Debs greets the formation of the National Rifle Association. He was not a fan.

‘The National Rifle Association’ by Eugene V. Debs from The National Ripsaw. Vol. 12 No. 9. November, 1915.

To teach the gentle art of murder in Sunday schools, in the public schools and colleges, that the young may be trained up to know that the wholesale killing of human beings is essential to the happiness of nations and to the progress of civilization, is the object of the recently organized National Rifle Association of America, with headquarters at Washington, D.C. Of course, the purpose of this rifle gang is stated in different terms by its patriotic and plutocratic promoters. For instance, Elihu Root, ex-senator and attorney for the Wall street gangsters says: “The purposes of the National Rifle Association of America are of the greatest importance, and the methods by which it proposes to attain them are simple, direct and suited to American life and character.”

Just so! Elihu is one of the life members and knows what he is talking about. Other life members are Roosevelt, Taft, Belmont, Drexel, Frick, Von L. Meyer, Mackay, Gary, Westinghouse, Schiff and other plutocrats whose material interests are conserved and advanced in an exploiting system in which parasites fatten on slaves and which can be maintained and perpetuated only by bloody, savage warfare.

These gentlemen propose to teach the youth of the land to kill their fellow-beings to make them patriotic. Accordingly, when the war drums throb it is a good citizen’s patriotic duty to shoulder a rifle and march out to kill or to be killed according to his fate. But barring Roosevelt, who, as a soldier made a record to make angels weep, there is not another member in the entire bunch who ever smelt powder outside of a barber shop. Every one of the chief promoters of this movement is a leech and a parasite and not one of them would dream of making rifle-fodder of himself. But by giving their powerful (?) names to the scheme it is expected that the suckers will flock to its standard in droves, all eager to be branded as patriots by the Rifle Association, backed by Wall street and promoted for no other purpose than to make murderers of school children in the name of patriotism and thereby perpetuate the vicious and inhuman system that is now drenching the old world in the blood of its misguided victims and turning our vaunted civilization back again into the dark ages of barbarism.

If the plutocrats and their retainers and mercenaries want to organize a National Rifle Association to cultivate the art of human slaughter, let them do so, but certainly no workingman with a glimmer of intelligence will be caught in the trap baited with their patriotic bunc.

Let the murder advocates carry on their vicious propaganda in the name of perverted patriotism, if they will; we shall not be deceived by it, and while they are attempting to sow the seed of hate in the mind of childhood and to glorify the lust to kill, we shall do our utmost to teach the youth of the land that a system that has to be upheld by murder should be overthrown and a new system established in which there are no warring class interests, no incentive to bloodshed, and in which men will love and serve one another instead of maiming and murdering one another as they are now taught to do as their patriotic duty by the National Rifle Association of America.

The National Ripsaw, a Free-Thinking, Socialist magazine that, in the 1910s, included the O’Hare’s and Debs on its board. The paper under the O’Hare’s was a voice of the Party’s anti-war wing and became a main literary vehicle for Debs before it, like all of the anti-war Left press, was banned from the postal services. In it’s previous incarnation, The Rip-Saw was an openly racist, exclusionary “Socialist” magazine under editor Seth McCallen from 1903 until 1908 when the paper was taken over by Phil Wagner and the politicsand focus of the paper changed dramatically. Thereafter it was a leading anti-war voice, and one in which Debs would contribute much anti-militarist writings to, changing its name to Socialist Revolution before its banning by the Post Office at the U.S. entered World War One in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/national-ripsaw/151100-nationalripsaw-v12n09w141.pdf