Wayne LaPierre’s (in)famous “jack-booted government thugs” quote…

For many decades after the National Rifle Association was founded in 1871, a main focus of the group was on urging and teaching gun safety, to help reduce gun-related accidents.

In fact, the famous slogan associated with the NRA — “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” — was once used as a cautionary safety warning, rather than as defensive response in the debate over gun control.

In recent decades, the NRA’s primary public focus has been on protecting and expanding Americans’ right to own and carry guns.

Your position on the controversial issue of gun control probably determines how you view the NRA slogan and a famous (and infamous) gun-related quote that’s linked to the date April 13.

In a fundraising letter to NRA members, dated April 13, 1995, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called the federal officials who enforce U.S. gun laws “jack-booted government thugs.”

LaPierre tied the phrase to a law banning certain semi-automatic and automatic weapons, which had passed during President Bill Clinton’s first term in office, with Clinton’s support.

That law is popularly known as The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB).

The AWB is a subsection of the broader Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The provisions in that act which imposed harsher penalties on violent and repeat offenders have recently inspired “Black Lives Matter” protesters to heckle both Hillary and Bill Clinton at their 2016 primary campaign speaking engagements.

Back in 1995, it was Wayne LaPierre who was making news for harshly attacking the measure and its enforcement.

Among other things, LaPierre said in the April 13, 1995 letter to NRA members:

“…the semiauto-auto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

The last part of that sentence conjured up images of the fatal confrontations between officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and Randy Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in 1993.

LaPierre’s use of the phrase “jack-booted government thugs” was his metaphorical way of equating BATF officials with Nazis.

During the early part of World War II, before leather shortages developed, German soldiers wore distinctive military “jack boots.”

Since then, the name of those high leather boots has been commonly used as a symbolic reference to totalitarian governments.

On April 19, 1995, just six days after LaPierre sent out his NRA fundraising letter, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was destroyed by a bomb, killing 168 people.

It was later discovered that the conspirators behind the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were also angry over gun control laws and the federal government’s involvement in the Ruby Ridge and Waco tragedies.

Gun control advocates suggested that the inflammatory rhetoric in LaPierre’s letter had encouraged the bombing.

NRA officials denied that there was any link.

However, a few weeks after the Oklahoma bombing, in an interview reported by the Associated Press, LaPierre did publicly apologize for the harshness of his remarks about federal officials.

“If anyone thought the intention was to paint all federal law enforcement officials with the same broad brush,” LaPierre said, “I’m sorry.”

Nonetheless, LaPierre’s use of the phrase “jack-booted government thugs” in his fundraising letter remains notorious among gun control advocates and critics of the NRA.

For example, in 2011, liberal groups harshly criticized Fox News for using LaPierre as a commentator in a segment about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

An opinion piece on the liberal website Media Matters said:

“LaPierre is the last person a responsible media outlet should have on its airwaves to comment on the Bureau…because LaPierre once referred to ATF agents as ‘jack-booted government thugs.’”

Today, the phrase is still being cited in articles and commentary about gun control, the NRA and LaPierre.

A January 5, 2016 editorial in the New York Daily News about the continued opposition to gun control by the NRA and its political allies, despite the recent wave of mass shootings in schools and other public places, reminded readers:

“Just one month before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre railed against ‘jack-booted government thugs.’”

Of course, in the view of NRA members, guns and ill-advised words don’t kill people — ill people do.

It’s a debate that is likely to continue for many decades to come.

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What were the “top quotes” of 2013?

I recently looked through a couple dozen lists of “top” and “best” quotes of 2013 and came to a disappointing conclusion.

In terms of truly memorable quotations that generated new idiomatic expressions and catchphrases or that will show up in future books of quotations, the year 2013 was pretty much a bust.

Browse through some of the lists of the supposed top or best quotes of 2013 at this link yourself and you’ll understand why I say that.

For example, as far as I can tell from the lists of the “top” or “best” political quotes of the year, no politician said anything in 2013 that will be cited by large numbers of history or quotation books years from now.

