Security

Chaos at the NRA

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We should begin by acknowledging that the current NRA is basically a slush-fund non-profit front for gun manufacturers who export death for profit, with associations to white supremacist policy, as Hasan Manaj masterfully explains:

What Hasan misses in his otherwise excellent segment about chaos at the NRA is an obvious historical angle. For example, when he discusses a move by the current US regime leader to overturn humanitarian rules meant to limit goods flowing to regimes that violate human rights…that’s a straight repeat of what Reagan did in 1981.

In case you missed it, I wrote about this in a post called “Ronald Reagan’s ‘Special Unit’ Soldier Sentenced to 5,160 Years in Jail for MASS MURDER”

Two months after news of the massacre Reagan un-blocked $3.2 million in military support to Guatemala’s army. The unblocking method used was crafty, as Reagan reclassified trucks and jeeps to transport Guatemalan soldiers to commit massacres. Military vehicles known to be used in the massacres no longer were under the human rights embargo.

Here’s another way to look at the topic from a current versus historic one.

We can tell a current news story about American gun manufacturers today accelerating the destruction of endangered wildlife. They are illegally and secretly arming poachers.

…precipitous decline in the worldwide rhino population from 500,000 in the early 20th century to fewer than 30,000 today, with the vast majority in South Africa.

A 2015 report by Small Arms Survey, a Switzerland-based research group, showed that the free flow of high-powered rifles and other weapons in Africa has significantly increased the scale of poaching. In turn, that has bolstered the illicit arms trade.

[…]

CZ and its American subsidiary, at a minimum, knew that the weapons it was selling were being used for poaching,” Ms. Austin said in an interview. “They knew and continued to look the other way as dozens, perhaps hundreds, of their weapons continued to show up in the hands of poachers.”

Or we can tell an historic story about the 1980s, where gun manufacturers perpetuated civil wars in southern Africa by illegally and secretly arming white supremacist authoritarian regimes.

In that context, the shift from killing hundreds of thousands of people (e.g. Angolan civil war) to destroying endangered species seems predictable for American gun manufacturers that disrespect regulations of any kind. Destabilization and conflict is a fuel the gun manufacturers use in their engines to juice sales numbers.

You may recall I wrote a blog post about white supremacists who destabilized neighboring states. When I hear Hasan discuss how America today floods Mexico with guns and opposes the United Nations role in stopping such activity, naturally I want to say this sounds familiar.

I think people might be shocked to learn in Hasan’s program that America today supplies the guns that destabilize neighboring Mexico’s government. However, I wonder if even more people would be surprised to find out this maps to decades of American policy.

Take for example a 1996 news story where the US gets called out for clandestine arms deals to maintain South African apartheid…by destabilizing its neighboring states:

The US indictment claims that Armscor, set up in 1977 to circumvent the United Nation’s arms embargo against South Africa and wholly owned by the South African government, smuggled military technology from the US in the late 1980s…South African ministers have threatened to reveal details of clandestine deals between the US and previous South African governments if the US does not drop the Armscor case.

Once you accept the NRA saw a massive political shift (a coup, really) in 1977 to completely oppose gun control, coinciding with South African apartheid forces circumventing gun control at that same time (United Nations arms embargo on South Africa was promulgated in 1964, mandatory in 1977), you get a different theme of how we ended up with Hasan’s program.

There’s a good case to be made here that the current incarnation of the NRA is a direct result of American gun manufacturers seeing a business/lobby opportunity to ensure the “existential threat” (end of apartheid) perceived in 1978 by South African government would face a heavily armed resistance.

Of course history throws some curve balls too. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, infamously signed a Mulford Act in 1967 to ban guns. So how did this politician rotate like the NRA from prior to the 1970s being for gun regulation to becoming a poster-child of anti-regulation after the 1970s? Why did Reagan originally support regulation of guns in a democracy and then fight against regulation when guns were exported to obviously authoritarian even genocidal regimes?

The Black Panthers appear to confirm that Reagan’s position really depended on who was perceived to be exercising their rights (a common criticism of the NRA today).

So basically my issue with Hasan’s excellent program is that its international relations tone lacked historic perspective. History can seriously help inform and guide gun regulation policy, and a viewer probably would benefit from knowing why Oliver North was given such a powerful role in the NRA.

