"The Effort to Enact Robust Gun-Control Laws in the Nineteen-Sixties Quickly Revealed America’s Racial Fault Lines"

"The Kennedys' home-town paper, the Boston Globe, hoped that the N.R.A. would get 'its first real comeuppance' in the slain reverend's wake. But the N.R.A. has only gained political strength since then. It has weakened elements of the Gun Control Act of 1968, and generally blocked the passage of major gun-control legislation for decades. In the fifty years since, the number of civilians who have died from firearms in the U.S. has exceeded the number of Americans who have been killed in uniform during all the wars in the nation’s history. In 2017, the Journal of the American Medical Association declared gun violence a 'health crisis.' Meanwhile, donations to the N.R.A. tripled after the Parkland school shooting."

Rich Benjamin at The New Yorker looks at politics, race, and firearms fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.