The NRA wasn’t always about the promiscuous toting of guns and arming of teachers
Before it became a lobbying behemoth, the fraternal association focused on marksmanship, sport, and gun safety
“I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” Karl T. Frederick told Congress in 1934. “I seldom carry one.” Today, it’s unimaginable that a person in Frederick’s position — president of the National Rifle Association — would utter these words. But it was a different era, one in which the NRA was mostly a fraternal association focused on marksmanship, gun safety, and sport, with very few traces of the lobbying behemoth it is today.
The congressional hearing at which Frederick spoke had been convened because several incidents had increased lawmakers’ concerns about, and subsequent scrutiny of, the country’s gun policies. First, in 1921, Nevada senator Charles B. Henderson was shot in his office by a disgruntled constituent. Then, in 1929, mobsters, armed with shotguns and submachine guns, killed seven members of a rival gang in a Chicago warehouse in what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The men had been shot execution-style, and the ruthlessness of the attack shocked the country. The bodies were so disfigured that the coroner had difficulty identifying them. The country’s qualms about firearms were compounded on February 15, 1933, when a 32-year-old bricklayer, Giuseppe Zangara, attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt with a 32-caliber pistol he had bought at a pawn shop. Zangara missed his target but killed Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was standing nearby. “I kill presidents first and next all capitalists,” Zangara shouted from his jail cell, alarming many of the economic and political elite.
In light of these incidents, lawmakers began putting pressure on the NRA to explain where the organization stood, and Frederick was forced into the spotlight. His strategy was to remain uncompromising on the right to carry pistols but to make concessions on big guns.
Frederick, with his lifelong passion for sportsmanship, embodied the ethos of the old NRA. Born in 1881 in Chateaugay, New York, he became a skilled competitive marksman while a law student at Princeton. In 1920, he represented the United States at the Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium, returning with three gold medals. He also served as vice president of the U.S. Revolver Association.
For Frederick, guns belonged first and foremost on shooting ranges. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns,” he said. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
The NRA’s ethos during Frederick’s leadership came across in its magazine, The American Rifleman, which mainly covered hunting and fishing, with little discussion of politics or the Second Amendment until the 1960s. When it came to the question of gun regulation, a column in the 1929 December issue took a very moderate position on concealed carry: “We have no objection to legislation requiring a man to obtain a permit to carry a gun concealed, as long as proper provision is made in the law to enable any honest citizen who is a member of a properly organized target-shooting club to carry his gun to and from the target range … if the police believe that such a law will help them, we have no objection to its passage.”
Frederick’s relatively pragmatic stance, and his testimony before Congress, enabled the adoption of the National Firearms Act in 1934. It was the first federal law regulating guns on a national level. It required certain firearms, such as machine guns and short-barreled rifles, to be registered and taxed.
But Karl T. Frederick’s legacy is no longer part of NRA historiography. After the 1977 “Cincinnati coup,” when libertarian hard-liners, such as former Border Patrol head Harlon Carter, overthrew the old guard of the NRA, it became a political organization, advocating aggressively for an extension of Second Amendment rights. Today, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and CEO of the organization, takes extreme stances, such as arming teachers in schools. “They hate the NRA,” he said of anti-gun activists in 2018, never mentioning Karl T. Frederick or acknowledging the original intention of his organization. “They hate the Second Amendment, they hate individual freedom.”
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