I mean just take for example how Oliver North is a kind of central act in Hasan’s story and Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandals aren’t even mentioned! Quick refresh:

…Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the corrupt and repressive government of General Somoza…Reagan increased military aid to the beleaguered governments. El Salvador alone received $3bn, a vast amount for a small nation. At the same time, Reagan began to do all he could to engineer the overthrow of the Sandinistas…opposition to this funding grew among the US public. In 1986, the Reagan government, secretly and illegally, transferred to the contras the proceeds of clandestine sales of military equipment supplied to Iran…it seems almost unbelievable that these tiny countries could have been seen by Reagan as a major threat to US national security.

Stop for just a minute to consider that Oliver North, a beacon of de-regulation and free-market forces, is being pushed out of the NRA because he tried to regulate the excessive fraud and waste he found there.

It is from historic events we get better context to help find a true North, and to better understand evolution of the NRA from advocating for gun regulation before the 1960s to being against any kind of gun control at all in the 1980s.

Given what we know today about economic history of America’s gun industry exporting death it is amazing the NRA has been able to keep going on its post-1977 radically racist political lobby platform.

To recap, the NRA today represents gun manufacturers looking to juice sales by fomenting societal conflict, which apparently means opposing any regulations that impact profits, regardless of harms to people and their government. Hopefully at this point you’re not only wondering why they can run like this, but also who started it all.

And now I’d like to end by pointing out what the NRA really was created for and meant to do, way back more than a hundred years ago in the 1870s. I never see this topic discussed anywhere with any kind of real detail, so I posted it on this site as well.

Also, here are a number of other comedians who successfully rounded up the NRA chaos:

Bee’s explanation of the financial disintegration of the NRA because tax-exempt status may be removed, and manufacturers (vast majority of income) already are funding less

Colbert’s now famous comment:

I’m surprised the NRA was affiliated with car rental companies at all, considering Hertz and Avis enforce tyrannical rules like ‘age restrictions’ and ‘having a license.’

Cracked lesson on how in 1977 the NRA had an abrupt leadership coup, and drummed up some 2nd Amendment propaganda that had started in 1960.

Oliver’s piece on how the NRA actively prevents reasonable discourse (e.g. attacking lawyers)

Cenac’s exploration of NRA representation in American movies

History, Security

Real History of the NRA

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The National Rifle Association (NRA) has an interesting origin story that is basically 180 degrees from its current incarnation. Everything it stood for was reversed when the NRA in 1975 developed a splinter extreme right-wing Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) lobby group.

The ILA in 1977 suddenly seized complete control of the NRA, representing primarily interests of gun manufacturers. Few to this day understand the significance of the year, as the United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of 1977 had unanimously adopted a mandatory global arms embargo against apartheid.

…all States shall cease forthwith any provision to South Africa of arms and related materiel of all types.

The flip in 1977 to become a front for running guns illegally to white nationalist militants was a very far cry from 1871, the year NRA was founded in New York to better prepare black freemen (e.g. emancipated slaves) to defend America against white nationalist militants.

African American Civil War soldiers, 1865, Petersburg, VA via JSTOR, Project Gutenberg

In other words the NRA was established after Civil War to help blacks prevent infringements of their newly won civil rights (e.g. defend against violent sabotage by white nationalists). Yet in 1977 the NRA was flipped into an organization representing violent white power groups that threaten and infringe on the civil rights of blacks even to today.

Here’s the actual paragraph from the NRA origin days, where Colonel William C. Church, founder of the Army and Navy Journal, writes “let us have our rifle practice association” meaning let him establish a NRA.

The United States Army and Navy journal and gazette of the regular and volunteer forces, Volume 8, p 837

Before blacks were considered citizens, America was not democratic and expressly prohibited individual freedom. The NRA was meant to help by better enabling black Americans to preserve freedom as guardians of their democracy. That’s the real history as an executive summary.

And now for the long-form discussion:

Source: Tom Toles

After the Civil War ended it generally was thought (pun intended) that Americans needed to be trained better with rifles to defend the country against white supremacist rebellion. I mean U.S. citizens were expected to defend self, communities and federal government from terrorists like those who had started a confederacy to preserve slavery.

It was in this context of rifle skills that US General Shaler had noticed that on average it took nearly 1K rifle shots to stop each enemy soldier during the Civil War.

Army records for the Civil War showed that it took 1,000 rifle shots for every Confederate soldier hit during battle. In fact, the NRA’s first president, Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside, himself a former Rhode Island gunsmith, had this to say about Civil War shooting inefficiency: “Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill … only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn.”

