NRA Racket: Millions For Largest Prison Construction Boom EVER + Harsh Sentencing To Keep Them Full
The Big House That Wayne LaPierre BuiltThe NRA spent millions in the 1990s pushing the largest prison construction boom ever—and harsh sentencing to keep them full.
—By Tim Murphy | Fri Feb. 8, 2013 3:11 AM PST
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It sounded like a throwaway line. Toward the end of a four-hour Senate hearing on gun violence last week, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president of over two decades, took a break from extolling the virtues of assault rifles and waded briefly into new territory: criminal justice reform. "We've supported prison building," LaPierre said. Then he hammered California for releasing tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders per a Supreme Court order—what he'd previously termed "the largest prison break in American history."
But California's overflowing prisons, which the Supreme Court had deemed "cruel and unusual punishment" in 2011 because of squalid conditions, were partly a product of the NRA's creation. Starting in 1992, as part of a now-defunct program called CrimeStrike, the NRA spent millions of dollars pushing a slate of supposedly anti-crime measures across the country that kept America's prisons full—and built new ones to meet the demand. CrimeStrike's legacy is everywhere these days.
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LaPierre launched CrimeStrike that spring with $2 million in seed money from the parent organization and a simple platform: mandatory minimums, harsher parole standards, adult sentences for juveniles, and, critically, more prisons. "Our prisons are overcrowded. Our bail laws are atrocious. We'll be the bad guy," he announced.
The NRA took its case to the public. "Will you let criminals rape your rights?" asked a four-page ad in a 1994 issue of Field & Stream magazine. And the real culprit was in the White House: "The Clinton administration has already cut federal prison construction by $550 million in favor of 'community placement' and 'criminal rehabilitation programs.'" This was reviving an old conservative talking point: Democrats were soft on crime. The ads featured LaPierre's signature and bespectacled, stoic face at the bottom, alongside a 1-800 number interested volunteers could call. It was a membership hotline.
MORE:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/wayne-lapierre-crime-strike-three-strikes
= new reply since forum marked as read
i salute him!
Flashback: How Republicans and the NRA Kneecapped the ATF
Thirty years ago, the National Rifle Association saved its biggest adversary from extinction. It got just what it wanted.
—By Tim Murphy
| Thu Jan. 17, 2013
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/atf-obama-gun-reform-control-alcohol-tobacco-firearms
But then the NRA had had a change of heart. The organization's strategists came to worry that if gun law enforcement was handed to the Secret Service, one of the few federal agencies with a reputation for competence, gun owners might actually have something to fear. And, they feared, that if the agency did become part of the Secret Service, they'd lose an easy target.
"If it weren't for the NRA and the liquor industry, there would be no ATF today."
The NRA realized, "'Oh my God, we're gonna lose the ATF!'" recalls William Vizzard, a professor of criminology at California State University-Sacramento, who worked for bureau at the time. "It would have been like removing the Soviets during the Cold War, for the Defense Department—there's nobody to point to."
