Mr. Johnson’s knowledge of “shoot and move” — and the fact that a few of the protesters in the crowd who were not involved in the shooting were armed and carrying rifles — has helped shed light on how a theory of multiple assailants emerged.
In Texas, gun owners can legally and openly carry what are known as long guns, including shotguns and rifles. The carrying of handguns is regulated in Texas and requires a state-issued permit, whether concealed or openly carried, but the carrying of rifles is largely unregulated and requires no permit. The so-called open carrying of rifles has become common at many demonstrations in Texas in recent years.
The Silence and Violence of the N.R.A.
In the language of today’s National Rifle Association, “an armed society is a polite society.”
.. It is a vision at the heart of the modern gun movement: the more that society makes the threat of violence available to us, the safer we will be. In forty-eight hours this week, the poisonous flaw in that fantasy has been exposed from multiple angles: on Tuesday, two police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fatally shot a black man, Alton Sterling, while trying to arrest him. Some reports say that, before police arrived, he was openly carrying a gun, which, under the makeshift patchwork of American gun law, would have afforded him more legal protection, not less.
.. In the hours that followed, as America turned, once again, to the ritual of mourning the killings of black men by police officers, the N.R.A. was silent. Its official Twitter feed, which often draws attention to cases of police questioning gun owners for exercising the right to carry, said nothing, even as the silence became conspicuous. (@CoolJ90: “@NRA care to come to the defense of a man murdered by police who had a license to carry his weapon?”)
For critics of the N.R.A., it was an awkward exposure of what is usually left unsaid: the organization is far less active in asserting the Second Amendment rights of black Americans than of white ones.
.. Last year, under lobbying pressure from the N.R.A., the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms abandoned an effort to stop the sale of armor-piercing “cop killer” ammunition that authorities have tried to ban for thirty years.
.. After each high-profile public massacre in recent years, the N.R.A. and its allies have deployed a reliable strategy: deflect criticism from the basic problem—the unqualified availability of military-grade weapons—by fixating on technical details that serve their political ends.
.. The Dallas ambush has also exposed an uncomfortable fact for the gun-rights movement: for decades, even as it maintains its abstract tributes to law enforcement, it has embraced a strain of insurrectionist rhetoric, overtly anti-government activism that endorses the notion that civilians should have guns for use against American police and military. In a 1995 fund-raising letter, the executive vice-president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, called federal law-enforcement agents “jack-booted thugs,” and suggested that “in Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”
.. At the annual N.R.A. convention last year, the board member Ted Nugent said, “Our government has turned on us.” Stopping short of calling for violence, he urged members to focus their ire on “the bad and the ugly.” He said, “It’s a target-rich environment. If it was duck season, there’d be so many ducks, you could just close your eyes and shoot ’em.”
Gun-Control Activists Need a History
By 1977 — the time of the NRA coup — those numbers had surged to almost 19,000 and 57,000, respectively. Adjusting for population growth, the murder rate had almost doubled, and the rape rate had more than tripled. The overall violent crime rate tripled, and it kept going up, peaking at almost five times the 1960 rate:
.. If the NRA hadn’t reinvented itself, some other organization would have risen in its place.
.. America has come a long way since then. In 1980, the murder rate peaked at double the rate in 1960 — before falling in 2014 to a rate well below even 1960’s low number. In the meantime, the number of privately held firearms has surged, as has the number of Americans with a concealed-carry permit. It turns out that millions of law-abiding Americans can exercise their Second Amendment rights without turning the United States into a free-fire zone. More guns can indeed correlate with less crime.
.. The Right tells Americans that criminals are indeed worth fearing, but you can have confidence in yourself if you own a gun and know how to use it — that free citizens can and should take responsibility for defending themselves and their families.
.. The history of the “gun lobby” is the history of an American idea — indeed, of American culture — and selective retellings of that history cannot and will not erase the desire for independence and autonomy from the American heart.
What happened to Comedy Central’s cable-news satire?
in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller case, Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, in part, “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited” — and that curbs may apply to “dangerous and unusual weapons.”