The NRA’s newly appointed boss was once involved in the grisly torture and killing of a fraternity house cat while he was a college student in Michigan, as disturbing media reports on the 1979 incident detail.
Doug Hamlin, who was appointed to the gun rights group’s top spot this summer, was one of five people charged for chopping off a cat’s paws, hanging it from a tree and then setting fire to it, according to news articles published at the time that were resurfaced by The Guardian.
The crime reportedly took place on Dec. 6, 1979, while Hamlin was a student at the University of Michigan and a member of Alpha Delta Phi. Fraternity members tortured the cat because it sometimes failed to use its litter box, according to one article reporting on the case by The Associated Press in 1980 and reviewed by HuffPost through an archive subscription service. The incident was also reported on by the Ann Arbor News in a newspaper clipping excerpted here.
In a statement to HuffPost on Wednesday, Hamlin denied being directly involved in the cat’s killing and said that he “took responsibility” for what happened because he was the fraternity chapter’s president at the time.
“I do not in any way condone the actions that took place more than 44 years ago,” he said.
“Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families, and raised millions of dollars for charity. I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach. My focus now is on protecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”
The judge overseeing the case back in 1980 called the cat killing a “cold, calculating, ruthless act” and said he had received letters “from every corner of the U.S.” urging him to impose strong penalties against the men, according to a past article by the AP.
All five students pleaded no contest and were ordered to pay $360 in court costs and perform 200 hours of community service work.
The charges were later expunged from the men’s records, The Guardian reported.
Several months after the judge’s sentence, one of the five men told the AP that only three of them had physically participated in the cat’s torture and killing. He also insisted that the hate and threats they had received were unreasonable.
The two men who didn’t participate “went to bed knowing they were going to kill it, and we should have stopped it and we didn’t,” the man, who went unnamed in the article, said.
“Once a creep, always a creep,” Shelagh Abbs Winter, who as a student reported the cat’s killing to authorities after it happened, recently told The Guardian.
Hamlin was appointed the NRA’s chief executive officer and executive vice president in May after previously serving as executive director of the gun rights group’s publishing arm.
He was appointed after the NRA’s longtime leader, Wayne LaPierre, was banned from holding a paid position with the organization after he was found guilty of misspending millions of dollars of donors’ money on lavish trips and other personal expenses.
Read the full article here
