Mike McIntire
speaker
322 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Mike McIntire’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And he always had a very strong interest in gun rights.
Dingell objected to that.
He said that, you know, these attempts to restrict guns were pointed in the wrong direction, should be focused on criminals.
So from very early on, he articulated, you know, a pretty strong view of what he felt was a threat against gun rights in America.
This continued through the 1960s with passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which is really one of only two major bills, the other being in 1934 that restricted firearms in any meaningful way.
And he opposed that as well.
And it was after that that he really, I think, was determined to try to do something more than just simply be a voice in Congress to protect what he saw as an erosion of Second Amendment rights.
One of the surprising things I learned in my reporting on this over the years is that members of Congress, they are allowed to serve on the boards of nonprofit groups as long as they're not paid.
And I think some people might be surprised to know that the NRA itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization.
And they've had quite a few members of Congress actually serve on the board going back at least to the 1960s.
And Dingell was one of them.
He joined the NRA at the end of that decade.
And he very quickly came to dominate the discussion on the board about, you know, the role of the NRA in reshaping gun rights.
And he occupied a very, as you say, potentially conflicted perch because he, on the one hand, is helping this modern-day lobbying group kind of shape its own actions and policies and plans on this very important issue of gun rights.
At the same time, he's a member of Congress that...
is effectively being lobbied by the same organization.
And in that role in Congress is also shaping public policy.
And I think it is indisputably a conflict.
And he himself acknowledged it actually years later in the 1990s when he resigned from the board.
when a very important bill in Congress, the assault weapons ban came up in 1994, he, you know, said that he had a conflict between his two roles, but that was decades later after he had already served in that capacity and presided over a wholesale change in not just the NRA itself, but gun rights in general.
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