The Secret History of Gun Rights: How Lawmakers Armed the N.R.A.

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/us/politics/nra-congress-firearms.html

They served in Congress and on the N.R.A.’s board at the same time. Over
decades, a small group of legislators led by a prominent Democrat pushed
the gun lobby to help transform the law, the courts and views on the
Second Amendment.

Long before the National Rifle Association tightened its grip on Congress,
won over the Supreme Court and prescribed more guns as a solution to gun
violence — before all that, Representative John D. Dingell Jr. had a plan.

First jotted on a yellow legal pad in 1975, it would transform the N.R.A.
from a fusty club of sportsmen into a lobbying juggernaut that would
enforce elected officials’ allegiance, derail legislation behind the
scenes, redefine the legal landscape and deploy “all available resources
at every level to influence the decision making process.”

“An organization with as many members, and as many potential resources,
both financial and influential within its ranks, should not have to go 2d
or 3d Class in a fight for survival,” Mr. Dingell wrote, advocating a new
aggressive strategy. “It should go First Class.”

To understand the ascendancy of gun culture in America, the files of Mr.
Dingell, a powerful Michigan Democrat who died in 2019, are a good place
to start. That is because he was not just a politician — he simultaneously
sat on the N.R.A.’s board of directors, positioning him to influence
firearms policy as well as the private lobbying force responsible for
shaping it.

And he was not alone. Mr. Dingell was one of at least nine senators and
representatives, both Republicans and Democrats, with the same dual role
over the last half-century — lawmaker-directors who helped the N.R.A.
accumulate and exercise unrivaled power.

Their actions are documented in thousands of pages of records obtained by
The New York Times, through a search of lawmakers’ official archives, the
papers of other N.R.A. directors and court cases. The files, many of them
only recently made public, reveal a secret history of how the nation got
to where it is now.

Over decades, politics, money and ideology altered gun culture, reframed
the Second Amendment to embrace ever broader gun rights and opened the
door to relentless marketing driven by fear rather than sport. With more
than 400 million firearms in civilian hands today and mass shootings now
routine, Americans are bitterly divided over what the right to bear arms
should mean.

The lawmakers, far from the stereotype of pliable politicians meekly
accepting talking points from lobbyists, served as leaders of the N.R.A.,
often prodding it to action. At seemingly every hint of a legislative
threat, they stepped up, the documents show, helping erect a firewall that
impedes gun control today.

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“Talk about being strategic people in a place to make things happen,” an
N.R.A. executive gushed at a board meeting after Congress voted down gun
restrictions following the 1999 Columbine shooting. “Thank you. Thank
you.”

The fact that some members of Congress served on the N.R.A. board is not
new. But much of what they did for the gun group, and how, was not
publicly known.

Representative Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican, sent confidential memos to
the N.R.A. leader Wayne LaPierre, urging action against gun violence
lawsuits. Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, chided fellow board
members for failing to advance a bill that rolled back gun restrictions,
and told them how to do it.

Republican Representative John M. Ashbrook of Ohio co-wrote a letter to
the board describing “very subtle and complex” tactics to support
“candidates friendly to our cause and actions to defeat or discipline
those who are hostile.” Senator Larry E. Craig, an Idaho Republican who
was a key strategic partner for the N.R.A., flagged and scuttled a
proposal to require the use of gun safety locks.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/07/27/us/00nra-documents-tear-
10/00nra-documents-tear-10-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

Representative Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican, wrote to the N.R.A. leader
Wayne LaPierre in 1999 urging action against gun violence lawsuits. It was
one of several memos raising alarms about firearms issues in Congress.

And then there was Mr. Dingell. In a private letter in October 1978, the
N.R.A. president, Lloyd Mustin, said his “insights and guidance on the
details of any gun-related matter pending in the Congress” were “uniformly
successful.” Just as valuable, he said, was the congressman’s stealthy
manipulation of the legislative process.

“These actions by him are often carefully obscured,” Mr. Mustin wrote, so
they may “not be recognized or understood by the uninitiated observer.”

As chairman of the powerful House commerce committee, Mr. Dingell would
send “Dingellgrams” — demands for information from federal agencies —
drafted by the N.R.A. Other times, on learning of a lawmaker’s plan to
introduce a bill, he would scribble a note to an aide saying, “Notify
N.R.A.”

