Category: Gun Rights Organizations

Caleb has been alerting the community about someone running for NRA Board who aims to make the organization more reasonable, as in to support gun control. This is not really much of a concern, because the Board is carefully engineered to avoid any uppity faction from being able to place members on the Board. There are often times when I think the Board’s size and structure is a bug, but in this case it’s a feature.

Brandon Webb has two paths to a board seat. He can be nominated by the nominating committee, which is about as likely as the snowstorm overhead right now heading down to Miami and covering Miguel rather than me. The other option is to be nominated by petition, which if I recall requires the signatures of 250 voting NRA members, which is lifers or people with 5 unbroken consecutive years of annual membership. That’s not an impossible mountain to climb, but that’s just to get on the ballot.

I can recall only one petition candidate successfully winning since I’ve been following this stuff, and that’s Maria Heil, and she managed to win only through very dogged campaigning on a personal level. In short, I don’t think Webb stands a chance of even getting on the ballot, let alone actually winning. But it’s worth it to point out that there’s a subversive with interest in running, so I would check out Caleb’s post.

One last thing is that this idea has been floated before, but never gone anywhere. Webb is just the first person to think of it who isn’t absolutely on the other side.

This is interesting. According to an AP interview with NSSF’s CEO, they considered moving their Newtown headquarters where they have been for 20 years in response to the shooting there.

The article says that even though they didn’t get political until the gun control proposals that would hurt the industry were brought up, their employees who were also impacted by the shooting were still bothered by neighbors who complained about their presence.

This is a very interesting article for people who like politics, essentially describing one viewpoint on how Colorado was lost. I don’t know enough about Colorado politics to have any insightful commentary, but the state, like many other western states, strikes me as having a pretty strong libertarian streak, much of which I’d imagine is incompatible with Brown’s very strong social conservatism. There’s a strong current in the GOP base, and especially in the Tea Party, that if we just run candidates that are conservative enough, we’ll never lose. I’ve never believed that to be true, and Colorado is evidence. You can run candidates that alienate other parts of your coalition, and hand the election to your opponents. That if we just run someone conservative enough is a myth peddled by talk radio hosts that making their livings telling people what they want to hear. The reality is getting to enough votes to win an election is not so simple.

Brown may be correct that the Democrats in Colorado have really stepped in it with the gun issue. I hope he’s correct in that. But for gun rights to be secure in Colorado, or anywhere, over the long term, you have to have a workable governing majority, and sometimes that involves making compromises. That would seem to be something Brown has trouble with.

It looks as if NAGR were robocalling gun owners with the wrong information, and were actually telling people to ask Governor Sandoval to sign the private transfer ban that’s currently sitting on his desk. It would seem they’ve since corrected it, but it’s amateurish mistakes like this which make me not take NAGR or Dudley Brown seriously at all. This article, from someone in Colorado, was a little to “rah-rah my team” for my taste, but it has some interesting bits:

Apparently, Mr. Brown has been (for many years) using third-party “front groups” that claim to represent hot-button social issues (like abortion and gay marriage), but in reality, are little  more than direct mail operations designed to “punish” Mr. Brown’s opponents. When voters receive these last-minute attack mailers they get the impression that the candidate in question (whichever candidate Mr. Brown opposes at the time) are also opposed by a “wide spectrum” of other conservative groups. The mailers are often completely false, as with my own legislative race, where Dudley’s Beltway minions sent pieces that claimed that I was pro-gay rights and “soft” on Pro-Life issues. Anyone that knows me, knows these claims are laughable. But by then, the damage has been done.

And just recently, a reader in Virginia who knows my disdain for Brown an NAGR sent me an e-mail from a Virginia State Delegate (no link, sorry) which was sent to supporters:

You see, [NAGR] would rather line their pockets, posing as a legitimate gun organization, and attack pro-gun legislators instead of going after the liberal Democrats who boast of taking our guns.  Simply put, it is a “get-rich-quick” scheme at the expense of gun owners and their rights.

I am their latest target. My primary election is this coming Tuesday, and NAGR is engaging inone false attack after another against me.

I am known in Richmond and throughout Virginia as one of our legislature’s staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment. I have an “A+” career rating from the NRA and am endorsed in my current primary election by not only the National Rifle Association and the Virginia Shooting Sports Association, but by legitimate “no compromise” groups like the Virginia Citizens Defense League PAC and Gun Owners of America. These folks have seen my good work protecting your rights, and they know the real deal when they see it.

GOA is fighting against the immigration bill, arguing that all those foreigners will vote to take away our guns. Maybe that’s so, but maybe it’s not so. Italians were big Democratic voters when they first came here too, but GOP politics around here is now full of people of Italian heritage.

I think GOA is attempting to shoe-horn gun rights into other right issues, and I think that is a mistake. It only serves to make the tent smaller. Approximately 35% of Democrats own firearms, and I don’t believe those votes ought to be written off or marginalized. That would pretty much assure that our fortunes rise and fall with the GOP, and given that all political party fortunes rise and fall, that’s not a recipe for long term protection of the right they claim to preserve.

Forbes outlines the five reasons the NRA won the recent gun control debate. I think it’s excellent, and well worth reading:

I’m going to share with you 5 reasons why the NRA won, and they have nothing to do with the often reported reasons like their PAC funds, their ability to turn out pro-gun voters in every legislative district, and the abundance of their skilled in-house and external lobbyists, although those are all true.

They simply execute the basics extremely well. As NRA volunteer Robert in Arizona told his fellow members about the basics, “Thanks for emailing your U.S. Senator, but you have to also write a letter or send a hand written postcard. No one ever tripped on a bag of email.” The good news is the tactics the NRA employed that no one is talking about are things that you can implement in your next persuasion battle. In addition, there were some mistakes made by gun control advocates that unwittingly aided the NRA.

I think she mostly gets it right, and it’s definitely one of the most serious looks at the dynamics of the pro-gun side of the issue I’ve seen from the traditional media in this late struggle.

One thing I think Ms. Showalter might discount a bit in her piece is that quite a bit of the grassroots power in gun rights comes through spontaneous and informal organizing, which makes me wonder whether she’s ever read Brian Anse Patrick’s The Rise of the Anti-Media. Patrick argues our success largely driven by the fact that we’ve constructed our own “horizontal interpretive communities.” I think that ought to be required reading for anyone trying to understand this issue.

One of the biggest mistakes the anti-gun crowd makes is to fail to understand their enemy. NRA is a manifestation of the gun rights movement, the gun rights movement was not created by the NRA. If the anti-gun folks could wish NRA out of existence tomorrow, we would quite quickly create an alternative. I believe the role the NRA plays, and has played in the gun rights movement has been supremely important, even if they haven’t always gotten everything right all the time.

I found this article a bit amusing, because I usually tend to think NRA as a whole, by which I mean to include its members and not merely leadership, is firing on maybe 5 out of 8 cylinders on a good day, though since Obama has started this latest push, I’d say we’ve been maybe 6 out of 8 in terms of our game. There’s still room for improvement. But many of our opponents really can’t grasp the depth of this issue; they think the NRA is the tip of the spear, when it many ways, it’s really the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes I wonder if the reason they think of gun rights as a spear, rather than an iceberg, is that in their more honest moments, they might wonder whether they are passengers on a political Titanic.