I attended the monthly meeting for the gun club tonight, and now am working on the fallout from HR2640.  The NRA is doing it’s usual bang up job of communicating exactly nothing to it’s clubs and members in regards to the nature of the deal, and as such, our Legislative chairman is getting all of his news from GOA and the Brady’s, which as I’ve detailed here, has been quite misleading.
Our club is a 100% NRA club, which means you need to be a member of the NRA to join, and continue your membership with the NRA to continue your membership with the club. Our club has about 1100 members, which amounts to quite a lot of money if NRA were to lose a club of that size.  Granted, it would be their own fault, because they, one, cut a deal with the devil which was bound to be controversial no matter how many positive things we got in return, and two, haven’t been working hard to make sure the message gets out there.
I’m going to do what I can do to repair this damage, but the problem is, I don’t know anybody who can help.  Bitter might, and I’m pursuing some of those channels, but this could be a hard thing to fix, and I very well might be on my own here. As a new member of the club, who doesn’t really know anyone, I’m not entirely comfortable at starting a huge political fight within the club over the 100% NRA program.
I think the Brady Campaign may have outsmarted us on this one. If the cost of this deal is a divided pro-gun community, and a weakened NRA, it will have amounted to a giant victory for the gun control movement.  Whether people like them or not, the NRA is the 800lb gorilla on the gun issue in Washington, and the politicians don’t know much about the other pro-gun organizations, and don’t much care. Much of the gun control movement may be on the ropes, but we will be too if we end up divided, and have a weak NRA representing us in Washington. That’s the political reality.
It may be an 800 lb gorilla, but if it isn’t on our side it isn’t necessarily beneficial to us to keep feeding it.
I have started to have suspicions that the NRA is the Stealth arm of the ACLU and the Brady campaign. I believe they have decided it is to their benefit to keep the problem than to solve it.
If you can logically explain recent years’ actions in another light I will entertain them. But I don’t think I’ll be easy to talk out of the evidence I have seen with my own eyes, the evidence that caused me to terminate my membership with them.
Which actions in particular? We’ve been winning, consistently, since 1994. To the extent that we haven’t gotten rid of more gun control, it’s because politicians lack the will to do so. If the NRA had 14 million members instead of 3.6 million members, the politicians would suddenly find a lot more motivation to give up more.
Most of what the NRA has done can be explained by political realities. Sure, there are genuine fuckups, but any group that’s actually doing anything is going to have fuckups in politics. HR2640 may, in the big picture, end up being a fuckup, if they lose too much membership for it.
It’s easy for the other groups to fling poop at the NRA for doing this or that wrong, because flinging poop is easy when you’re largely watching the game from the sidelines. When the politicians, media, and anti-gun groups start talking about the massive power of GOA or JPFO, I might be more inclined to ditch NRA and support them. Until then, the NRA is the only group people in Washington, and the various state legislatures listen to or care about.
The main reason people seem to hate NRA, is that the politicians don’t care about them enough, and force them into compromises, which is entirely a function of the size of their membership. It’s a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle. From my point of view, it’s frustrating, because on the one hand there are gun owners who hate NRA because they haven’t done enough to repeal more gun laws, and there are gun owners on the other side who hate NRA because they are too extreme.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fine to support other groups. I do myself, when the spirit moves me, but the NRA is who make things happen, so I intend to keep my membership, and encourage everyone else to do so as well.
NRA basically sabotaged HB89 in Georgia last year. Read about it at georgiapacking.org.
What exactly happened? I was under the impression that the Georgia Chamber of Commerce are basically who scuttled that bill.
There is too much misinformation circulating out there on H.R. 2640. If you read objective analysis of the legislation by constitutional scholar like Steve Halbrook and Clayton Cramer, you learn that the bill doesn’t add any new individuals to the list of prohibited persons and provides remedies for those who should not be on a prohibited list.
All in the pro-Second Amendment community should support ensuring that those adjudicated by a judge or court as mentally incompetent don’t gain access to guns.
Of course, there is also concern that Rep. McCarthy is walking point on the bill., but there were also notorious anti-gunners leading the charge on efforts to allow commercial airline pilots from carrying handguns in the cockpits. Yet there was no hue and cry that this was some grand anti-gun conspiracy.