Beginning in the 1970s, he pushed the group to fund legal work that could
help win court cases and enshrine policy protections. The impact would be
far-reaching: Some of the earliest N.R.A.-backed scholars were later cited
in the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia vs. Heller decision affirming
an individual right to own a gun, as well as a ruling last year that
established a new legal test invalidating many restrictions.

The files of Mr. Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress, were
donated to the University of Michigan but remained off-limits for nearly
eight years. They were only made available in May, five months after The
Times began pressing for their release.

Mr. Barr, who has remained on the N.R.A. board since leaving government in
2003, said in an interview that he did not recall the memos he wrote to
Mr. LaPierre, which were among the congressman’s papers at the University
of West Georgia. But during his nearly six years in office while also a
N.R.A. director, he said, the group “never approached me to do anything
that I didn’t want to do or that I would not have done anyway.”

“I’m doing it as a member of Congress who also happens to be an N.R.A.
board member,” Mr. Barr said.

N.R.A. manuals say its board has a “special trust” to ensure the
organization’s success and to protect the Second Amendment “in the
legislative and political arenas.” Under ethics rules, lawmakers may serve
as unpaid directors of nonprofits, and the gun group is classified by the
I.R.S. as a nonprofit “social welfare organization.” No current
legislators serve on its board.

In 2004, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence objected to three
Republican lawmakers then serving as unpaid N.R.A. directors: Mr. Craig
and Representatives Don Young of Alaska and Barbara Cubin of Wyoming. The
Brady organization argued that their fiduciary duty to the N.R.A.
conflicted with their government roles.

“Here, the lobbyist and the lobbied are the same,” said the complaint. It
was rejected by Senate and House ethics committees.

Mr. Dingell eventually left the N.R.A. board. The turning point was his
support for a 1994 crime bill that included an assault weapons ban. In a
terse resignation letter, he acknowledged a problem in serving as an
elected official and a director — though he would continue to work closely
with the group for years.

“I deeply regret,” Mr. Dingell wrote, “that the conflict between my
responsibilities as a Member of Congress and my duties as a board member
of the National Rifle Association is irreconcilable.”

‘Patriotic Duty’
John Dingell was comfortable with firearms at an early age: When not
blasting ducks with a shotgun, he was plinking rats with an air gun in the
basement of the U.S. Capitol, where he served as a page. They were
pursuits he picked up from his father, a New Deal Democrat representing a
House district in Detroit’s working-class suburbs, who enjoyed hunting and
championed conservation causes.

After serving in the Army in World War II, the younger Mr. Dingell earned
a law degree and worked as a prosecutor. He succeeded his father in 1955
at age 29. Nicknamed “the Truck” as much for his forceful personality as
his 6-foot-3 frame, Mr. Dingell was an imposing presence in the House,
where he became a Democratic Party favorite for pushing liberal causes
like national health insurance.

Mr. Dingell recalled, in a 2016 interview, that he saw President John F.
Kennedy “fairly frequently” at the White House and generally “traveled the
same philosophical path.”

“Except on firearms,” he added.

In December 1963, just weeks after Mr. Kennedy was murdered with a rifle
bought through an N.R.A. magazine ad, Mr. Dingell complained at a hearing
about “a growing prejudice against firearms” and defended buying guns
through the mail. His advocacy made him popular with the N.R.A., and by
1968 he had joined at least one other member of Congress on its board.

Historically, the N.R.A.’s opposition to firearms laws was tempered.
Founded in 1871 by two Union Army veterans — a lawyer and a former New
York Times correspondent — the association promoted rifle training and
marksmanship. It did not actively challenge the Supreme Court’s view,
stated in 1939, that the Second Amendment’s protection of gun ownership
applied to membership in a “well regulated Militia” rather than an
individual right unconnected to the common defense.

During the 1960s, public outrage over political assassinations and street
violence led to calls for stronger laws, culminating in the Gun Control
Act, the most significant firearms bill since the 1930s. The law would
restrict interstate sales, require serial numbers on firearms and make
addiction or mental illness potential disqualifiers for ownership. The
N.R.A. was divided, with a top official complaining about parts of the
bill while also saying it was something “the sportsmen of America can live
with.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted the bill to be even stronger, requiring
gun registration and licensing, and angrily blamed an N.R.A. letter-
writing campaign for weakening it. The Justice Department briefly
investigated whether the group had lobbied without registering, and in
F.B.I. interviews, N.R.A. officials “pointed out” that members of Congress
sat on its board, as if that defused any lobbying concerns. (The case was
closed when the N.R.A. agreed to register.)

