The Price of Freedom

It was a normal Friday to start with.

You know get the kids up give them their breakfast.

Dylan went to the Sandy Hook School.

That day I put my boys on the bus and

then my friend was calling and she said,

"Nicole, it's a shooting and it's at our school."

It was the day after Thanksgiving.

I was at my family's home in Chicago.

My son was with his father in Florida.

I picked up the phone and there was just this,

this dead silence.

And I said, "Where's Jordan, what happened to Jordan?"

And that's when Jordan's dad said Jordan's been shot.

You're 25 times more likely to die by gun violence

in the United States of America

than any other developed nation in the world.

What does this say about us as Americans

if we're just willing to let people die?

Because we're afraid of the NRA?

There's no other single issue lobby in the United States

that has had as much success advancing its agenda

against the wishes of the majority of the country.

Gun violence is taking lives at a historic rate.

It's only getting worse and worse,

and yet we're focused on the right to bear arms

and not the right to live.

The NRA has managed to convince millions of Americans

that when people get killed in gun violence,

that is the price of freedom.

Why has that happened?

We have to start unpacking their myths.

David Keene.

I'm Dave Keene.

I was president of the National Rifle Association

from 2011 to 2013.

I continue to serve on the NRA board,

as I have since 2000.

I've been in politics in Washington and nationally

for more than 40 years.

I've been involved in one way or another

with every major battle over gun rights in this country.

At the NRA, what you have to do is try to every day

advance and protect the rights of gun owners.

No, you shall not take the freedoms

bequeathed to us from us.

We will go to the ballot box.

We will demonstrate, we will organize.

We will do everything it is necessary to do

to protect those rights.

Americans came to this country, survived on the frontier,

protected their families.

They knew that if they got into trouble,

help was probably not gonna come.

And so they developed this self-reliance.

Gun control is not simply about guns.

It's about an assault on values and an image of America

that believers in the Second Amendment hold dear.

It's an attack, not just on the guns.

It's an attack on them.

It's an attack on their lifestyle.

It's an attack on the country

and the values that the founders cared about.

It was George Washington who said,

"Every citizen should be armed."

The NRA wants you to believe a fantasy

about our founding in which our founding fathers believed

that there should be no regulation of firearms.

That couldn't be further from the truth.

It is absolutely clear that our founding fathers

loved gun control.

They in fact had loads of it.

From our very earliest days in the 1600s

through the 20th century,

there were literally thousands of gun laws,

and they were gun laws of every imaginable variety.

We had rules on who can own a weapon

and who couldn't.

You had to register your weapon,

you had to register your gunpowder.

You couldn't bring your weapons certain places.

When we think about the American West,

you think of it as a lawless period

where everybody carried a gun

and that it was guns that won the West.

And that's really not the story of the West at all.

The norm was strict regulation

and prohibition of gun carrying.

That's why in recent years even Justice Antonin Scalia,

a very conservative member of the Supreme Court,

made very clear that the Second Amendment

wasn't an unlimited right.

How far does that constitutional right go?

Limitations upon the right to keep and bear arms

are permissible because there were some

that were acknowledged at the time.

We think today of this great battle

between those who support gun rights

versus those who want stronger gun laws,

but in the first 300 years of our history,

that was not how it was.

When the NRA was founded in 1871

they took no position on gun control whatsoever

because they saw no need.

I started covering the National Rifle Association in 1994.

The National Rifle Association was founded

in order to deal with future possible threats

involving European military forces.

They organized shooting competitions

to improve the skills on the range,

which could then be applied to the battlefield.

The fact that the high level of marksmanship

is maintained and that a continuous program of training

and education is carried forward

is the result of the work of the National Rifle Association.

And that remained their main focus,

riflery and later hunting to expand the shooting sports

for over a century before the NRA changed.

The President's car

is now turning onto Elm Street.

And it will be only a matter of minutes

before he arrives at the Trademark.

It appears as though something has happened

in the motorcade route.

President Kennedy has been assassinated.

It's official now.

The 1960s is a decade in which the gun

comes to symbolize the chaos and disunity

that the nation is experiencing as a whole.

For the first time, you get signs

that there's going to be a push for racial equality.

You get signs that there's going to be a push

to say women have equal rights.

And you also see at the same time

this incredible upsurge of dramatic gun violence.

From the assassination of John F. Kennedy,

to the assassination of Malcolm X

Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers.

There's also the mass shooting

at the University of Texas, Austin in 1966

that begins the age of mass shootings.

It's a decade that's awash in police violence.

Most of the urban unrest is tied in some way

to firearms and to shootings.

My first true understanding of what gun violence does

was when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

I distinctly remember watching my father be so distraught

and my mother sobbing.

Because he represented freedom.

It's not a coincidence

that the assassinations of the 1960s

are against people who are representing progress.

Every time it seems that there is some group

that is going to rise up and say, "We are Americans too.

And we deserve the same rights as everyone else."

That's the point at which violence breaks out.

The upsurge in violence shocks the country

and spurs calls for new, stronger gun laws.

I Call upon the Congress

in the name of sanity

to give America the gun control law America needs.

NRA members and gun rights activists arose in the 1960s,

not just in response to the rising tide

of support for gun control,

but also in response to the political

and social movements of that time.

Those movements threatened the status of a lot of white men.

It wasn't until what we now call the culture wars

broke out back then that gun ownership

and the Second Amendment became a matter of controversy.

Restrictive legislation at the present time

is the initial step to the takeover of this country.

At that point

a fight took place within the National Rifle Association.

You had one element focused on the shooting sports

and they were not interested in politics.

You had another element of the NRA

starting to raise the alarm about gun rights.

Some NRA members believed the goal

was to abolish firearms in the United States.

They realized unless you do something

you're not gonna have the right to have a firearm.

We stand in the forefront of millions

of those people in America who like to shoot.

These new voices in the NRA

are led by a man by the name of Harlon Carter.

We believe that the right to keep and bear arms

is a salient part of the American tradition.

Carter believed that every gun control measure

violated true American identity

and principles of individualism and freedom

and began organizing NRA members.

The NRA has been campaigning

against the gun laws,

fearing it might curtail their members' activities.

We have sent a letter to our entire membership.

By Sending instructions

on how members were to write their congressmen

the NRA had clearly launched

a very effective lobbying campaign.

Harlon Carter wanted to take the activities