measures such as a national registry
in the hands of the central government for guns and gun
owners.

But then World War II broke out, and Germany and Japan
invaded their neighbors. The American people were reminded
how important it is to have a firearm handy when you need
one. Cummings’ early attempts to regulate guns and gun
owners suddenly became unpopular. Gun control advocates
lowered their voices until a more opportune time.

Most American leaders in both political parties were
pro-gun. In fact, Democratic presidents Harry Truman and
John F. Kennedy were NRA members. Gun control advocates
were always present in policy debates, but did not have much
political clout.

In the 1960s, gun control came back with a vengeance.
Modern liberalism became the dominant political philosophy
in this country. And after the deaths of JFK, Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., an all-out national push
for gun control was launched.

This period in the late 1960s was the beginning of
significant gun control in America. Liberal activist
judges, led by the Warren Court, enacted a widespread
liberal agenda. American society was being secularized.
President Johnson was forcing a hard-left agenda through the
Great Society. And the Vietnam War was becoming
increasingly unpopular. It was against that backdrop the
left finally launched an open, concerted effort to implement
national gun control.

And that’s what we’ll talk about next week, remembering that
if we ignore the lessons that history offers us, our
children will pay the price with their freedom.

Sandy Froman is immediate past president of the National
Rifle Association of America and a longtime member of the
NRA board of directors. A practicing attorney in Tucson,
Ariz., Froman is an international speaker on the right to
keep and bear arms and an advocate for federal judges who
will interpret the Constitution according to its original
meaning.

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !