Vox Comic Relief: Web Site Uses New Deal-Era National Recovery Admin Photo in History of NRA

August 27th, 2015 11:46 PM

Two weeks ago, cable and broadcast giant Comcast announced that its NBCUniversal unit would invest $200 million in Vox Communications, thereby "creating a partnership to help the television giant better connect with younger audiences."

Based on what follows and far more examples than one could hope to cite in a single post, Comcast should consider asking for their money back. Apparently trying to capitalize on the anti-Second Amendment hysteria the Obama administration and the left have attempted to foster after Vester Lee Flanagan II shot and killed Alison Parker and Adam Ward in Virginia, Vox posted the following breathtakingly ignorant tweet (since taken down; HT Twitchy):

NRAandGunsVox0815

Younger readers may wonder what in the world the NRA was doing in the "cocoa and chocolate manufacturing" business in the 1930s.

The answer is that the National Rifle Association wasn't in that business. The poster above is from a different NRA, namely Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Depression-era National Recovery Administration. Its goal was "was to eliminate 'cut-throat competition' by bringing industry, labor and government together to create codes of 'fair practices' and set prices." It was an outright attempt to cement the existing industrial order with the heavy hand of government there to enforce it. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled the law's "codes of fair competition" unconstitutional in 1935.

Vox.com, the company's namesake component, claims that "Its mission is simple: Explain the News."

It so utterly fails so often that it has become a virtual national joke.

Let's get in a bit of history while we're in the neighborhood.

From Vox's headline, which is still present at the revised post, readers might believe that the NRA was actually a pretty "sensible" bunch of people (from Vox's anti-Second Amendment perspective) until the mid-1930s, when they got reactionary and paranoid during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Unfortunately, that's not so — again, from Vox's twisted perspective — because the organization almost failed during the next several decades at what should have been its primary mission.

In 1934, "The NRA formed its Legislative Affairs Division to update members with facts and analysis of upcoming bills, after the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) became the first federal gun-control law passed in the U.S." But the NRA supported that law. Vox also wrote (confirmed here) that the NRA's president said that the "'promiscuous toting' of guns should be 'sharply restricted.'"

The NRA also supported a gun-control act in 1968. In other words, "things" didn't "change."

Fortunately, over the next seven years its rank and file recognized the threat to fundamental Second Amendment Rights and saw what had happened in other counties during the previous five-plus decades when the people either voluntarily gave up their guns or had them confiscated. They eventually elected new leadership to fight against obviously growing threats from gun grabbers — which is why the Second Amendment remains in place with its originally intended meaning.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.