Category: Gun Rights Organizations

Over at Tactical Tupperware:

One of the things that bothers me to no end is that my range had enacted a one shot per second rule as well as magazine restrictions. Both of these bother me because they feel like anti gun thinking. The given reason for the one shot per second rule is not that people were firing faster than they could control but that nearby neighbors would call the sheriffs department and complain that the range was “training murderers”

Same boat I’m in too. The problem is, when you sit on a board at a gun club, all you will see is a parade of people who break rules and generally don’t know the first thing about safe shooting. It’s easy to fall in the trap that your club is infested with unsafe people, and then try to tailor rules around that likely false notion. I too get annoyed when clubs adopt the rules of the anti-gun folks, but the solution is to get more involved with the clubs and do your best to change things.

One of my big fears, in the overall big picture, is that a lot of private clubs are going to have severe membership difficulties as their members die off, and younger people don’t want to join them because they tend to think of shooting more as a product they choose to purchase or not, and don’t really have the disposition, patience, and/or time to work with a shooting club from the civic organization perspective. The risk to the shooting community is that when a club fails, and has to close down, either through a lack of interest in people joining, or a lack of interest in people helping to run the club, it’s lost forever. My club is currently in no danger of this, but other clubs I know of struggle, and there’s no guarantee even my club won’t have problems in the future.

An excellent article appearing in Town Hall by someone who understands the political process:

In view of this monolithic trend towards governmental expansion and commensurate limitation of individual rights, Mr. LaPierre has adopted a strict constructionist viewpoint. He may agree that it isn’t a good idea for people like James Holmes to get his hands on assault weapons, but he knows that whatever restriction is accepted will be just the beginning.

That’s largely what our opponents fail to understand, and what we need to understand. There’s no reason to reach out and work together to find solutions. That’s not how the process works. People who think politics is the art of everyone getting together to solve problems is naive. Politics is the art of living together without killing each other, and as Clausewitz famously said, killing each other is just politics by other means.

My position is absolute. I want less, not more gun control. I’m not going to compromise or work with them on any issue unless the other side gets me in a position where the only choices are bad and worse.

Apparently some members are not too happy NRA is going after Debra Maggart. I’d say that if this isn’t a story cooked up by Maggart’s campaign, I’ll eat my hat. Even if NRA pissed me off enough to cause me to resign my life membership, I wouldn’t feel that was something worth going to the press about.

NRA is supporting a primary challenge against Maggart in the GOP primary.

The NRA is offering half-off life memberships:

In appreciation of your support helping us reach over 1,550,000 likes on facebook, we are offering NRA Life Membership for half off for the next 48 hours! To take advantage of this offer, please visit http://membership.nrahq.org/facebooklife. Be sure to share this post and ask your friends to like the NRA!

Let’s see, 1.55 million likes. Brady has 21,666 likes. CSGV has 6600 likes. VPC has 421 likes. MAIG has 4072 likes. And these people wonder why politicians listen to the NRA and not them? Even on Twitter, after CSGV has begged like half the planet to please follow them, and NRA has several different feeds, CSGV is still has an order of magnitude less followers than NRA News.

Writing in Politico, Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review, writes of NRA as a model organization:

By the standards usually set for our politics, the NRA is a model organization. We say we want people more involved in the process. The NRA’s more than 4 million members are highly engaged. The organization’s recent national conference in St. Louis attracted 73,000 people — one of the largest conventions ever held in the city.

We say there’s too much partisanship. Single-mindedly committed to its cause, the NRA endorsed about 60 House Democrats in 2010.

And we say that we value the Constitution. Gun-control advocates, nonetheless, treat the Second Amendment like an “ink blot” (to borrow Robert Bork’s famous phrase for the Ninth Amendment). They consider it an anachronism, an unfortunate lapse by James Madison, a forlorn leftover from the 18th century.

To be fair, they don’t really claim that it was an unfortunate lapse by James Madison, they suggest that James Madison would have agreed with their position, and that his only concern was the preservation of the militia system, which since has fallen into disuse and disrepair, making any right of the people a complete non-barrier to anything they wish to accomplish, up to and including draconian gun bans. I think it’s important that we on the right get the exact crazy precise, but regardless of that, Mr. Lowry has done an excellent job with this article.

