The NRA’s National Firearms Museum has everything from Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson to the guns of Annie Oakley, but apparently, it’s not OK that the
“…the NRA tweeted about yesterday, is an elephant rifle that belonged to Henry Morton Stanley, the 19th-century British American journalist and “explorer” who marauded through east, southern, and central Africa.”
Source: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/12/nra-elephant-gun-henry-morton-stanley
And why is it not OK? Because Stanly commited murder during his safaris.
Stanley claimed, was 14 dead and 8 wounded, presumably including the baby and its mother. Due to tales such as this, Stanley gained a reputation for indiscriminate slaughter. George Bernard Shaw described him as a “wild-beast man, with his elephant gun, and his atmosphere of dread and murder.” Fellow expeditionist Richard Burton observed, “Stanley shoots negroes [sic] as if they were monkeys.” Though the elephant gun in the NRA’s collection is likely not the one fired in the passage above, it’s not surprising that the gun lobby isn’t volunteering the larger story behind the trigger-happy owner of this “special treasure.”
Well Mother Jones,
#1 The National Firearms Museum is about THE GUNS more than the people who owned them.
#2 I’m surprised that a racist and eugenicist like George Bernard Shaw would have a problem with Stanley.
“We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment …
A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw, Lecture to the Eugenics Education Society, Reported in The Daily Express, March 4, 1910.
Source: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Biology/Eugenics.htm#GEORGE%20BERNARD%20SHAW
Stanley’s gun is part of history, and unlike the evil ideas of George Bernard Shaw which inspired Hitler’s own ideas of genocide, Stanley’s gun is guilty of nothing.
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