And, what line from a movie released in 2013 do you remember and hear people using regularly, the way people remember and make quips with lines like “May the Force be with you” or “I’ll be back” or “You can’t handle the truth”? If there were any, they’re not in the lists of the top or best movie lines of 2013 that I’ve seen.

Similarly, can you think of a catchphrase from a TV show that debuted in 2013 that has embedded itself in our language? Anything that will become as familiar as lines like “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” or “To boldly go where no man has gone before” or “Well isn’t that special?” I’m guessing not.

So, what are the top quotes of 2013?

The most widely-published annual list of “top quotes” is the one released by Yale University librarian Fred Shapiro, editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations. It gets reprinted by thousands of newspapers and websites.

Shapiro has been issuing his list of the top quotes of the year since 2007. As he explained in a video on the Yale News website, his choices aren’t simply based on whether a quote has become “famous.” He says he also picks quotes that he views as historically important or revealing of the spirit of the times.

Even given those broader parameters, I think he had a lot better options to pick from in previous years.

You can read Shapiro’s complete 2013 list

at this link.

His number one quote of the year is a comment President Barack Obama made about the Affordable Health Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) at a news conference on November 14, 2013:

“With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan you can keep it: the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate.”

With respect to Fred, that may be a historic admission but it’s not a very memorable quotation.

It’s a comment on a famous promise Obama repeated in various ways in 2009 and 2010, usually summarized as “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

The most cited version is probably the one in his speech to the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, in which he used the word period at the end for emphasis:

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”

That statement wasn’t given much notice in 2009 but, ironically, it did become a famous quote in 2013.

When Obamacare began to be implemented this past year, opponents of the plan discovered that some Americans would not actually be able to keep their existing health care plans if those plans didn’t meet certain minimum quality criteria in the law’s fine print.

So, during 2013, Republican politicians and pundits gleefully (and endlessly) reminded everyone that Obama had previously said if you like your health care plan, you could keep it. Politico.com actually dubbed it “The Lie of the Year” for 2013 — even though Obama didn’t say it in 2013.

Indeed, there is only one quotation on Fred Shapiro’s list of the top quotes of 2013 that I think will likely be considered a “famous quote” in the future. It’s actually famous already, in the sense of being familiar to most reasonably aware people and frequently cited, mocked and satirized.

But it was also uttered prior to 2013.

It’s the oft-parodied remark made by Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, at a press conference on December 21, 2012:

     “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Shapiro included it on this year’s list because it was uttered after he issued his 2012 list in mid-December of last year.

So, I’m guessing that in his list of the top quotes of 2014, Fred may include a few that were uttered shortly after he issued his 2013 list.

One is now paraphrased as “Santa is white.”

That’s the shortened version of some immediately controversial and widely-covered remarks made by Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on December 11, 2013.

Responding to an article she’d read which said the constant depiction of Santa Claus as a white man makes some black children feel uncomfortable and excluded, Kelly opined:

     “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is...Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure; that’s a verifiable fact – as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that.”

Kelly later said her remarks were intended to be humorous, but nobody really believed it. And, mentions of “Santa is white” quickly became — and will likely remain — a popular target of scorn and satire by Liberals and comedians in the future.

There were some other politically-incorrect statements by another TV celebrity that came to light after Shapiro’s issued his list of top quotes for this year.

Yep, I’m referring to the remarks that Phil Robertson, star of the Duck Dynasty reality TV show, made about homosexuals and African Americans in an interview in the January 2014 issue of GQ magazine, which actually hit newsstands and made news in December of 2013.

As you’ve probably heard (unless you’ve been living off the grid somewhere), Robertson compared homosexuality to bestiality. He also suggested that homosexuals won’t get into heaven.

Specifically, when asked what he thought was sinful, Robertson is quoted as responding:

     “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Robertson also managed to offend African Americans in his GQ interview, saying:

     “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The Duck Dynasty patriarch’s comments generated a ton of press and controversy.

I don’t know if they’ll show up in future editions of Bartlett’s or the Yale Book of Quotations. But given the attention they generated, I will be surprised if Fred Shapiro doesn’t mention them in his next annual list of top quotes.

Happy New Year from This Day in Quotes!

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