Here’s some good background on how the NRA turned into what it is today.

Not Safe for Work Corporation

FROM: MARK AMES
TO: THE SHOOTINGS DESK
DATE: DEC 17TH, 2012
FROM “OPERATION WETBACK” TO NEWTOWN: TRACING THE HICK FASCISM OF THE NRA
LAS VEGAS, NV: I’ve been writing about these rampage murders for about a decade now, but Friday’s rampage massacre was Different. So I’m going to approach this piece somewhat Differently than I usually do — I’m going to look at what’s most obvious.

For one thing, this massacre had pathos, and I’ve never really dealt with pathos like this in all my years researching and writing about these rampage killings. I’m used to digging into a story that has no pathos, and finding it where no one bothers looking, usually hidden in all the obvious places.

But there’s no point in being clever here. The slaughter of so may little children means approaching this from a more “obvious” angle.

Also, this isn’t the sort of rampage massacre I studied for “Going Postal,” my book that examined workplace massacres in which employees massacre supervisors and/or coworkers, and “middle America” school shootings where middle-class students attack their schools and fellow students.

Until relatively recently, those types of mass-murder were freakishly rare in America; they only appeared at the end of the Reagan Era. First they happened in the workplace, concurrent with the destruction of labor unions and the transfer of wealth and workplace power into few hands. Then, by the late 1990s, the workplace massacres had seeped down into the employees’ children’s schoolyards.

Much more at the thread. Read it quick, apparently they paywall after a couple of days.