Article: The NRA is So Against White Hate It Keeps Ted Nugent on its Board

Ted Nugent has been an NRA board member for 20 years
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Ted Nugent has been an NRA board member for 20 years
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As police search for the white gunman who killed six women and three men including the church's pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney yesterday at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, it is apparent that there is a huge overlap between gun rights advocates and white supremacist gun rights advocates.

It has barely been a year since KKK leader Frazier Glenn Miller was accused of killing three outside two Jewish Community Centers in Kansas the day before Passover. Among Miller's racist writings was his contention that the white race is "drowning literally in seas of colored mongrels." David Duke, one of the nation's best known Ku Klux Klan leaders is a big fan of the NRA, lauding Wayne LaPierre's "new rallying cry to spotlight the importance of every American's right to keep and bear arms," on his website and quoting a LaPierre speech.

Three years ago, white supremacist Wade Michael Page fatally shot six people and wounded four at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page was a musician who played in white power bands including End Apathy and Definite Hate.

Here in Chicago in 1999, white supremacist Benjamin Nathaniel Smith went on a racist shooting rampage killing any non-Aryan he could find. He shot and killed Northwestern University Men's Basketball Coach Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American, and Won-Joon Yoon, a Korean computer science doctoral student. He also wounded nine Orthodox Jews and an African-American minister. The hate spree spawned an annual community event called the Ricky Byrdsong Memorial Race Against Hate, which occurs in a few days.

With so many racist murderers embracing gun rights, the NRA has neither disavowed its hate group followers or its racist board member.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an umbrella group which includes 47 other organizations, has asked the NRA to remove Nugent from its board. "The NRA likes to bill itself as the 'oldest civil rights organization in the United States," said its petition. "If they want to wear that mantle it's time for them to walk the walk and end their relationship with Ted Nugent immediately."

Why does the NRA retain its racist-in-chief? Because Nugent is a master at the "oppressed white race" rhetoric that fuels the gun rights movement by telling its member they are victims. Like most bullies, gun rights advocates and especially white supremacist gun rights advocates think they are "persecuted." Or to use Nugent's own words "I'm like a black Jew in Nuremberg 1938 and the brownshirts can't stand me"; "I'm Rosa Parks with a Gibson."

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