Rather than trying to make a point (misguided as many of these points are) H.R. 2640 tries to actually make a difference in improving the lots of lawful gun owners while denying guns to those who’ve been adjudicated as mentally incompetent.
Let’s stick with the facts and the merits of the bill.
Sebastian – There were several bills on the table, HB89 (car carry) and SB43 (parking lots). NRA came in and chose one to support – 43. SB43 was very controversial, HB89 had a good chance. I believe the NRA basically pressured 89 to be morhed to include 43 language. In the end it all failed and we got nothing. Strong arm tactics didn’t work out so well. Read the posts for pages 7 through 9 at the link.
http://www.georgiapacking.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2201&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=hb89+nra&start=120
Hiya, Sebastian.
I agree with you that H.R. 2640 should not divide the gun-rights community. My opposition to the bill in no way is meant to suggest that people should leave the NRA. The nature of the political beast is that sometimes you must cut a deal. I just didn’t think this was the bill to support, but that’s the way it goes…we all have our reasons for the positions we took.
In today’s world it is of vital necessity that the gun-rights community stay united. We may have our disagreements along the way, but in the end we MUST stick together. There are too many out there who are out to rid the country of our rights.
Yeah, that was a boneheaded thing to support. I will never claim the NRA is perfect, and never makes mistakes. It does.
I have an idea of how this probably happened. Marion Hammer has been very big on pushing the parking lots bill in the southeast. This is one area I disagree with her on. I don’t think this should be a legislative priority for the NRA.
I don’t mean to bash Ms. Hamer; she is the reason we have 38 states that are right-to-carry, because she got it done in Florida first. Florida was the first, and the rest followed. Mistakes can be made. My assertion is not that the NRA never makes mistakes, or that it never screws state organizations who understand the politics better, it’s that they are the only game in town that’s really effective, and the best way to deal with their mistakes is change from within, not taking our toys and going to another sandbox.
If people were interested in winning, they’d ignore anything GOA had to say. As I’ve stated in the past, they make Brady look like a figure of credibility.
I often times think GOA only exists to set gun rights further back. They rarely prove me wrong.
Chappy you say “the bill doesn’t add any new individuals to the list of prohibited persons and provides remedies for those who should not be on a prohibited list.”
If you read the bill you will find in section 101(c)(1)(C)
(c) Standard for Adjudications, Commitments, and Determinations .
Related to Mental Health-
(1) IN GENERAL- No department or agency of the Federal Government may provide to the Attorney General any record of an adjudication or determination related to the mental health of a person, or any commitment of a person to a mental institution if– …
(C) the adjudication, determination, or commitment, respectively, is based solely on a medical finding of disability, without a finding that the person is a danger to himself or to others or that the person lacks the mental capacity to manage his own affairs.
and from 27 CFR 478.11 (definitions)
“Adjudicated as a mental defective. (a) A determination by a court, board, commission, or other *lawful* *authority* that a person, as a result of marked sub-normal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease: (1) Is a danger to himself or to others;”
Okay, so by my reading a “lawful authority” (say Janet Reno’s DOJ) determines that depression is the #1 cause of suicide in the country, and that according to the CDC’s WISQARS site, firearms are the number one suicide instrument.
Therefore, as determined by the Lawful Authority of the DOJ, anyone who has ever had a prescription for anti-depressant medication is found by Lawful Authority to be a danger to him/herself, therefore all states now have to report to NICS anyone who has ever been on anti-depressants.
And since the states are *not* required to inform the individual that they are now under a firearms disability they won’t find that out until they try to buy another gun and get turned down. Of course at that point it is too late, because they have already lied on their 4473, so in addition to being mentally ill they are also now a felon. Assuming, of course, they survive the SWAT raid on their home to get their “arsenal” and “huge cache of ammunition”. Oops, there’s a couple hundred more felonies for you (one “prohibited person” in possession of a round of ammo for *each* *round*).
Don’t worry, though. I’m sure the DA (he isn’t up for re-election or running for governor is he?) will be ‘lenient’ and offer you a plea bargain of a single felony and you’ll get off with time served (oh, did I forget to mention that you have been in prison in lieu of $15 million bail for the last 10 months while they filed motions and addenda?).
So there you are a free man again. With a felony conviction, no home, no car, no assets, no job, and (if you’ve been in general population) an urgent need for a plastic surgeon to give you an anal retread.