Tornado Alley (PROG)

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NRA fraud worked .. The NRA's Fraud: Fabrication of Second Amendment Rights
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For the first century of its existence beginning in 1871, the NRA primarily devoted its efforts to gun safety. Following enactment of new restrictive gun laws requiring gun licensing and taxes, a 1977 coup within the NRA membership led by militants resulted in a new harder edged and more aggressive NRA. The truth mattered not. The edifice of the NRA headquarters would now bear an abbreviated version of the Second Amendment: "The Right of the People to keep and Bear Arms Shall not be infringed." The NRA amended the Constitution unilaterally to avoid even a hint that the language pertaining to a Militia had any meaning. The law of the land spoke otherwise.

In 1939 the Supreme Court issued the Miller decision. The justices ruled that "the Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective Militia." That was the state of Second Amendment law until the 2008 Heller decision. Prior to Heller, the Supreme Court never recognized that individuals had an individual right to keep and bear arms. It was the NRA propaganda, not the law of the land, that led the cry for unlimited gun ownership and protection of gun owner rights. The NRA myths allowed the cycle of expanded gun sales and NRA power to purchase political influence. Democrats and Republican alike announced their allegiance to the Second Amendment and the public grew to believe that the NRA view of the Second Amendment was consistent with constitutional law. The NRA controlled too many elected officials to allow for protection of our citizens from gun violence, gun deaths and unspeakable gun horrors in schools and public places.

The NRA myths were disseminated on other fronts. Articles appeared in NRA publications and rewrote history by declaring that "Armed citizens [were] unregulated except by his own ability to buy a gun at whatever price he could afford." This credo became an NRA rallying cry.

The NRA poured millions upon millions of dollars into congressional and state legislative campaigns...
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Burgher had it right

Gun Debate Must Avoid Crazy 2nd Amendment Claims
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Here’s a quick way to see how rapidly things have changed. Warren Burger was a conservative Republican, appointed U.S. chief justice by President Richard Nixon in 1969. In a speech [ http://www.tnr.com/topics/warren-e.-burger# ] in 1992, six years after his retirement from the court, Burger declared that “the Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all.” In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was only “to ensure that the ‘state armies’ -- ‘the militia’ -- would be maintained for the defense of the state.”

A year before, Burger went even further. On “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger said the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud -- I repeat the word ‘fraud’ -- on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Burger wasn’t in the habit of taking stands on controversial constitutional questions on national television. In using the word “fraud,” Burger meant to describe what he saw as a clear consensus about the meaning of the Constitution.
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