The debate over the Gun Control Act agitated Mr. Dingell, his files show.
He asked the Library of Congress to research Nazi-era gun confiscations in
Germany to help prove that regulating firearms was a slippery slope. He
considered investigating NBC News for a gun rights segment he viewed as
one-sided. At an N.R.A. meeting, he railed about a “patriotic duty” to
oppose the “ultimate disarming of the law-abiding citizen.”

As Mr. Johnson prepared to sign the act in fall 1968, Mr. Dingell was
convinced that gun ownership faced an existential threat and wrote to an
N.R.A. executive suggesting a bold strategy.

The group, he said, must “begin moving toward a legislative program” to
codify an individual’s right to bear arms “for sporting and defense
purposes.” It was a major departure from the Supreme Court’s sparse record
on Second Amendment issues up to that point. The move would neutralize
arguments for tighter gun restrictions in Congress and all 50 states, he
said.

“By being bottomed on the federal constitutional right to bear arms,” he
wrote, “these same minimal requirements must be imposed upon state
statutes and local ordinances.”

A New Aggressiveness
Mr. Dingell’s legislative acumen proved indispensable to the gun lobby.

The 1972 Consumer Products Safety Act, designed to protect Americans from
defective products, might have reduced firearms accidents that killed or
injured thousands each year. But the N.R.A. viewed it as a backdoor to gun
control, and Mr. Dingell slipped in an amendment to the new law, exempting
from regulatory oversight items taxed under “section 4181 of the Internal
Revenue Code” — which only covers firearms and ammunition.

While Mr. Dingell’s office was publicly boasting in 1974 of his bill to
restrict “Saturday night specials,” cheap handguns often used in crimes,
C.R. Gutermuth, then the N.R.A.’s president, confided in a private letter
that the congressman had only introduced it to “effectively prevent”
stronger bills. “Obviously, this comes under the heading of legislative
maneuvering and strategy,” he wrote.

Still, the public generally favored stricter limits. After a 3-year-old
Baltimore boy accidentally killed a 7-year-old friend with an unsecured
handgun, a constituent wrote to Mr. Dingell asking, “How long is it going
to be before Congress takes effective action?” He instructed an aide to
“not answer.”

When the N.R.A. board met in March 1974, Mr. Gutermuth reported that
“Congressman Dingell and some of our other good friends on The Hill keep
telling us that we soon will have another rugged firearms battle on our
hands.” Yet he expressed dismay that N.R.A. staff had not come up with a
“concrete proposal” to fend it off.

Mr. Dingell had an idea.

In memos to the board, he complained of the N.R.A.’s “leisurely response
to the legislative threat” and proposed a new lobbying operation.
Handwritten notes reflect just how radical his plans were. He initially
said the group, which traditionally stayed out of political races, would
“not endorse candidates for public office” — only to cross that out with
his pen; the N.R.A. would indeed start doing that, through a newly created
Political Victory Fund.

The organization’s old guard, whose focus continued to be largely on
hunting and sports shooting, was uncomfortable. Mr. Gutermuth, a
conservationist with little political experience, wrote to a colleague
that Mr. Dingell “wants an all out action program that goes way beyond
what we think we dare sponsor.”

“John seems to think that we should become involved in partisan politics,”
he said.

Mr. Dingell got his way. A 33-page document — “Plan for the Organization,
Operation and Support of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action” — was
wide-ranging. The proposal, largely written by Mr. Dingell, called for an
unprecedented national lobbying push supported by grass-roots fund-
raising, a media operation and opposition research.

It would “maintain files for each member of Congress and key members of
the executive branch, relative to N.R.A. legislative interests,” and
“using computerized data, bring influence to bear on elected officials.”
The plan reflected Mr. Dingell’s savvy as a lawmaker: “For greatest
effectiveness and economy, whenever possible, influence legislation at the
lowest level of the legislative structure and at the earliest time.”

Walt Sanders, a former legislative director for Mr. Dingell, said the
congressman viewed the N.R.A. as useful to his goal of protecting and
expanding gun rights, particularly by heading off efforts to impose new
restrictions.

“He believed very strongly that he could affect gun control legislation as
a senior member of Congress and use the resources of the N.R.A. as
leverage,” Mr. Sanders said.

