A left-wing group is planning a protest at NRA’s Federal Affairs office in Washington DC. This is where they will start to lay this tragedy at our feet and make us own it. This is where we have to stand, if you’re capable of getting there. I would encourage everyone, if you’re in the DC area, to show up and counter-protest. Take signs that show the real problem is our mental health system, rather than guns. Take signs that support the Bill of Rights. The politicians will be paying attention to who shows up. Be peaceful, be civil, but be firm. If you forgive my nerdiness here:
Category: Gun Rights Organizations
Chicago Really Helping NRA
The latest check. I’d be OK with sending Rahm a hat, and considering the magnitude of the donations, I think a letter from Chris Cox would be nice too. I’m sure that can be arranged for high donors like Rahm.
Another View on Chicago Senator Trotter’s Gun Oops
I meant to get this up yesterday, but my workstation died, and John Richardson beat me to it. We had reported a bit tongue-in-cheek about State Senator Donne Trotter getting caught with a pistol at an airport checkpoint a few days ago, and noted he was a C-, which for Chicago is to say he’s not a raving gun hater. CCRKBA jumped immediately though, which in light of this from NRA’s lobbyist in IL, may have been ill advised. A lot of people on our side are very black and white in how they approach political actors: either they are with us or against us. In the actual mechanics of passing bills, it’s never that clear, and a vote for your immediate legislative priority is a vote whether it comes from an A rated politician or a C- rated politician. Politics can sometimes make for strange bed fellows.
NRA to Brady: “Losers say what?”
NRA has an article rebutting Dan Gross’s assertion that NRA is now weak and ineffective:
Gross also failed to mention how his own organization scored in the 2012 elections. The reason for that is simple: the Brady Campaign was not included in the study because it just isn’t a player.  It raised and spent so little money that it wasn’t worth measuring. However, if you apply the same standards to Brady as the Sunlight Foundation used, the Brady score would be 0.00. It did not spend money backing one winning candidate in the 2012 election.
In order to spend money to back any candidate, one must have money to back a candidate with. The Brady folks have been short of that for some time, and have not raised serious money for electioneering in many years. Bloomberg is the big threat now. Gun control is exclusively an issue for a handful of billionare moguls.
Why Does This Say Anything?
The Mayors Against Illegal Guns survey of voters in Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado indicated 45 percent of voters trusted Obama on gun issues, while 40 percent trusted Romney, results released Thursday indicated.
Really? This is supposed to mean something? Do you have any idea how many staunch supporters of gun rights did not trust Romney on guns? I had more than a few people on here arguing with me that Obama was objectively better, because he at least signed two bills that contained two improvements to gun laws.
Obama won re-election by largely ignoring the gun issue. If NRA’s power really is waning, it’s because the gun voters are getting complacent and going back to sleep. Bloomberg’s theory is that the gun vote doesn’t really exist. If Bloomberg wants to team up with Obama, and wake the gun voter back up, I’m game.
Speaking of NRA in Hawaii …
… a quite balanced account of David Keene’s visit:
Keene said most people associate the NRA with its high-profile lobbying and political activity. In fact, he said, only about 12 percent of its budget goes toward those activities.
The bulk of the NRA’s work involves instructing youth how to use guns safely and responsibly.
A statistic that I’m sure astounds a good many people, including our opponents, who revel in myths about the NRA and its members.
Shocker: GOA Opposes Dem Sponsored Bill
Gun Owners of America comes out against the Democratic sponsored S.3525, the Sportsman’s Act. Among the items the Sportsman’s Act will do is remove lead ammunition and fishing tackle from the purview of the EPA. From NRA:
In addition to promoting land access, the bill would amend the “Toxic Substances Control Act” to prevent this and future administrations from using the Environmental Protection Agency to eliminate the right of hunters, shooters and anglers to use traditional ammunition and fishing tackle. The bill would amend the law to clarify that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate shot, bullets or sport fishing equipment.
Given the threat the lead issue poses to shooting, I’m finding it hard to accept GOA’s flimsy pretense for opposing the bill, namely that is empowers the government to seize private lands. I have read the provisions of GOA claims to have issue with, and my view is the bill makes no such authorization. GOA even fully admits that the bill explicitly prohibits federal funds being used to seize property without permission of owners, but then go on to say:
So while this section is put forward as a “protection,†it actually doesn’t provide total immunity because the government can take a land owner’s property using non-federal funds — and there is no protection in the bill against that.
The federal government can’t take anyone’s land using “non-federal funds.” Money spent by the federal government is by definition a federal fund. They could have a bake sale to raise money, and it would still be a federal fund if the federal government is ultimately cutting a check from the treasury to fund it. More importantly, because this is a federal program, no funds provided to states could be used to seize property either.
