“The thing that really addresses gun violence is the thing that Brady was set up to do, and that is federal legislation,†said Michael Wolkowitz, a New York filmmaker who was on Brady’s board of directors for 10 years until he left last July. “Brady’s people knew policy like no one else.â€
Yet so many years of congressional inaction led to a decline in the group’s ability to raise money, Wolkowitz said, which is why the board wanted a new, less policy-focused mission. “It’s borderline Kafka,†he said.
And now you realize what I mean when I said that offering victory, any victory, to our opponents screws us politically. It is part of why we can’t have any rational conversation on this issue, because even to give a little would enable our opponents to regroup, come back, and take more, and there can be no doubt what many want, at this point, because it’s confiscation. There is no possibility that anyone can credibly argue now that this is not the case.
Read the whole article, it goes into more detail about the Brady decline:
Brady’s 2011 tax documents show it raised $5.8 million, about half its haul a decade earlier. The staff on I Street had dwindled to 30 — though Wolkowitz estimates the roster is now in the teens. Debra DeShong Reed, a spokeswoman for Brady, declined to say how many people work there.
Of course, that also cuts both ways. Gun owners have been in a long slumber that Obama is waking our people out of, though NRA has always had a broader based of members from which to raise funds than the Brady folks could ever dream of.
Grassroots activists are also on the move again; there’s a new “million moms.†Yet this one has nothing to do with the 2000 march or Brady. Twenty-four hours after the shooting, Shannon Watts, a mother of five in Indianapolis, put up a Facebook page called One Million Moms for Gun Control, which has collected more than 25,000 “likes.â€
I’m impressed. The above final statement turns out to be a blatant lie, Facebook reports that for December, starting on the 21st, they got 16,099 likes. They’re only up to 32K now.
They don’t have me shaking in my boots.
The ‘new’ million moms, have joined up with the relic’s who ran MADD back in the 80s….these ‘new’ moms are planning on using MADD’s tactics to get stuff done.
The Giffords look more dangerous, from the not quite triviality of having 37K Facebook likes (only up 6K since the 11th or so) to their being a Super PAC according to Open Secrets instead of a plain PAC like I’d wished.
They have ambitions; it remains to be seen if they can translate them into actions.
Gifford’s PAC got $1 million dollars in seed money from a 1%-er.
If every NRA member gave just $1 to the ILA (and a matching $1 to SAF) that’d be dwarfed -and- reportable as actual “99%” money.
An angle of attack NRA needs to look at for social media is playing the “bankster/elitist/1%-er” card as often as possible. Name names. Show all the rich white guys and gals and their foundations.
The anti’s can (and will) come back with the Koch Brothers, and ALEC, and such, but that’s more or less it. Gun manufacturer’s are small potatoes, mostly small businesses and mom-and-pop’s.
We need to point up the economic disparity between the two sides in terms of who supports rights for “the little guy.”
I seem to remember that the Koch brothers were anti-gun, but couldn’t find support for that when I recently tried to confirm it.
We’d need to carefully calibrate such an argument, but it is significant that “the %1” is almost entirely liberal; Clayton Cramer has been noting this for a while.
One of the Koch brothers is a big gun collector. Another ran on the Libertarian Party ticket. I don’t think there’s any serious evidence that the Koch brothers are actually anti-gun. I don’t think it’s been a big priority on their radar, but not considering it one’s top issue isn’t the same as being anti-gun.