Timothy Murphy’s sharpshooting of Gen Simon Fraser in the 1777 battle of Saratoga during the American Revolution might have remained just another contested historical footnote were it not for the National Rifle Association’s (NRA’s) Cincinnati convention coup in 1977. This transformed it from a stodgy hunting and conservation outfit into Washington’s strongest lobbying operation whose radical interpretation of the second amendment savages even the mildest gun control proposals.
The NRA’s leadership of Conservative America was sealed in 2000 when its president, actor Charlton Heston, assuming his Moses character, closed the annual convention by raising a similar sharpshooter’s rifle above his head, and roared: “Only out of my cold dead hands”, in reference to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s proposed gun controls...
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