The changes mirrored an increasingly uncompromising outlook within the
N.R.A. membership. In what became known as the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” a
group of hard-liners seized control of the group at its 1977 convention.

The coup drew inspiration from Mr. Dingell, who a month before had
circulated a blistering attack on the incumbent leadership. He was revered
by many members, who saw little distinction between his roles as a
lawmaker and an N.R.A. director, and would write letters praising his
fight on their behalf against “gun-grabbers.”

In his responses, he would sometimes correct the impression that he
represented the N.R.A. in Congress.

“I try to keep my responsibilities in the two capacities separate so that
there is no basic conflict,” he wrote to one constituent.

Cultural Shift
When gunshots claimed the life of John Lennon in December 1980 and nearly
killed President Ronald Reagan a few months later, the N.R.A. readied
itself for a familiar battle. Its officials, meeting in May 1981, grumbled
that their “priorities, plans and activities have necessarily been
altered.”

But remarkably, no new gun restrictions made it through Congress.

The group saw the failure of gun control efforts to gain traction as a
validation of its new agenda and a sign that, with Reagan’s election,
there was “a new mood in the country.” The N.R.A. and its congressional
allies seized the moment, eventually pushing through the most significant
pro-gun bill in history, the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986,
which rolled back elements of the Gun Control Act.

The bill — largely written by Mr. Dingell but sponsored by Representative
Harold L. Volkmer, a Missouri Democrat who would later join the N.R.A.
board — was opposed by police groups. It lifted some restrictions on gun
shows, sales of mail-order ammunition and the interstate transport of
firearms.

The N.R.A. also went ahead with Mr. Dingell’s plans “to develop a legal
climate that would preclude, or at least inhibit, serious consideration of
many anti-gun proposals.” A strategy document from April 1983 laid out the
long-term goal: “When a gun control case finally reaches the Supreme
Court, we want Justices’ secretaries to find an existing background of law
review articles and lower court cases espousing individual rights.”

The document listed several scholars the N.R.A. was supporting. Decades
later, their work would be cited in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2008
decision in Heller, affirming gun ownership as an individual right. And it
would surface in last year’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v.
Bruen ruling, which established a right to carry a firearm in public and a
novel legal test weakening gun control efforts — prompting lower courts to
invalidate restrictions on ownership by domestic abusers and on guns with
serial numbers removed.

Key to those victories were appointments of conservative justices by
N.R.A.-backed Republican presidents. By the time Antonin Scalia — author
of the Heller opinion — was nominated by Reagan in 1986, the joke was that
the “R” in N.R.A. stood for Republican, and internal documents from that
era are laced with partisan rhetoric.

A 1983 report by a committee of N.R.A. members identified the perceived
enemy as liberal elites: “college educated, intellectual, political,
educational, legal, religious and also to some extent the business and
financial leadership of the country,” inordinately affected by the
assassinations of “men they admired” in the 1960s.

Lawmakers joining the board during that time — Mr. Ashbrook, Mr. Craig and
Mr. Stevens — were all Republicans. Mr. Craig, a conservative gun
enthusiast raised in a ranching family, would become “probably the most
important” point person for the N.R.A. in Congress after Mr. Dingell, said
David Keene, a longtime board member and former N.R.A. president.

“He was actually like having one of your own guys there,” Mr. Keene said
in an interview.

He added, however, that a legislator need not have been a board member to
be supportive of the group’s ambitions.

Mr. Craig did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Ashbrook and
Mr. Stevens are dead. The N.R.A. did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Dingell, under increasing pressure as a pro-gun Democrat, faced a
reckoning of sorts in 1994, when Congress took up an anti-crime bill that
would ban certain semiautomatic rifles classified as assault weapons. He
opposed the ban but favored the rest of the legislation.

A year earlier, he had angered fellow Democrats by voting against the
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which imposed a background check
requirement. This time, after intense lobbying that included urgent calls
from President Bill Clinton, Mr. Dingell lent crucial support for the new
legislation — and resigned from the N.R.A. board.

His wife, Representative Debbie Dingell, a proponent of stronger gun laws
who now occupies his old House seat, said her husband faced a backlash
from pro-gun extremists that left him deeply disturbed.

“He had to have police protection for several months,” Ms. Dingell said in
an interview. “We had people scream and yell at us. It was the first time
I had seen that real hate.”

