According to someone who attended, their booth was not barren at this year’s SHOT. It’s unclear how much we have actually hurt H-S Precision. I am going to hold out hope they’ve seen a significant drop in business, regardless of their booth traffic at SHOT. But this does offer a lesson in overextending political capital.
It seems we had some effect on Cooper Firearms, but it’s not entirely clear that wasn’t related to pre-existing business trouble. H-S Precision made the gamble that our bark was worse than our bite, and if they do not suffer a significant reduction in business as the result of our refusal to buy their products, we will have a significantly reduced likelihood of twisting anyone’s arm and making them cry “Uncle!” in the future. This is exactly how it works on Capitol Hill too.
I would also add that being good at politics isn’t just about using your own power (in this case, reducing demand for their products), but also matching your own power with other factors (the Cooper situation, the threat of even slightly reduced demand with their other problems may have been the final straw). Sometimes that’s good strategy, sometimes it’s just luck. (I would argue Cooper is luck since it was based completely on the media cycle.)
Even if it was luck, perception matters more than reality. Just like when a politician loses his seat, every group that opposed him will line up to take credit for it. The trick is creating the perception that you were responsible. There was that perception with NRA in the 1994 elections, and perhaps the biggest favor Bill Clinton ever did for the NRA was crediting them, but Clinton also created a perfect storm against himself by pissing off a lot of other conservative interests too. I have little doubt that the gun vote played a big part in 1994, but wonder whether we could have done it alone? No doubt some seats would have been axed by the gun vote alone, but could, say, Marjorie Margolies-Mesvinsky, or Harris Wofford, both of whom lost their seats in ’94, be claimed to have been defeated by the gun vote? I would say yes on Wofford, but Mesvinsky probably not.
Bill Clinton rhetorically, was a great politician, but he was a poor political strategist. My worry is Barack Obama is the best traits of Bill Clinton combined with a smart political mind. That’s either going to lead him to stay away from us, or come after us in difficult ways. Which way that’s going to go remains to be seen, but I suppose we start finding out tomorrow.
Sebastian, I’m a little late to the party as I missed the original controversy over HS’s endorsement. That’s bizarre. I almost wonder if they wanted the controversy to get their name in the gun news??
What next, the Charles Whitman model?