Because he was a gun enthusiast who avidly enjoyed shooting semiauto rifles, and personally owned an AR-15, an M1 carbine, and a Garand. And rifle homicide was probably higher back then than it is now, since it has been at historic lows in recent years.
Was Eleanor Roosevelt a Democrat, with her concealed-carry license and her views on armed self-defense?
I'd also point out that prior to the first Clinton administration, when the Third Way types decided to go hard on gun control as a way to appeal to right-leaning law-'n-order types (thereby shooting the party in the foot in 1994), support for gun control was an urban/rural thing, *not* a liberal-vs.-conservative thing. Most gun control prior to that time had been instituted by conservatives seeking to centralize power in the hands of elites, and keep guns out of the hands of people with the wrong color skin or the wrong ethnicity. That's true of the Mulford Act in California (signed by none other than Ronald Reagan), NY's Sullivan Law (aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of immigrants), and the Jim Crow gun control in the South, vestiges of which still stand today (like NC's law allowing sheriffs to deny handgun ownership on the basis of subjective "moral character", which was originally code for "has the wrong color skin"
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The modern gun-control lobby is primarily funded by a single Wall Street billionaire who believes in stopping and frisking brown people without warrant, among other illiberal police-state positions he advocates.
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