Despite voting for the ban, Mr. Dingell almost immediately explored
getting it overturned. Notes from 1995 show his staff weighing support for
a repeal proposal, conceding that “a solid explanation will have to be
made to the majority of our voters who favor gun control.”

‘Best Foot Forward’
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were too young to legally purchase a
firearm, so in November 1998 they enlisted an 18-year-old friend to visit
a gun show in Colorado and buy them two shotguns and a rifle. Five months
later, they used the weapons, along with an illegally obtained handgun, to
kill 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School.

The massacre was a turning point for a country not yet numbed to mass
shootings and for the N.R.A., criticized for pressing ahead about a week
later with plans for its convention just miles from Columbine. That sort
of response would be repeated years later, after a teenager killed 19
students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and the N.R.A. went on with
its convention in the state shortly afterward.

After Columbine, the organization mobilized against a renewed push for gun
control. It had a new lawmaker-director to help: Mr. Barr, who had joined
the board in 1997.

A staunchly conservative lawyer with a libertarian bent, Mr. Barr was
among the House Republicans to lead the impeachment of Mr. Clinton. He
served on the Judiciary Committee, which has major sway over gun
legislation, and proved an eager addition to the N.R.A. leadership.

Mr. Barr wrote to another director with a standing offer to use his
Capitol Hill office to ensure that any “information you have is cranked
into the legislative equation.” Mr. Barr’s chief of staff sent the
congressman a memo saying the gun group wanted him to review the agenda
for a meeting on the “upcoming legislative session” and “make any changes
or additions.”

The post-Columbine legislative battle centered on a bill to extend three-
day background checks to private sales at gun shows, something the N.R.A.
vigorously opposed, saying most weekend shows ended before a check could
be completed. In the Senate, Mr. Craig engineered an amendment softening
the impact, and Mr. Barr worked the House, earning them praise at an
N.R.A. board meeting as “two people that put our best foot forward.”

The N.R.A. also turned to an old hand: Mr. Dingell.

Together, they came up with another amendment that narrowed the gun shows
affected and required background checks to be completed in 24 hours or
else the sale would go through. Publicly, Mr. Dingell argued that the
shortened time window was reasonable.

But his papers include notes explaining that while most background checks
are done quickly, some take up to three days because the buyer “has been
charged with a crime” and court records are needed. Gun shows mostly
happen on weekends, when courthouses “are, of course, closed.”

“It is becoming increasingly tougher to make our case that 24 hours is
indeed enough time to do the check,” a member of Mr. Dingell’s staff wrote
to an N.R.A. lobbyist.

Nevertheless, Mr. Dingell succeeded in amending the bill. He tried to win
over his fellow Democrats with a baldly partisan message: “We’re doing
this so that we can become the majority again. Very simply, we need
Democrats who can carry the districts where these matters are voting
issues.”

But his colleagues pulled their support. Representative Zoe Lofgren, a
California Democrat who fought for the stronger bill, said she believed
Mr. Dingell was “trying to make progress, and had, he felt, some
credibility with the N.R.A. that might allow him to do that.”

“Even though what he wanted to do was far from what I wanted to do,” she
said.

At the N.R.A., the collapse of the bill was seen as a victory. An internal
report cited Mr. Dingell’s “masterful leadership.” A year later the group
honored him with a “legislative achievement award.”

‘We Can Help’
Despite the victories, Mr. Barr saw bigger problems ahead. In memos to Mr.
LaPierre in late 1999, he warned that the “entire debate on firearms has
shifted” and advised holding an “issues summit.”

Specifically, he pointed to civil lawsuits seeking to hold the firearms
industry liable for making and marketing guns used in violent crimes. Gun
control advocates saw them as a way around the political stalemate in
Washington — Smith & Wesson, for instance, chose to voluntarily adopt new
standards to safeguard children and deter theft.

Mr. Barr had introduced a bill that would protect gun companies from such
lawsuits, but lamented that “I have received absolutely zero interest,
much less support, from the firearms industry.”

“We can help the industry through our efforts here in the Congress,” he
wrote.

Mr. Craig took up the issue in the Senate, drafting legislation that
mirrored Mr. Barr’s House bill. After Mr. Barr lost re-election in 2002, a
new version of his liability law was sponsored by others, with N.R.A.
guidance. To draw support from moderates, an incentive was added mandating
that child safety locks be included when a handgun is sold, but N.R.A.
talking points assured allies that the provision “does not require any gun
owner to actually use the device.”

