A month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an Army colonel testified before Congress that the deed might harm the Army's civilian marksmanship program. "I think that this terrible tragedy did have a tremendous impact upon marksmanship in the United States, and in this way, it focused the attention of all American citizens on the weapon that was used in the commission of that crime - the gun," Colonel John K. Lee, Jr., told the House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense. "The public sentiment is against it as a tool . . . There is a feeling of revulsion against the instrument which caused a tragedy of this sort."

Colonel Lee made it clear that he did not share this revulsion: "To me, a gun . . . in itself never commits any act, wrong or right, but is controlled by the people who handle it." Almost all of the Congressmen present indicated that they agreed with the irrelevant logic of this cliché.

Colonel Lee's testimony took only a few minutes and covered only $500,000 or so during days of hearings on the $50 billion Department of Defense budget. But his comments on the assassination attracted some attention and so drew notice to a little-known segment of Army life – its program of distributing guns and ammunition to civilians and training the recipients in their use. At the end of 1963, the Amy was instructing 384,950 civilians in marksmanship, a number exceeding a third of the total American soldiers under arms. Half of those trained were younger than 18. This program cost the government $620,000 in the last fiscal year. But the annual appropriation may not cover the whole cost of the program to the Army. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D., Tex.) has told Congress that the federal government, at a cost of $1,627,422  distributed more than 60 million rounds of ammunition to gun clubs during the 1963 fiscal year.

The program is not new - the Army has been sponsoring it for years and has well-defined reasons for doing so. “We in the Army completely endorse the budget request...” Colonel Lee informed the House subcommittee, “because those of us vested with the responsibility for training our nation’s youth realize that regardless of our highly technical armament, the ultimate weapon of our defense is man himself. The man with the gun, the citizen properly trained in the use of firearms, has been the foundation of our military strength throughout the history of our nation.” The Army, using these lofty - though, in a nuclear age, questionable - sentiments, has done its best to glorify the role of the gun in American society. In doing so, it has joined hands with the main force in the gun lobby that has prevented Congress so far from passing any meaningful legislation to restrict the ownership and use of guns. The heart of this lobby, the Army's partner, is the National Rifle Association, a nonprofit, private organization of more than 600,000 American gun buffs.

The Army oversees civilian marksmanship through its National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which is headed by Colonel Lee. The board sets up instruction programs, organizes the annual National Rifle and Pistol Matches, and markets used guns to the public. It does all this through the National Rifle Association. The Army sells rifles at cost to civilians only if they are members of the NRA, and it gives instruction to gun clubs only if they are affiliated with the NRA. There is, as Colonel Lee told Congress, "a good cross-membership" between the NRA and the National Board, and sometimes the board looks like the NRA's little empire within the Army. Colonel Lee, for example, serves both as executive officer of the Army's National Board and as a member of the NRA's board of directors. The NRA, in fact, boasts that it was responsible for the establishment of the National Board in 1903.

Pentagon records show that the Army sold 268,893 .30-caliber Model 1903A3 rifles to members of the NRA from 1960 to mid-1963. Last March, the Army also offered 150,000 M1 .30-caliber carbine rifles to members of the NRA and found a customer for each one. During the past year, the Army also made 30,000 .45-caliber pistols available to NRA members. In addition to all these guns, which were priced at cut rates, the Army sold at regular prices 1,344 M1 Match rifles and 309 M1 Standard rifles (for conversion to Match) to selected NRA marksmen. In short, the Army has put almost a half million used guns in the hands of civilians during the last five years.

The Army sells these guns to NRA members, it says, not to make a profit or to clear Army stocks, but to improve "skills in the use of these weapons." Its authority to do so comes from Congress, whose members believe that channeling arms through the NRA is the best way to encourage marksmanship while keeping the guns out of the hands of criminals, fools and novices. The Army points to several NRA safeguards: No one can become a member without sponsorship from another member, and each applicant must sign a pledge. "I certify," this pledge states, "that I am a citizen of the United States; that I am not a member of any organization which has as any part of its program the attempt to overthrow the Government of the United States by force or violence; that I have never been convicted of a crime of violence, and that if admitted to membership I will fulfill the obligations of good sportsmanship and good citizenship." Nothing is said (see box, page 570 [see below The Guns of California]) about a tendency to discover guerrillas in every thicket.