Wayne LaPierre spoke before the United Nations yesterday on the Arms Trade Treaty:

Let me state – in the clearest possible terms – that it is not.  A preamble to a treaty has no force of law.  We know that, and a strong bipartisan majority of the United States Senate and House of Representatives know it as well.

Any Arms Trade Treaty must be adopted by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, which has 100 members.  Already, 58 Senators have objected to any treaty that includes civilian arms, and a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives also opposes such a treaty.

The NRA represents hundreds of millions of Americans who will never surrender our fundamental firearms freedom to international standards, agreements, or consensus.

NRA is essentially threatening to push the US out of the Treaty if the scope at all extends to civilian weapons, and the delegates know NRA can follow through on that threat. It’s a firm speech, but one that’s entirely for domestic consumption. I wish Wayne, rather than only concentrating on American rights and freedoms, had spoken a bit more about the fundamental human right to self-preservation, and the right all people have to the one tool most effective at affecting that defense: the firearm. He’s essentially conceding the ground that this is some peculiar American right, and while it practically may be, we can’t accept that philosophically.

Slate takes a look. I’m pleased they acknowledge something our opponents have long failed to acknowledge, “For the most part, the NRA’s lobbying arm didn’t gin up the emotional fervor of firearms advocates—it resulted from it.” The gun control crowd has long persisted, in the face of all evidence and reason, that NRA has whipped gun owners into a fury rather than the other way around.

Eric Erickson’s Red State is a well known booster of Larry Pratt’s Gun Owners of America, which has shown up from time to time here. There are many legitimate criticisms of NRA to be had out there, but the notion that they were responsible for health care, the day after the Robert’s Court decision, reeks of incredulity at its highest.

As other conservative and right-of-center groups have come to realize the folly of endorsing Democrats – even marginally conservative ones – because the party as a whole is dedicated to radical progressive values, the NRA has insisted on endorsing pro-gun incumbent Democrats. In addition to allowing the NRA to claim the charade of “bipartisan,” the tactic also pads the NRA PAC’s endorsement/win ratio, always a key thing for establishment operatives playing an insider’s game.

I’ve been an outspoken proponent of NRA not succumbing to the same kind of partisan hackery that is found among other center-right organizations in DC. In this respect they are not perfect, but they are a sight better than other organizations in D.C. For the most part, when it comes to political endorsements, PAC money, grading, and scoring legislation, they’ve remained pretty true to their single issue mission. Most of my issues with NRA’s grading have been “Well, you gave this guy a X when it should have been a Y,” or, “Really? You’re going to endorse (or not endorse) that guy?” I’ve never thought “Have you ever met a Democrat who was pro-gun enough for you?”

I think that’s been relatively good for the Second Amendment. Indeed, that’s about the only center-right issue I think isn’t going to hell in hand basket these days.

It’s time for the conservative movement to start embracing full spectrum conservatism, realizing that no individual principle of conservatism may survive alone and apart from the support of other principles.

And how’s that strategy working out for you? Second Amendment seems to be doing pretty well from my point of view. We’re still winning, and have been even in the Democratic Congress. The partisan “conservative” strategy this author at Red State is advocating is a recipe for disaster. It has been a disaster. When was the last time you felt like conservative principles, other than gun rights, were advancing? I can’t think back that far. The entire center-right coalition as it stands today is an abject failure for freedom, and they ought not be lecturing the one part of the movement that’s seen success on how it should be done. We’re the recipe for it. It’s you who should pick your cause and move it forward in a bipartisan, but ruthlessly political manner.

I’ve often been pretty critical of Dudley Brown and the National Association for Gun Rights, but it’s looking like another one of Dudley’s outfits, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, has lost its tax-exempt status from the IRS, because they have not filed tax returns for three years. I wonder how long it will take the inevitable fundraising letter to go out, talking about how the Obama Administration, through his Internal Revenue Service, is trying to silence the voice of gun owners, and surely won’t you donate some money to fight Obama.

To be fair, most any tax-exempt political organization is pretty shameless when it comes to fundraising, but I’ve always thought Brown’s organization was an extra shade of shameless. I’ve also never really understood what they are really contributing. From what I’ve been able to find, NAGR doesn’t even have a lobbyist registered on the Hill.