Former NRA President Jim Porter comes armed with stories, stats to Hoover chamber

The United States doesn’t need more restrictions on gun ownership because they don’t do anything to curb crime, a former president of the National Rifle Association told the Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce Wednesday.

Widespread publicity of shootings involving multiple victims in recent years has gun control advocates pushing for more limitations, but that’s not the answer to the problem, said Jim Porter, a Birmingham attorney who served as NRA president from 2013 to 2015.

Porter came armed with a few statistics to the chamber luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Birmingham — The Wynfrey Hotel.

Porter said surveys show that 72 percent of people in the U.S.A. say the country doesn’t need more gun laws. Instead, authorities need to focus their efforts on taking criminals off the streets and putting them in jail, he said.

The Mothers Against Drunk Drivers group is very successful in its efforts because it doesn’t spend its time suing car manufacturers, Porter said. Instead, that group deals with the problem, which is people who get behind the wheel when they’re under the influence of alcohol, he said.

More than 99 million people support people’s right to keep firearms in their homes for self-defense, Porter said. When people have the right to bear arms, crime rates are infinitesimally small, he said.

“Crime is at an all-time low,” Porter said. “Gun ownership is at an all-time high.”

Areas with stricter gun control, such as Chicago, have extremely high crime, he said.

Everyone is sickened by the people who gun down innocent people, Porter said. “Those people are murderers. They’re criminals,” he said.

But the gun control restrictions being proposed in Congress by Democrats will have no effect on crime, Porter said. NRA members are not the ones who are guilty of perpetrating these heinous acts, he said.

Porter told the story of Otis McDonald, a black grandfather in Chicago who sued the city of Chicago over a handgun ban because he wanted to protect himself and his family from drug dealers and gangbangers who were terrorizing his neighborhood.

He lost the lawsuit in U.S. District Court but won at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010.

McDonald is considered a hero among NRA members and proof that gun rights advocates are not just white people.

Porter also recounted the history of the NRA, noting it began in 1877 as a shooting club aimed at teaching citizens how to use military weapons in case they were ever drafted to help fight in the service. The idea that having people already trained on how to fire guns would give the United States an advantage over its enemies, he said.

The organization, which has grown from 100,000 to 150,000 members in the 1950s to more than 5 million today, still has a strong emphasis on teaching people how to safely operate firearms, he said.

President Lyndon Johnson, looking for a diversion from his failed policies related to Vietnam, led the first major gun control charge in the 1960s and got the nation’s first legislation passed to limit the possession and sale of firearms, Porter said. That was the legislation that also created the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, he said.

The NRA created a lobbying arm in 1975, started fighting hard politically and had a major reorganization under Porter’s father’s leadership in 1977, he said. Their efforts proved successful in 1986 with passage of the Gun Owners Protection Act, he said.

The NRA has continued growing and gained strength not because of a lot of money, but because of its size and organization, Porter said. “Our people vote,” he said. “We can show candidates we can move the needle 4 percent in elections.”