Since there is no legal control over what an NRA man does with his Army gun, each purchaser signs a statement assuring the Army that he does not intend to sell it. "Your average member of the National Rifle Association is certainly a law-abiding citizen," Colonel Lee told the subcommittee. But, more important, Franklin L. Orth, executive vice president of the NRA, has assured the Senate subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency "that in our clubs where our individuals have received [Army] firearms . . . there is no record of any case in which any of the pistols which are owned by our people or any of the other firearms, have ever been used for an illegal, unlawful purpose."

Despite these proud pledges, it is a question how closely the NRA and the Army actually check the men and women who receive federal guns and ammunition. In May, New York policemen, worried about Malcolm X’s caII for Negroes to arm, raided the homes of two officers of a Harlem rifle club and seized 12,000 rounds of ammunition — or 11,600 rounds more than the law allows to be stored. The men had a third of the ammunition from the Army through the Office of Civilian Marksmanship, an agency of the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice.

As it turned out, members of this club were not Black Nationalists, but the incident raised the issue of what controls were in effect to keep weapons out of the hands of fanatics. Frank Daniel, NRA secretary, who reported that the Harlem club had been associated with the NRA since 1959, said the investigation of individual rifle clubs was the job of the state associations and the state governments, not the NRA or the Army. Major A. C. O'Hara, chief of the New York State National Guard, then told The New York Times that the State can't do the job. He said it was impossible to fingerprint officers and members of clubs; therefore, every time he received a list of club members from the NRA, he simply sent it back without approval or disapproval. And a high police official told the New York Post: "Any creeps and nuts in this town can get together and start a club, buy anything short of a machine gun, go out and practice on established ranges, and there's just no way for us to know what's going on."

Moreover, in the statement which he inserted in the Congressional Record (May 26), Mr. Gonzalez charged that the Minutemen, the fanatical, right-wing, guerrilla-type anti-Communist organization, was “in part supported, subsidized and encouraged by the federal government” through the civilian marksmanship program. Mr. Gonzalez also quoted from a newsletter written by M. S. Riecke, Jr., founder of the Paul Revere Associated Yeomen (Pray) in which he urged members to [“]join the National Rifle Association . . . stock up on rifles, shotguns, pistols . . . join the Minutemen. . . . Remember, the Communists cannot subdue an armed citizenry.”

The more man 600,000 members of the National Rifle Association pay at least $5 a year dues ("benefactors" contribute more than $1,000) and receive for this the camaraderie of fellow sportsmen, the organization of competitive shoots, a subscription to the NRA's American Rifleman, a chance to buy Army guns, a massive public relations campaign that included a float in the 1963 Tournament of Roses Parade saying, "The Bill of Rights — Freedom to Keep and Bear Arms” and, most important, some lobbying on their behalf in the halls of state legislatures and Congress. The NRA is proud of this lobbying. Its advertisements for membership boast that “since 1871, the National Rifle Association has stood against ill-advised attempts to disarm our citizens through anti-firearm laws. NRA must continue to take the lead in turning the tide of uninformed anti-firearms opinion.” To help make sure that this is done, the American Rifleman publishes monthly lists of gun legislation pending in state capitals. The editors urge members to use “logic, good sense and courtesy” in writing their state legislators about the gun bills.

The NRA, with its national headquarters in Washington, has easy access to Congress. Executive Vice President Orth is continually testifying about gun legislation and cornering Congressmen to urge them to withdraw or tone down their anti-gun bills. Orth and the NRA always stress they are lobbying for the sportsmen of America and have no other ax to grind. "The National Rifle Association, chartered in 1871, is a nonprofit association, supported by membership dues," the NRA blurbs say. "The Association is recognized by federal statute, but receives no financial assistance from Congress." This, of course, ignores the $600,000 that Congress shuffles toward the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, an agency that seems to benefit the NRA and no one else.

It also ignores the very heavy advertising support given the NRA in the pages of American Rifleman by the sports gun industry, a business that shipped, when last studied in detail by the Department of Commerce, more than $50 million worth of guns a year to American civilians. "Let's Aim for Good Gun Legislation," the Redfield Gun Sight Company advertises in the March issue of the American Rifleman. ". . .The National Rifle Association and other responsible citizens' groups need your wholehearted and enthusiastic support." Such advertising gave the NRA almost $1 million in 1963, 25 per cent of its total income. It is safe to assume that the National Rifle Association, when it pleads the case for more than 600,000 sportsmen, pleads a case for the American gun industry.

