National Rifle Association: A Legacy of Conservation (mp3s)

Open Spaces (0:18)

Just Like Any Other Animal (0:30)

But Not All People (0:31)

The Earth Is All We Have (1:00)

Fallout (:20)

Preservation (0:31)

The Year 2000 (0:20)

When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day (0:31)

Conservation (0:30)

You Better Do Something About It (0:30)

Step Off (0:20)

Water Over the Dam (0:20)

Starvation (0:30)

Litter Bag (0:28)

Freeways (0:29)

Wildlife Habitat (0:31)

More Than Talk (0:29)

More Than Your Footprints (0:30)

River (1:01)

Educated Americans (0:30)

Imagine walking into a record store, say, Cheapos on Mass Ave in Cambridge, and seeing an album cover (front cover image) with a nice oil painting of ducks in flight. Flip it over, and National Rifle Association of America letterhead is staring back at you (back cover image). This is an album that you buy.

   A Legacy of Conservation is a collection of radio PSAs from those inspired conservationists at the NRA. Shooting animals, it seems, is less fun when there's litter and strip malls everywhere. The segments range from earnest pleas to preserve outdoor space to the usual hunter's rhetoric of how all the deer would starve to death if someone wasn't out there shooting them.

   The exact date is unknown, but the presence of a 5-digit ZIP code and the lack of an area code on the NRA stationery puts this somewhere between 1963 and 1967. The track titles are my own, as the album simply lists them numerically. Surface wear varies--like a lot of PSA albums, the first track on Side 1 got played a lot, and the cuts get cleaner closer to the center.

   Start with "Preservation," which nicely sums up the NRA's message. "Fallout" plays into the Cold War nuclear hysteria of the day. Check out "Educated Americans" to understand where PETA is off the mark, and imagine the pristine winter landscape marred by herds of dead animals that the segment describes.

   And remember, we need high-powered semiautomatic assault rifles to take down this dangerous wildlife that threatens to destroy our American landscape.

Comments

[Yobu]

I'm happy to live in a country where most people don't have deadly weapons. Maybe it's that latent everpresent fear of death that makes the US so prolific culturally. BTW, the front cover link is broken.

[jenny]

Wow you live in a country with no deadly weapons? So no blunt or sharp objects? No knives? No bats? I guess no water either since you can drown someone. Amazing!

[omordha]

FYI people. Hunters (gun owners) buy licenses to hunt. Those license fees are what intitailly preserved a whole lot of the wetlands and wilderness area that exist and are protected today. Without the NRA and hunters, much more of those areas would have been lost before now.

[chris]

those are geese, not ducks . way easier to shoot because theyre bigger and slower.

[chris]

those are geese, not ducks . way easier to shoot because theyre bigger and slower.

[mark]

those are geese, not ducks . way easier to shoot because theyre bigger and slower.

[Hear It Wow]

Geese indeed. I've been looking at too many oil paintings in furniture stores. Interestingly, there's nothing on the album that's specific to shooting geese or ducks. Mostly it's the deer that we need to conserve.

[Norm]

This appeals to me because I love environmentalism AND owning guns.

[Alison Randall]

Check out my podcast of this album at http://mondodiablo.wordpress.com

And yeah, I have comments too, at the end of the program.

[greg]

@jenny:
At least running amok with a sharp object or water is not so easy...