50 Years of Infringements after GCA68 Show Only Constant is Obsession with Control

USA – “Why must all gun owners be classified as being pawns of, or brainwashed by, the NRA?” the “Trigger Talk” column in the October, 1968 issue of GUNS Magazine asked. “With one million members, the NRA still has little or no influence over the rest of the 20 million gun owners in the U.S. Why can’t the news media believe that 19 million people have minds of their own, and as much right to “lobby” as the members of the NRA?”

Probably because it’s easier to focus on a monolithic target and you don’t need to call attention to individuals the people you’re trying to influence live among. Otherwise they might catch on they’re being conned, and that the stereotypes being foisted on them bear little resemblance to the friends and neighbors being smeared.

Media hostility to and subversion of the right to keep and bear arms has only grown stronger and more pervasive over the last 50 years, and at the time this issue of GUNS hit the newsstands, Americans were about to have the greatest infringements since the National Firearms Act of 1934 forced on them by representatives capitalizing on media-fueled-political hysteria: The 1968 Gun Control Act  was signed into “law” by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on October 22 (the semicentennial is next Monday).