The Rifle Association likes to boast that if it had been as powerful in 1911 as it is now, it could have prevented New York from enacting the Sullivan Law, which requires registration of any concealable weapon even if it is kept only over a fireplace at home or in an office desk. "There was no organized opposition in those days to ill-conceived firearms laws," said an article in the American Rifleman. "The Sullivan Law is really no worse than many introduced into other State Legislatures each year. But now they are properly analyzed and usually killed before they get to the floor for discussion. Today, as for the last 30 years, the full strength of the membership of NRA would be marshaled against any such proposal. Unfortunately, in 1911 there was no such organized strength." One of the problems for the NRA in New York is that police do not like to issue registration permits. "Police captains are cautious individuals because of their experience with humanity," Executive Vice President Orth told the Senate subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. "They do not like the idea of certifying somebody to have a hand gun when there is always a possibility that the pistol permit-holder will do something wrong and this decision can reflect the captain’s judgment. . . ."

The NRA feels that many proposed anti-gun bills would harass the honest sportsman and allow the criminal to find his weapon in violation of the law. The NRA also likes to quote Dr. Marvin E. Wolfgang, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who once wrote, "Few homicides due to shooting could be avoided merely if the firearm were not immediately present. . . . The offender would select some other weapon to achieve the same destructive goal. Probably only in those cases where a felon kills a police officer, or vice versa, would homicide be avoided in the absence of a firearm." And while the NRA agrees there are some unscrupulous gun dealers, it says that many proposals would hurt the reputable dealers. "Many reputable firearms dealers, of good repute based on a history of adherence to existing law on all levels, could suffer financial disaster if the tide of public opinion is turned in the direction of all-encompassing legislation," Orth told the Senate subcommittee.

As a general policy, the NRA does not believe that any anti-gun bill is much good, but it never blindly opposes them all, at least not as a national organization. When it sees that the mood of Congress or a legislature favors some anti-gun legislation, the NRA works to make sure the bill will hurt its members as little as possible. In 1962, NRA officials met frequently with staff members of Senator Thomas J. Dodd's subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to persuade the legislators not to draft too strong a bill.

Dodd and his assistants had generated publicity by showing how easy it was for a teen-ager to buy a hand gun by mail order and how often these guns became robbery and murder weapons. In 1963, Dodd introduced a bill that would have required purchasers of hand guns by mail order to fill out and sign an affidavit listing their name, age, address and criminal record, if any. There is reason to believe that the NRA, while not opposing the bill publicly, worked through local gun clubs to kill it; in any case, it got nowhere. Then Lee Harvey Oswald ordered a gun by mail, a gun advertised in the American Rifleman....

Dodd's bill would not have prevented Oswald from buying his rifle; it would not even have made the purchase more difficult. So, after the assassination, Dodd fashioned a new bill, covering not hand guns alone but all firearms, and requiring the mail-order purchaser not only to fill out an affidavit but to have it "authenticated by the highest local law-enforcement authority in his community." This stimulated the NRA's lurking fear of local police, and Orth sat down with staff members of Dodd's subcommittee to urge additional changes.

The staff and Dodd listened, and Dodd, realizing it would be impossible, in any case, for the federal government to force local police to do anything, agreed to eliminate the requirement of police authentication. Instead, the new bill required only that the dealer notify police of the sale and send them a copy of the purchaser's affidavit.

Orth, testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee, repeated his organization's usual arguments in explaining why it asked Dodd to eliminate police authentication: "Our experience indicates that some law-enforcement officers view the possession of firearms by private citizens with a jaundiced eye.” Orth did not oppose the latest version of the Dodd bill, but stressed that the NRA felt lawmakers would be wiser to pass laws that stiffened the punishment for armed violence rather than laws that the NRA believes are aimed in vain at preventing such violence. A host of other NRA officials and members testified along similar lines, and the bill became stuck in committee, where it remains.

The toned-down Dodd bill is now among the weakest pending in Congress. The National Rifle Association has devoted more attention to it than to the others because it seems to have the best chance, though a slim one, of passing. Actually the Dodd bill, if passed, would be no more than a meager first step. And even the other bills would do little to tear guns out of American life. They all pale next to the suggestion offered by E. U. Condon soon after the assassination.