A UCLA law professor tried to frame it like this in his 2011 Atlantic article called “The Secret History of Guns”:

Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.

Unfortunately the law professor gets it right (marksmanship was the concern), while also being wrong; it was not about being born in a city, it was about race. It’s understandable why some believe cities reduced a person’s need for hunting, therefore reduced their related skill with hunting equipment. However hunting for rural communities never was a “life and death” drama that outsiders like to portray it as (crops, traps and lines work just fine with lower cost/risk for staying alive, thank you), whereas defending oneself from racist angry mobs always has been about survival.

This law professor still makes many good points about the NRA from a legal standpoint. Here, for another example, is how he hammers on the lack of any real 2nd Amendment focus in the organization.

For most of its history, the NRA completely ignored the Second Amendment. If you go through old issues of the NRA’s signature publication, American Rifleman, from the 1940s and 1950s, you can read issue after issue without finding a single mention of the Second Amendment. The organization was focused on marksmanship and hunting, not shooting down gun control.

What I find lacking in legal perspectives on history such as this is any mention of NRA core principles. What was the organization meant to do, and what did it do within its first 20 years?

Imagine instead of 1950s…go way back to when the federal military was telling emancipated Americans to take up marksmanship and hunting with rifles, to better protect themselves because in doing so they were helping to protect their federal government from regression and rebellion.

That’s more what was really going on when the letters NRA first were put together.

From the start the NRA was “a roster of Union commanders” who had just defeated angry white men trying to destroy the federal government. Training emancipated blacks with marksmanship was seen as not only viable but logical course for America to preserve civil rights won as well as maintain the country’s national security.

General Grant in 1868 did not even have to campaign for President, he was so popular. He just stated that the federal government needed to preserve sacrifices of the war (that he had decisively won) by protecting Americans from racist militias and by preventing former rebellious militants from retaking power.

Look at these 1868 choices for President and take a wild guess which side created the NRA. Hint: the left.

After the hugely popular Grant dominated the Presidential election, where 80% of freemen voted, he set about to crush the white-supremacist platform against civil rights. Consider three years after election, in 1871, it was Union military and political voices who set about forming the NRA under Grant’s administration to allow citizens to train and better protect the federal government, or at least protect selves until federal help could come.

This is why today it would be so awesome if anyone making TV shows about the dysfunction of today’s NRA would point out that the decorated “roster of Union commanders” probably are rolling in their grave because of what their federal defense concept has become.

Burnside was the first NRA president and it’s worth noting his father emancipated their slaves in the 1820s, as most of the world was ending slavery.

Burnside became immortalized by the term “side burns” to describe his facial hair. His American heroism destroying anti-American militias and their spies deserves far more attention.

Also note Burnside was engaged before Civil War. His bride-to-be disappeared and later showed up serving as a spy to the rebels fighting to perpetuate slavery. She infamously then got engaged to 16 pro-slavery men at the same time (saying “it is so they die happy and if they live I don’t give a damn”).

She was caught trying to fool Burnside a second time and he arrested her.

Just to go a little further on this tangent, the sister and mother of the woman he had been engaged to were both arrested for carrying large amounts of opium and morphine. The Civil War also had an element of “war on drugs” to it. With this woman’s family arrested for drug smuggling in the United States, she then shows up pretending to be British and…

I hope that gives some context to the environment where accuracy in both speech and rifle shot become paramount. This is the context for an NRA creation by Union Generals.

It is certain that a lot of people have completely forgotten that during this crazy time of privileged whites using “every trick” possible to deny blacks any rights, President Grant outsmarted them and successfully drove civil rights in America.

Grant used a multi-pronged military and civilian strategy to promulgate freedom in the truest sense, elevating America as a whole. This is what made 1871 such a pivotal time for NRA establishment.

After Grant had won on the battlefield, with far superior strategic plans than the bumbling failure General Lee, Grant was thrust into helping establish civilian models for Americans to defend themselves against residual terror cells (e.g. KKK) that were prolonging the Civil War.

Paramilitary terror campaigns continued to threaten to undermine emancipation or federal government legitimacy, and Union Generals knew America needed to build broader national defense options than just military ones.

In other words, when talking about 1871 as a start date, and saying “the situation shifted” for rifles in America, it was because a pro-government organization was founded as a citizen defense project to improve marksmanship of black men and…called it the NRA.

