Category: Anti-Gun Folks

From the Brady Campaign on Twitter. Oh no! People with guns! Big guns! Let me ask this though, why is the Brady Campaign covering this march instead of the main one? Should we be thankful there’s probably as many reporters there as there are protesters? Think of all the public education that’s going on with all those slung rifles!

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest none of the major news coverage of the sideshow march in Virginia is going to be positive, but it will distract greatly from the main rally in Washington. Why? Because it helps advance a narrative. I’ve never understood why people on our side are so willing to play into the hands of the people who want to destroy us.

According to Josh Sugarmann’s latest “study,” NRA is full of the next up and coming terrorists. What is their evidence?

• Someone who volunteers for NRA once posted photos of a tea party protest she did not attend.
• NRA sells shirts that come in XXXL!
• We can’t ignore that NRA is hosting a speaker who has spoken at tea party events.
• NRA allows outside groups using such inflammatory rhetoric as “pro-family and pro-American” to pay for the ability to add inserts to their catalog shipments.

I’m going back and forth between what the saddest part of this report is and how it speaks of the Violence Policy Center’s fall.

First, there’s the fact that I’ve been charged with doing the type of research he’s supposed to be doing for VPC for other organizations. If I had ever turned in something like this, I would have been laughed out of the building. I would fire an unpaid intern for this kind of work. Yet Josh is being paid more than $145,000 a year for it.

Second, there’s the concern that Josh has over whether or not NRA will meet its political goals. In noting that some NRA volunteers have political opinions on topics other than gun rights, Josh seems upset by this may interfere with NRA’s political success.

These links raise questions not only regarding the grassroots role of the NRA’s activists on issues beyond gun control, but also whether the independence of Tea Party activists will conflict with their expected support of the NRA’s preferred candidates.

I’m so happy that Josh wants us to have all of our activists dedicated to winning elections for pro-gun candidates all of the time! We’re really happy to have your support, VPC!

Third, there’s also the issue that Google seems to be failing for poor Josh. See, both of us are volunteers for NRA. And we attended a candidate forum – hosted by self-proclaimed tea party activists. We even attended a tea party event in a park that celebrates the actions of a traitor honored by the so-called pro-America movement. They embraced vulgar language. The participants were clearly future terrorists who are already prepared for war. As a fellow activist suggested, it looks like Josh needs to switch to Bing.

Josh Sugarmann is going way over the top again, trying to argue that NRA’s Gadsden Flag T-shirt is fomenting terrorism, along with standing up for the Constitution. I kid you not. One has to wonder whether Josh Sugarmann thinks that the United States Navy is also fomenting terrorism.

VPC is increasingly becoming an irreverent joke. A sad caricature of a dying movement.

From Jacob up in New York:

White Plains Mayor Adam Bradley is in big trouble over domestic violence allegations against his wife.  Now he’s been rearrested on witness tampering charges after trying to persuade his wife to recant her accusations and say she is mentally ill and lied to police.

Stay classy, Bloomberg Mayors. Stay classy.

One of the MAIG Mayors who stood with Bloomberg against the Thune Amendment for National Concealed Carry has been defeated. Good news. We need more of this, especially here in Pennsylvania.

I decided to look at the VPC finances to see how they were doing. The last time I checked them out was nearly 3 years ago! How could I have let so much time pass without checking in our pals Josh and Kristen? Only this time, I think the only way to fully express their situation is in a graph.

You can actually see Josh drove them in the hole to the tune of more than $40,000 in 2006. I guess that’s when Helmke drew all the gun control donations back to the Brady Campaign. At the end of 2008, the reserves he has built back up are still less than his salary for one year. Between 2002 and 2008, their reserves are down by 86% and revenues are down by 47%. What board of directors allows this to go on? I can’t fathom that any leader of any organization I’ve worked with would be allowed to stay on if they delivered the same kind of performance. Regardless, lead on, Josh! Heckuva job!

Even with this very handy overview of their finances, it doesn’t tell the real story of VPC’s changes over the years. For that, I realize we needed one more data point. So I fixed it.

I’m not done crunching numbers with the Brady Campaign. And I have to give them some credit for remaining consistent in their spending given the tight times they’ve had over the last few years.

I was curious if the organization (or rather, organizations, since I examined both the Center and the Campaign together) would make cuts in any one particular area. Would they figure a way to cut fundraising costs, axe general management expenses, or chop programs? Other than the blip of 2005, they have actually been consistent in the percentage of their expenses that each of those categories eats.

That blip in 2005 showed they cut services to increase fundraising. This is rather interesting if you look back at a graph I already posted that showed their revenues for the same time.

See that bid drop off for 2005? That means that increasing the percentage of their expenses on fundraising didn’t actually stop the plunge in revenue. Regardless of the fact that fundraising surged to more than 25% of their expenses, their revenues dropped by more than 20%. Even though their revenues continued to fall, never by so much as 2005. That tells me they get more for their dollar by investing in programs rather than direct fundraising costs. Some other groups could learn a thing or two about that concept.

Again, by reader request, I reworked the numbers a bit. beatbox made a good point that combining the total donations and expenses of both the Brady Campaign and Brady Center would give us a better picture of the organization’s overall health. I would agree in very broad terms.*

As you can see, 2008 is really the outlier when you look at the combined revenue/expense model. That shouldn’t be shocking because of not only the recession, but the Heller loss early in the year before most donations arrive. There is definitely a downward trend, but their combined “cushions” didn’t really take a major hit until 2008.

*It was still handy to break down the individual data because that tells us if they are heading for a re-alignment and/or shifting their strategy. At some point, they will need to reorganize and probably rename themselves again. Consider that the main event they use to tug at heartstrings happened just two months after I was born – and I’m approaching the age where women start lying about their age. There’s no context or meaning to it anymore for a good number of Americans. With the courts as the new major battleground for the next few decades, it just makes sense for them to shift their limited resources to litigation and related support services. These are the changes we will see in the organization breakdown featured in the first post on the subject.

In the last post, beatbox mentioned the Brady campaign finance data for their PAC arm and how much it has been hurting in recent years. I didn’t include that information in the initial look at the Brady finances because without diving into tons of very convoluted campaign finance reports, it’s a pain in the ass to break out by individual year as opposed to election cycle. And really, a year-by-year breakdown won’t give you any more insight that’s worth looking at. I wanted to keep the data sets in one post the same, or in the case of this post, similar.

Joe Huffman also piped up that he had some older 990s from the Brady camp, though it turns out they are only for the Center. Hugely useful data going back to 1999 (technically 1997, but missing 1998, so I’ll start out in 1999) for the Center, and he deserves a huge kudos for putting that together. But, because the Campaign appears to have been their core source of income until 2008, I don’t want to skew the data by updating only the Center’s numbers in the last post.

So what do the prior two paragraphs mean? Just that here is the data for the Brady PAC donation/expenditures/cash on hand for 1997-2008 (the 1998-2008 cycles) and the Brady Center revenue/expenses/ending assets for 1999-2008. (The ending asset is what I previously described as their cushion or nest egg, essentially savings they can dip into when they spend too much.)

Remember, these are similar time periods, not perfect matches. The PAC cycle includes two years that the Center graph does not.

For those of you keeping score at home, this shows that the “cushion” they could dip into when major legal threats come up has fallen by more than 67% since 1999.