Condon, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado and former director of the National Bureau of Standards, sent his proposal to Attorney General Kennedy and every state governor. "We should adopt and fully enforce legislation making the unlicensed private possession of firearms a felony,'' he said. Under his plan,
‍“every privately owned firearm would not only be registered with the police, but also would normally be left in police custody. The private owner would only be allowed to borrow his weapon for short periods after filing with the police an application stating where and for what purpose he plans to use it. When the private owner has such authorized possession of his weapon, he would be required to wear distinctive clothing (such as red caps hunters wear) as a warning to others and as a reminder to himself of the special responsibility for public safety he has assumed. It would be a felony to be in possession of firearms except under these conditions.”

Such a proposal to put the lethal gun in its place is possibly unconstitutional; more important, it is certainly unthinkable. It is unthinkable in a society where 30 million civilians, encouraged by the Army, own 50 million guns. It is unthinkable in a society that reacts to the shock of assassination with a run on Italian Carcano rifles for souvenirs. It is unthinkable in a society that allows Rep. Robert L. F. Sikes (D., Fla.), fined in Alabama last April for violating hunting laws, to persuade Congress to add a rider to the Arms Control Act, stating that "nothing ... in this act shall be construed to . . . restrict or prohibit the acquisition, possession, or use of firearms by an individual for . . . personal defense, sport, recreation, education, or training." It is unthinkable in a society that does not laugh at Sikes, a member of the Appropriations subcommittee that provides the funds for the Army's civilian marksmanship program, when he warns his colleagues that "Great Britain, after Dunkirk, had only a few thousand small arms available in the entire country, and was requesting the people to contribute swords and crossbows for defense. This was the dilemma they faced because they did not have an armed civilian population to fall back on. Britain had tight gun laws." It is unthinkable in a society that produces a Byron De La Beckwith who testified at his first trial. "I've been collecting firearms all my life. . . . My interest runs to every phase of firearms. . . . Anything that shoots I like. ... I trade guns the way you might trade dogs or stamps," and who whiled away his time in jail by writing to the National Rifle Association: "For the next 15 years we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives and children from bad niggers."

This is the very atmosphere that the Army and the NRA create, despite all their talk about defense and good healthy sport. There will be no receptivity to meaningful gun legislation until this atmosphere changes. "We need to evaluate and improve the tone and the atmosphere in which our people live," said Rep. George H. Mahon (D., Tex.) at a recent hearing that discussed the gun problem, "and we need to create greater respect for law and a greater respect for human life. We just need to do a better job at being the kind of Americans we ought to be." Mahon seemed more concerned with moral change than legislative change, perhaps realizing that legislation, despite the shock of the assassination, will not be easy. It will be resisted every step of the way by the National Rifle Association and the sporting gun industry, and indirectly by the Army and Congress.

Stanley Meisler is a Washington newsman.

‍The Guns of California

Attorney General Stanley Mosk of California, a state beset today by the paranoid patriotism of such private army groups as the Minutemen and the Rangers, has taken his worries directly to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. On May 21, he wrote the Secretary to complain that a request from his office for information as to the quantity of free ammunition and arms distributed to California in 1963 had never been answered by Lt. Col. C. F. Shaffer of the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice. Col. E. F. (Tod) Sloan, Western representative for the National Rifle Association, promptly branded Mosk's action a "witch hunt."

Attorney General Mosk has established that the Minutemen have units within the California National Guard and that they recruit members from cells of the John Birch Society and from the more extreme Young Republican groups. In his letter to Secretary McNamara, Mosk observed: "These extremists concern us because we fear that if such unstable characters continue to play with guns and bombs, they may eventually disrupt the peace and security of our communities. It is disturbing to consider that the U.S. Army may aid such violence through its distribution of free ammunition."

The Attorney General defined his position recently as follows: "We in no way intend to affect legitimate rifle clubs, outdoor organizations, or fraternal and patriotic drill teams. But we can no longer allow fanatics in our state to nurture their illusions by building private armies and menacing the safety of the people of California and America."

The Rangers and the Minutemen justify their para-military activities on the ground that the United States faces, any day now, a Communist attack upon its shores. This terror of invasion may seem extreme to rational men, but it is a nightmare not exclusive to the private militias. Speaking in 1961 before a Congressional committee on behalf of the annual appropriation for the National Board, Franklin Orth, executive vice president of the NRA, declared: "I submit that with Castro's Communist Cuba as a stepping stone and a base of operations into the United States furnishing a haven for untold thousands of Communists, that every American, young and old, male and female, should be able to shoot."