Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Gun Control Is an Immigration Issue: A Note on the NRA

And let’s not forget that the current NRA was created by a "law-abiding citizen" who gunned a Mexican teen down in cold blood and later headed the Border Patrol as it carried out the mass deportations of “Operation Wetback.”—TPOI editor
Harlon Carter in 1984. Photo: Michael Evans/National Portrait Gallery
The man responsible for the modern NRA killed a Hispanic teenager, before becoming a border agent
Harlon Carter led the evolution from sporting advocacy to political juggernaut

By Laura Smith, Timeline
July 6, 2017
In 1931, on the Laredo, Texas side of the arid U.S.-Mexico border, a teenage boy named Harlon Carter came home from school to find his mother upset. Three Hispanic boys had been loitering in front of the house. The family’s car had been stolen a few weeks before, and she thought these boys might know something about it. Racial tensions ran high in this part of the country. The newly-minted Border Patrol was operating in what historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Migra! refers to as “a sanctuary of violence.” A few years earlier, the Border Patrol — Carter’s father was an officer — had determined that Laredo was mostly inhabited by Mexican immigrants and had undertaken a “full-scale house cleaning.”

The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn’t be home for hours, so the son picked up his shotgun and walked out the door….

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