Screw the NRA. Half my family used to be members (mostly the male half). I wont ever be. Their paranoid, and unconscious admission that their position on gun rights is indefensible and the slippery slope is impossible to correct caused them to support, even encourage, the passage of the 1986 FOPA. Despite its being fronted as a clarification of the second amendment (something anyone with a copy of the federalist papers and/or a relevant college history book can do) is actually the largest infringement of citizens second amendment rights, as they were understood by the men who wrote our constitution since… ever. It effectively helps to keep citizens from owning modern, military-quality small arms (excluding semi-auto and bolt action rifles and pistols, but I would not doubt a national .50BMG ban is in the works with these new crazy powers that congress suddenly has according to the FOPA) and basically contributes to the anti-gun/VPC agenda of eroding the second amendment rights of American citizens to nothing.
Neverdem: “Suicide is not a disease, but rather a somewhat particular form of Darwinian natural selection.”
I disagree. Suicide, in some cases, might be caused, in part, by genetic factors, but is for the most part due to environmental (both internal and external) factors. Plus social darwinism is about the furthest thing from the truth on god's green earth. unless the crazy christian-conservatives, lead by the upstanding pat robertson, decide that genetic engineering is not against the will of god (which BTW includes all sorts of insanity if biblical laws are to be believed) evolutionarily the human race is doomed to quasi-stagnation.
The FOPA was a good step towards removing many of the infringement of the 1968 Gun Control Act, and in reigning in the BATF. Right up until the last minute addition of the machine gun ban, that is. But the addition was so last minute that it and the bill passed before anyone could really evaluate it's actual meaning. (It's poorly written and of taken literally it would mean nothing, but the intent is enforced rather than the actual language.)
So yes, the NRA did support and push the FOPA, but the not the machine gun ban. The was your typical o'dark thirty gun control. It might have even been intended as a poison pill, but because it was so poorly written, no body recognized in time to block it before the law passed in both houses with the amendment still attached.