You know what I think GOA’s objection to this bill is? It’s primary sponsor is John Tester (D-MT), who is a Democrat. I think GOA would rather us continuing to rely on the benevolence of the EPA on lead ammunition and tackle, rather than offering the Democrats a legislative victory in the Senate.
NRA Prez Visits the Aloha State
NRA President speaks in Hilo, Hawaii. I’m sure they had to drag him kicking and screaming to get him to go there. Bitter has spent a lot of time in Hawaii, and I spent two weeks out there with her visiting family. It’s gun culture is closer to Maryland than it is to California, and the Big Island can get pretty redneck. Even on the North Shore of Oahu you’ll find trucks with NRA stickers. It’s one of those states that’s challenging, but perhaps not beyond hope. One of our NRA friend’s family has a coffee estate in Kona, so if you want to buy some gunny Kona coffee, that’s a good source.
ROI For NRA Spending
I’ve seen a lot of analysis like this that NRA basically blew a wad of cash for nearly nothing. If you look at our overall results in Pennsylvania, things don’t look that bad. But the fact is that in a lot of key races, NRA got beaten badly.
NRA is certainly not alone. A good many groups on the right also sunk huge, often times much much larger sums of dollars into this election with even less to show for it. That will hopefully blunt the damage to NRA’s reputation, but this is going to hurt, for certain. What is the root problem here? I would boil it down to a few factors.
- For the past two elections, NRA has had a choice between Barack Obama and a candidate that could be charitably described as a compromise. John McCain was well understood to have gone all “maverick” on NRA at various points in his political career, and while Mitt Romney’s actual record on the issue wasn’t nearly as bad as his rhetoric, that signing statement was bound to dog him. NRA has never been in a position to endorse a candidate for President who was actually strong on our issue, and everyone knows it. NRA did much better in down ticket races where this was not a factor.
- No grassroots interest group can hope to do more than swing elections at the margins. When you don’t have a close election, it’s hard to claim interest groups were relevant. NRA suffered extensive losses in their U.S. Senate endorsements. Two candidates probably deserve the blame there, namely Mourdock in Indiana, and Akin in Missouri. Their ridiculous jabbering about rape poisoned the well of GOP Senate prospects, and took most of those races down below the NRA’s margin. That’s not something that could have been helped, because it was a messaging problem created by two bad candidates.
- The center-right groups are not reaching younger voters, largely because their use of technology is backwards. NRA actually does a better job in this area than most of the other groups that flushed millions of dollars down the toilet this election, but that’s not saying NRA’s efforts are particularly good. I believe a big component of Obama’s two victories have been his effective use of technology to reach and motivate younger voters, who are not reachable by TV, print or direct mail. We’re finally starting to see the technology revolution come to politics, and it’s OFA who is leading.
- The GOP didn’t run on gun rights at all this election cycle. Even Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal got nary a mention. Most pundits believed everyone wanted to hear about the economy, and that if the Democrats made this a culture war election, they would lose. Well, how did that work out? The Democrats pounded the GOP on culture war issues with single women and young people, and won those groups by large margins. Gun rights are actually a culture war issue where there’s no generation gap. Why not attack Obama on the issue?
The bigger question is what to do about it? It should be possible to motivate young people on gun rights. If there’s one thing that’s true about Millennials, is that they are extremely socially liberal. If guns are your “thing” — how you like to spend your Saturdays — most Millennials are fine with that. It’s your thing. Millennials don’t make strong value judgements on other people’s choices, and that is required to be a strong gun control advocate. The way to market gun rights to Millennials is to make them understand it as a lifestyle choice, and an issue of personal freedom. If you can do that, you’ll sell it to them. To that extent, I actually think blogs that heavily feature the shooting life are more useful for reaching that generation than political gun blogs like mine.
I think everyone on the right needs to understand the OFA machine. This is something I’m very curious about, but I don’t have time right now to try to dig to understand more of how it works. But every center-right group, including NRA, needs to start thinking more seriously about reaching younger voters, and using technology as a force multiplier in GOTV efforts. This means investing a lot more in technology spending, and bringing people on board who deeply understand how young people consume and share information. The days of raising money, awareness, membership and action, by sending oodles of direct mail or making phone calls, if not dead, is nearly so. If NRA and other groups keep messaging to the old, they will die with the old.
Still Irrelevant
I’ve been busy the past few days and I haven’t checked my Google Alerts for a bit. I noticed this:
Well, well, look who the media’s been talking about in post-election week. more than 3x the number of outlets talking about a gun rights organization as opposed to a gun control organization. Even if the media thinks we took a shellacking in the recent election, they certainly aren’t crediting the win to the irrelevant gun control groups.