What do you do if you’re Mike Bloomberg and Everytown, and have a boatload of money but not really any substantial grassroots? Well, you buy phone calls to Congress:
The majority of the money paid for the call goes to a gun safety movement called Everytown. Sometimes, organizations benefitting from a campaign (like Everytown) make the calls themselves, but individuals can also sign up to become paid callers for campaigns, garnering a base rate of $1 per call.
Unfortunately this is working. NRA is currently noting Congress is only hearing from their side. I think there’s a tendency among gun owners to think if we got through Sandy Hook, this latest wave of mass shootings shouldn’t be a concern. But that is unfortunately not how this works. The other side has been fired up, in my opinion through a combination of the latest mass shootings and the nonsense going on in Texas. They money being dumped into the issue is all helping as well.
A lot of gun owners have no idea how tenuous this stuff can be. The gun control crowd made a lot of mistakes after Sandy Hook. They’ve learned. They are going to be less ambitious, less bombastic, and will build support slowly going forward. They will keep at this until they get what they want. A Republican Congress is not a guarantee nothing gets passed. They will turn on us in a heartbeat if they think they’ll get away with it. We have to call.
See www.nraila.org/writeyourreps or call 202-225-3121. We benefitted greatly in the past decade by there being no money in the gun control movement. Bloomberg can single handedly dump more money into the issue than all of us combined. We have to pay mortgages and feed families. The only thing we have he can’t compete with is our collective voices, but we have to exercise it to make a difference.
What specific bills are moving? What is the message to send?
I searched for firearm at http://beta.congress.gov/ and I see some boilerplate (extending the undetectable firearms act of ’88), some actual good bills (changes to firearms commerce rules, amnesty for NFA items brought back by military, etc), some vaguely firearms related bullcrap (addtl 4473 restrictions, restrictions of firearms if you have a restraining order filed) and a pair of subtle but risky bills (CDC funding and CPSC scope for firearms).
Is there specific action to demand or just a general pro-2A message?
H.R. 4783 is a concern. The House version of Manchin-Toomey is still alive as well, I believe.
Robocalls to congress critters? really? If any of these people get paid to vote, now that would be an interesting and illegal inside story.
Not a robocall. They are using real people. The problem is that the person who they are hearing from is calling on behalf of someone, and doing it for money.
I am a tad skeptical this will really work. To work, the calls need to represent voters that will show up.
Gun clubs in Maryland called, sent, and wrote over a million emails, faxes, phone calls to Annapolis opposing the gun laws last year, did not make a bit of difference. Politicians have a keen eye who will actually show up at the polls.
I am curious what they actually say. Do they say, “calling on behalf of ___” Give personal info? Reference particular bills? Staff collects all that and even checks against voter/district voter registration. If they give enough info to ID you as a registered voter, wont matter that you have called/emailed 5 times. If they don’t give enough info, staff often weeds these out. They know that x% of the calls that came in were from real voters in the politician’s district (that’s their job!).
As I said, Marylander’s did this last year… it made people sit up and notice for sure, but there were few concessions, because the feeling was the calls would not translate into votes. What I tend to think is that the people most likely to buy these already live in blue districts anyway.
Someone from SF paying to have the Rep from CO called won’t do much. If it did, Chickenpooper would not be attempting the mea culpa campaign tour.
When I was calling folks re:various PA gun control bills, some of the people answering the phones asked for an address (so they could hit me up for campaign cash probably) and some just asked what town I lived in to verify that I was represented by that politician. I suspect caller ID may have played a part in that, but I don’t know for sure.
I also don’t know if US congressional/senate offices do the same (all my US reps/senators are anti-gun weasels, like Pat Toomey(R)) or if these paid shills already have a solution for address/town type questions. “Sure, I live in .. let me look that up .. yes, here it is .. al-buh-kwayer-kway, NM.”
Maryland is like NJ, BLUE….and like NJ, MD government views gun ownership/rights as a right wing issue…so they do what they want cause they know gun owners aren’t gonna vote Blue…and blue voting gun owners, they follow party orders.
Well, the phone book probably has enough information to satisfy most of these callers. I suspect that pick a place in the phone book and use every name, address and number. Just another “identity thief” scam.
Congressmen aren’t total idiots. Once it becomes widely known, if it isn’t already, that paid callers are the ones contacting them on gun control any momentum the issue gained will immediately be lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg
Yup.
Congressmen care about calls, because traditionally calls represent voters, and probably lots of them; for every one who bothers to call, many more are annoyed about the issue but hate calling or don’t bother … but will vote against you.
Paid calls?
Only works for a while; once they realize anti-gun calls are astroturf that doesn’t map to votes, but remember pro-gun calls represent very engaged and active voters, it becomes money thrown away to no effect.
And that last part I can get behind.
Funny. I was thinking how we could lose a lot of our Gains because we, the Pro-RKBA Citizens could be outspent by the Antis. But in a different way. So the Antis make the calls on Bloomberg’s Dime. The Pols then pass Laws that won’t pass Constitutional Muster, but then become the Law. We have to dig into our own Pockets to take them to Court, while the Gooberment (Local, State, Fed, whatever) fights us with Tax Payer Money. Couple that with having to go to Courts which are packed with Judges who got their Jobs from the same Anti-Gun Politicians, and think like them, and we have to spend MORE money to try and regain what was stolen from us.
Don’t think it’s happening? Just look at what Cleveland, Ohio Mayor Frank Jackson has proposed to the Cleveland City Council for NEW Guns Laws. Heck, some of what he whats has ALREADY been declared Unconstitutional, yet he wants to make them the Law of Cleveland. So we have to dig into our own pockets to stop him.
We need a Pro-Gun Bloomberg-type to step up.
“If we got through Sandy Hook …”
So, say one was to sign up as one of the paid callers, then call as a pro instead of an anti. Would bloominidiot’s stooges know the difference?
Hmmmmmm
Awful lot of work for a measly $1. If they found out Bloomberg et. al. would then have an easy shot to accuse the NRA of interfering with their operations.
I have called my congress critters. Of course McCain has and will vote for any type of ‘universal background check’ (registration) no matter what anyone says.