The political climate shifted enough under President George W. Bush and
the Republican-controlled Congress that the assault weapons ban of 1994,
which had a 10-year limit, was allowed to sunset, and the gun industry’s
liability shield finally passed in 2005. The twin developments helped
turbocharge the firearms market.

The private equity firm Cerberus Capital soon began buying up makers of
AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and aggressively marketing them as manhood-
affirming accessories, part of a sweeping change in the way military-style
weapons were pitched to the public. The number of AR-15-type rifles
produced and imported annually would skyrocket from 400,000 in 2006 to 2.8
million by 2020.

Asked about his early role in pressing the N.R.A. for help with the
liability law, Mr. Barr said he believed the legal threat was significant
enough “that the Congress step in.”

“The rights that are front and center for the N.R.A., the Second
Amendment, are very much under attack and need to be defended,” Mr. Barr
said. “And I defended them both as a member of Congress in that capacity
and in my private capacity as a member of the N.R.A. board.”

Sensitivities
With each new mass shooting in the 2000s, pressure built on Congress to
act, and the politics of gun rights became more polarized.

The N.R.A. lost another of its directors in Congress — Mr. Craig was
arrested for lewd conduct in an airport men’s room and chose not to run
again in 2008. But by then, the group’s aggressive use of campaign
donations and candidate “report cards” had achieved a virtual lock on
Republican caucuses.

That left Mr. Dingell increasingly marginalized in the gun debate. For a
time, his connections were useful to Democrats; in 2007, after the
shooting deaths of 32 people at Virginia Tech, he helped secure N.R.A.
support to strengthen the collection of mental health records for
background checks.

But by December 2012, when Adam Lanza, 20, shot to death 20 children and
six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, any vestige of
good will between the N.R.A. and Democrats was gone. When House Democrats
created a Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, they included the 86-year-
old Mr. Dingell as one of 11 vice chairs, but his input was limited.

Notes from a task force meeting in January 2013 show that when it was Mr.
Dingell’s turn to speak, he joked that he was the “skunk at the picnic”
who had set up the N.R.A.’s lobbying operation — the “reason it’s so
good.” He went on to underscore the rights of hunters and defend the
N.R.A., saying it was “not the Devil.”

A few days earlier, he had privately conferred with N.R.A.
representatives. Handwritten notes show that they discussed congressional
support for new restrictions and the N.R.A.’s desire to delay legislation:

“Need to buy time to put together package can vote for, and get support,
also for sensitivities to die down,” the notes said.

Three months later, a bipartisan gun control proposal failed after
implacable resistance from the N.R.A. It was not until June 2022, after
the Uvalde shooting, that a major firearms bill was passed — the first in
almost 30 years. The legislation, which had minimal Republican support and
fell far short of what Democrats had sought, required more private gun
sellers to obtain licenses and perform background checks, and funded state
“red flag” laws allowing the police to seize firearms from dangerous
people.

By the time Mr. Dingell retired from the House in 2015, his views on gun
policy had evolved, according to his wife, who said he no longer trusted
the N.R.A.

“I can’t tell you how many nights I heard him talking to people about how
the N.R.A. was going too far, how they didn’t understand the times,” Ms.
Dingell said. “He was a deep believer in the Second Amendment, and at the
end he still deeply believed, but he also saw the world was changing.”

In June 2016, after 49 people were killed in a mass shooting at an
Orlando, Fla., nightclub, Ms. Dingell joined fellow Democrats in occupying
the House floor as a protest. When she gave a speech, in the middle of the
night, she broached the difference of opinion on guns she had with her
husband.

“You all know how much I love John Dingell. He’s the most important thing
in my life,” she said. “And yet for 35 years, there’s been a source of
tension between the two of us.”

Mr. Dingell, too, briefly addressed that tension in a memoir published
shortly before he died. He recalled that as he watched a recording of his
wife’s speech the following morning, “I thought about all the votes I’d
taken, all the bills I’d supported,” and “whether the gun debate had
gotten too polarized.”

“As Debbie had said with such passion the night before, ‘Can’t we have a
discussion?’” he wrote. “And I thought about the role I know I played in
contributing to that polarization.”


--
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.

[lock him up]

Trump was indicted again today. They're going to lock him up and throw the
key away.