This NRA story about an 1871 equivalent of Black Panther might seem crazy and out of the blue until you also recognize that a man named Jefferson Beauregard in 2016 was appointed to head the Department of Justice (DoJ). What I mean is, when you look around more generally we’ve come a very long way from where we were in 1871.

The DoJ was created in 1870 by President Grant to fight against the KKK, also known as…wait for it…Jefferson and Beauregard’s legacy.

In case that reference is unclear, Jefferson and Beauregard were the lead traitors in their pro-slavery aggression against their own country. So now look at the news in 2016 that a man named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was appointed to head the department created to defeat the men he was named after.

I’ve heard in KKK rallies his name is actually pronounced Jefferson Beauregard Secession III, if that helps make it any clearer.

Even more to the point, in 1986 America hadn’t pivoted this far yet to a complete reversal. There were still newspaper headlines screaming about a man with a name intended to preserve painful memories of slavery and treason against his own country…calling him out clearly as racist after he was caught calling the NAACP “Un-American” while calling Klansmen “Okay.”

Sessions is overtly the third generation with an absurdly un-American name. Can you see here the long game of the American white nationalist?

It sure seems very significant for the US to allow someone who calls a terrorist organization “Okay” to head the agency created to destroy that exact terrorist organization. This would be like Germany electing someone named Hitler Rommel Blitzkrieg III to be their Federal Minister of Justice.

In conclusion, I hope you see how the NRA of today has flipped 180 degrees from its origin. It definitely doesn’t operate today like it did when Union Generals were aiming to help protect federal government by training black Americans to stop white supremacist militias from undoing civil rights and ruining the country.

It perhaps makes sense then that if the DoJ very openly becomes led by a third-generation family homage to pro-slavery anti-justice Jefferson and Beauregard…the NRA too now would be led by white supremacists who hate government

In fact the NRA flipped abruptly in a 1977 leadership coup called Harlon’s “Cincinnati Revolt” that arguably helped prop up South Africa’s apartheid government as I’ve spoken about before.

Despite arms embargo since 1977, NRA funnels US guns to Apartheid regime for wars against non-white governments

Think about that for a minute. After 1977, the NRA seems to have transformed into an American industrial gun-running organization to perpetuate white nationalism against black populations. This literally is the opposite of its origin.

The tough question becomes should the NRA serving a structural white supremacist agenda today (let alone the DoJ) define it or obscure the true civil rights origins?

Both NRA and DoJ were established by Union Generals aiming to defend federal government from white supremacist militias. Americans should look at the history and regularly ask why these organizations no longer are serving in that capacity.

History, Sailing, Security

A Sailor-Historian-Technologist Perspective on the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster

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The tragedy of Boeing’s 737 product security decisions create a sad trifecta for someone interested in aeronautics, lessons from the past, and risk management.

First, there was a sailor’s warning.

We know Boeing moved a jet engine into a position that fundamentally changed handling. This was a result of Airbus ability to add a more efficient engine to their popular A320. The A320 has more ground clearance, so a larger engine didn’t change anything in terms of handling. The 737 sits lower to the ground, so changing to a more efficient engine suddenly became a huge design change.

Here’s how it unfolded. In 2011 Boeing saw a new Airbus design as a direct threat to profitability. A sales-driven rush meant efficiency became a critical feature for their aging 737 design. The Boeing perspective on the kind of race they were in was basically this:

Boeing had to solve for a plane much closer to the ground, while achieving the same marketing feat of Airbus, which said the efficiency didn’t change a thing (thus no costly pilot re-training). This is where Boeing made the critical decision to push their engine design forward and up on the wing,…while claiming that pilots did not need to know anything new about handling characteristics.

60 minutes in Australia illustrated the difference in their segment called “Rogue Boeing 737 Max planes ‘with minds of their own’” (look carefully on the left and it says TOO BIG next to the engine):


Don’t ask me why an Australian TV show didn’t call their segment “Mad Max”.

And that is basically why handling the plane was different, despite Boeing’s claims that their changes weren’t significant, let alone safety-related. The difference in handling was so severe (risk of stall) that Boeing then doubled-down with a clumsy software hack to flight control systems to secretly handle the handling changes (as well as selling airlines an expensive sensor “disagree” light for pilots, which the downed planes hadn’t purchased)

An odd twist to this story is that it was American Airlines who kicked off the Boeing panic about sales with a 2011 order for several hundred new A320. See if you can pick up a more forward and higher engine design in this illustration handed out to passengers.

