A long lobbying arm

Your recent feature, “Pages from the Past,” in which you include replicas of pages of the Arkansas Gazette in past years, is greatly appreciated by students of history. Your reproduction of the May 24, 1934, issue of the Gazette was accompanied by an introduction which highlighted the description of the killing of the famous outlaw duo Bonnie and Clyde on that day’s front page.

Despite the titillating description of that famous shootout, your editor may have overlooked an equally important article just a few columns away on that front page.

That article reported a speech made by Assistant Attorney General Joseph B. Keenan to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in Hot Springs on May 23, 1934. In that speech, Keenan lamented the “lobbying and deluge of telegrams” by the National Riflemen’s Association to kill a bill in Congress “to enforce identification of purchasers of firearms.”

The article continues, “‘It seems as though the National Riflemen’s Association is more powerful than any other organization,’ Mr. Keenan declared with indignation ‘and I’m asking this question—Who is running this country?’” He went on to cite statistics showing that the United States, with 7,000 homicides by firearms each year, had a much higher percentage of firearm deaths than other nations.

Some things never seem to change. One has to ask, with gun deaths currently around 40,000 each year, what role has the over 85 years of bullying, heavy-handed lobbying tactics of the NRA played in creating our violent, gun-saturated society and culture and the new norm of weekly mass shootings?

DAVID WILSON Fayetteville