As America has suffered through mass shooting after mass shooting, it often seems there is an unbridgeable chasm between activists calling for reforms and gun rights purists who have worked to redefine the meaning of the Second Amendment through the courts and exercise outsize influence on legislatures.
After Newtown, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre famously said “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
But as Dave Gilson reports in his cover story in the latest issue of Mother Jones, LaPierre’s distinctions are rarely so black and white – including in the upper echelon of the NRA itself.
In “The NRA’s Murder Mystery,” Gilson reports that the NRA’s own general counsel was convicted of murder in a shooting as a young man in a decision later overturned. Dave Gilson is senior editor at Mother Jones.