I added this into the story because note again how Boeing wanted to emphasize “identical” planes yet marketed them heavily as different for even an in-flight magazine given to every passenger. It stands in contrast to how that same airline’s pilots were repeatedly told by Boeing the two planes held no differences in flight worth highlighting in documentation.

To make an even finer point, the Airbus A320 in that same airline magazine doesn’t have a sub-model.

While this engine placement clearly had been approved by highly-specialized engineering management thinking short-term (about racing through FAA compliance), who was thinking about serious instability long-term as a predictable cost?

The emerging safety problems led to a series of shortcut hacks and partial explanations that attempted to minimize talk about stabilizing or training for new flow characteristics, rather than admit huge long-term implications (deaths).

Boeing Knew About Safety-Alert Problem for a Year Before Telling FAA, Airlines

The Seattle Times posted clear evidence of pilots fighting against their own ship, unaware of reasons it was fighting with them.

Anyone who sails, let alone flies airplanes, immediately can see the problem in calling a 737 “Mad Max” the same as a prior 737 design, when flow handling has changed — one doesn’t just push a keel or mast around without direct tiller effects.

Some pilots say unofficially they knew the 737 “Mad Max” was not the same and, at least in America, were mentally preparing themselves for how to react to a defective system. Officially however pilots globally needed to be warned clearly and properly, as well as trained better on the faulty software that would fight with them for safe control of the aircraft.

Second, America has a “Widowmaker” precedent.

Years ago I wrote about pilot concerns with a plane of WWII, the crash-prone B-26.

The B-26 had a high rate of accidents in takeoff and landing until crews were trained better and the aspect ratio modified on its wings/rudder

That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. In terms of history repeating itself, evidence mounted this American airplane was manifestly unsafe to fly and the manufacturer wasn’t inclined to proactively fix and save lives.

A biographer of Truman gives us some details from 1942 Senate hearings, foreshadowing the situation today with Boeing.

Apparently crashes of the Martin B-26 were happening at least every month and sometimes every other day. Yes, crashes were literally happening 15 days out of 30 and the plane wasn’t grounded.

The Martin company in response to concerns started a PR campaign to gloat about how one of its aircraft actually didn’t kill everyone on board and received blessings from Churchill.

Promoting survivorship should be recognized today as a dangerously and infamously bad data tactic. Focusing on economics of Boeing is the right thing here. They haven’t stooped yet to Martin’s survivorship bias campaign, but it does seem that Boeing knowingly was putting lives at risk to win a marketing and sales battle with a rival, similar to what Tesla could be accused of doing.

Third, there are broad societal issues from profitable data integrity flaws.

Can we speak openly yet about the executives making money on big data technology with known integrity flaws that kill customers?

There’s really a strange element to this story from a product management decision flow. Nobody should want to end up where we are at today with this issue.

Boeing knew right away its design change impacted the handling of the product. They then added fixes in, without notifying their customers responsible for operating the product of the severity of a fix failure (crash).

I believe this is where and why the expanding number of investigations are being cited as “criminal” in nature.

  • Investigation of development and certification of the Boeing 737 MAX by the FAA and Boeing, by DoJ Fraud Section, with help from the FBI and the DoT Inspector General
  • Administrative investigation by the DoT Inspector General
  • DoT Inspector General hearings
  • FAA review panel on “certification of the automated flight-control system on the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, as well as its design and how pilots interact with it”
  • Congressional investigation of “status of the Boeing 737 MAX” for US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

These investigations seem all to be getting at the sort of accountability I’ve been saying needs to happen for Facebook, which also suffered from integrity flaws in its product design. Will a top executive eventually be named? And will there be wider impact to engineering and manufacturing ethics in general? If the Grover Shoe Factory disaster is any indication, the answers should be yes.

In conclusion, if change in design is being deceptively presented, and the suffering of those impacted is minimized (because profits, duh), then we’re approaching a transportation regulatory moment that really is about software engineering. What may emerge is these software-based transportation risks, because fatalities, will bring regulation for software in general.

Even if regulation isn’t coming, the other new reality is buyers (airlines, especially outside the US and beyond the FAA) will do what Truman suggested in 1942: cancel contracts and buy from another supplier who can pass transparency/accountability tests.