If Only The Colonel Were Still Alive

The Educational Fund To Stop Gun Violence, the 503(c)3 arm of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, has a website called MeetTheNRA.org. Their goal is to publish (out of context) quotes in an effort to discredit current and former members of the NRA Board as being conservative radicals, racists, and insurrectionists.

The screen cap below is from today in their effort to smear the late Col. Jeff Cooper.

What Col. Cooper actually wrote in his Commentaries, Vol. 4, was this:

Clearly propaganda is more potent than truth. Take this matter of Guernica, for example. Pablo Picasso, one of the more significant propagandists of the left, made a very successful point in claiming that the town of Guernica had been flattened from the air by the German Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War − this being an atrocity since the town had no strategic value. This point was accepted by the world press, and is now considered a fact, even for inclusion in encyclopedias.

For those who have access to the official records it is clear that the Condor Legion had been grounded for two weeks prior to the occupation of the city by the Nationalist forces. Moreover, the German light bombers did not have the technical capacity for "carpet bombing," as later practiced by the Allies in Europe. Most conclusive, however, was the fact that there were no bomb craters in the streets. The buildings were pretty well demolished, but this was done from inside them. It is obviously impossible to flatten a town from the air without hitting any of the streets, but now, to the amazement of the well−informed, the German government is proposing to pay an indemnity to Spain for an atrocity never committed. Such goings on!

Now Col. Cooper served as an officer in the US Marine Corps during both WWII and the Korean Conflict. Moreover, he had a graduate degree in history to complement his undergraduate degree from Stanford in political science. I happen to think that a military officer, especially one trained as a historian, is somewhat more likely to have seen the official reports and to have made sense of them than a hoplophobe like Ladd Everitt who wasn't even born when Kennedy was killed.

Now I will acknowledge that there is a significant difference of opinion about what really happened at Guernica especially among historians so the Colonel could be wrong in his assessment. Jeff Cooper was reputed to be a man of strong opinions, somewhat cranky and irascible, but brilliant nonetheless. If he were alive today, the intellectual flaying he would have given the small-minded gun prohibitionist hoplophobes at the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and CSGV would have been a thing of beauty. It is a pity he didn't live long enough to apply it.