NRA's Flip-Flop

The NRA used to be all about background checks, but since the millennium its policy changed. So, what's different now? My theory is that there is now just too much money to be made in drugs-for-arms sales. There is a tide of guns from unregulated Texas gun shows to Mexican drug cartels: the infamous Los Zetas cartel, in particular. The reason the GOP got all upset about Fast and Furious isn't because the U.S. carelessly sent guns to Mexican drug gangs, but because the guns went to the Sinaloa Cartel, the deadly arch-enemy of Los Zetas. This de facto alliance between the GOP and the crazed decapitator squads of northeast Mexico is just too lucrative.

From the Huffington Post, in June of that same year, the NRA also took out an ad supporting background checks at gun shows:

The message of the NRA’s 1999 campaign was “Be Reasonable,” and the organization bought ads in top newspapers, including USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, to make its case.
“We believe it’s reasonable to provide for instant background checks at gun shows, just like gun stores and pawn shops,” the USA Today ad reads.

“We’ve always supported instant background checks,” LaPierre sat at a Friends of NRA event in May 1999, HuffPo reports.