After Senator Robert F Kennedy was fatally shot on 5 June 1968 – barely two months after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr – there appeared to be an opportunity to secure better gun control.
“Last night, Robert Kennedy[1] did not miss out on what went on,” wrote journalist Jules Witcover, the author of 1968: The Year The Dream Died, who was there in the kitchen passageway of the Ambassador hotel when Kennedy was felled, moments after his victory speech in the California primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. “And because he did not, his latest hour of political triumph became another hour of mindless tragedy in a nation that cannot or will not keep weapons of death from the hands of madmen who walk its streets.”
Anti-gun protestors picketed the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Lyndon B Johnson called for a sweeping gun control law during the most tumultuous year of America’s most traumatic decade since the civil war.
“Kennedy’s death saw the birth of directly attaching blame to guns, which hadn’t happened as much after King’s death,” said Dennis Brack, who photographed protesters outside the NRA[2] headquarters. “No one had focused so much on the instrument itself before.”
But former president Johnson’s gun control bill still riled many within the NRA, and over the next 50 years, the group set about transforming itself from a marksmanship and sporting organization to one of America’s most powerful political action groups, proclaiming to defend the second amendment against continuing attempts to erode it.
This began on 21 May 1977 in Cincinnati when the NRA’s annual meeting saw what amounted to a coup by a caucus of gun rights
