Gun Rights Organizations – Page 30 – Shall Not Be Questioned

The Descent Into Madness

Josh Horwitz has plenty of reasons to be a sad panda these days, but his latest tirade about how the NRA is just another part of the vast right-wing conspiracy takes the cake. I’ve been a pretty outspoken about NRA not inbreeding with the D.C. right-wing establishment, and staying true to it’s mission. NRA should be as welcoming to liberal gun owners as it is to conservative ones, and indeed, I believe many of the advances we’ve seen on the social front lately is because lefty gun owners are willing to come out of the closet in greater numbers. David Keene comes from the conservative D.C. establishment, and presents opportunity to our opponents to smear NRA as part of the VRWC because of his former role with ACU, which puts on CPAC. The take they are trying to weave, is pretty thin, however.

Horwitz’s rant is ludicrous, even given Keene’s background. Among the accessions are that Keene moderated a CPAC panel, which had an author on it, who wrote a book which wasn’t completely about the Second Amendment. He then proceeds to go after Keene for being “giddy” about the Wisconsin recall election results. Considering Walker was carrying an NRA endorsement, and signed Concealed Carry and Castle Doctrine in Wisconsin, I’d hardly call that surprising or stepping outside of his role as NRA President. It’s funny how they didn’t mention that Keene, in his former role as ACU President, was advocating for inclusion of gay conservative groups into CPAC, standing against the family groups who spoke against it, and who eventually won out once his presidency was over. Keene is someone I’m happy to have on my side in an issue, and I’m happy he’s NRA President. He doesn’t fit a lot of the stereotypical molds of people in the right-of-center establishment in D.C.

There is a more general risk, however, with this kind of mixing of issues, and dilution of NRA’s core mission with other right-wing causes. I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with NRA’s participation in CPAC for that reason. But there’s a good argument to be made that such participation, if it is the evil I think it, is a necessary one. In order for any organization to be successful, it has to attract a following, which means marketing itself, and marketing is pretty much what CPAC is about. More importantly, for NRA, it’s marketing to young people, which NRA desperately needs outlets for. The question is whether NRA can long mingle with the right-of-center DC establishment without being wholly consumed by it.

Polling on the National Rifle Association

Dave Kopel notes an April Reuters/Ipsos poll which shows the organization with a favorability rating of 68%, and an unfavorable rating of 32%. This is up from the 60/34 percent in a 2005 Gallup poll. Prof. Kopel notes that NRA’s favorability rating seems to track opposition to handgun prohibition. That reminds me of a passage from his paper I recently read:

Heston saw the broader fight as a contest for the hearts and minds of the American people. In the long run, they believed, the NRA needed a broad base of public support from citizens who saw the NRA as it sees itselfâ€”a civic organization dedicated to mainstream American values.Â Knox wanted the NRA to be feared. LaPierre and Heston wanted it to be loved.

The NRAâ€™s traditionally positive reputation with the American public had been falling, thanks in large part to HCIâ€™s efforts (strongly supported by much of the media)Â to delegitimize NRA, because HCI correctly perceived that as long as NRA was strong and popular, much of HCIâ€™s agenda would be politically impossible to achieve. Gun control advocates sniffed that Heston was merely putting a sunny face on the same old gun rights zealotry. But in the aftermath of the second ouster of Knox, LaPierre was able to firmly steer the NRA away from Knox-style absolutism. Unlike Knox, LaPierre favored the National Instant Check System. At the same time, there was no going back to the days of Franklin Orth. The NRA was not absolutely opposed to every possible gun control, but except for instant checks and laws aimed at criminals, there were not many gun controls which the NRA did support. The Heston/LaPierre strategy worked. By the early 21st century, the NRA was viewed favorably by 60% of Americans, and unfavorably by 34%.

Ideally, NRA should want to be both simultaneously loved and feared. Our success has had to depend on a measure of both, so it’s my opinion that the influence of both Knox and LaPierre has been necessary for the gun rights movement to achieve what it has. Dave has more background on this in his paper, citing heavily from the book “The Gun Rights War,” that was compiled and annotated by Neal Knox’s son Chris. I could encourage everyone to read both, because you can’t find out where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

There are many people on our side, however, that don’t believe public opinion makes a difference, as long as we’re reaching our own people. That 68% of the population views NRA favorably is not the same as saying they agree with NRA’s on every line time. Most of the people polled are not NRA members, and are not really involved in this fight. But their acquiescence is absolutely necessary if we’re going to keep achieving victory.

PolitinotsoFact Wisconsin

Politifact investigates an NRA claim about Tom Barrett’s gun banning ways, and finds some truth to it, but still rules that it’s mostly false. NRA’s claim is:

“Well, Barrett voted to ban 15 different kinds of guns, even a lot of common deer rifles.”

To refute this claim, they contacted a cop, a reporter, and a guy who quit the NRA because he hates pro-gun politics. Real objective crowd there. The warden is probably the one I’d trust the most:

Lawhern, who taught DNR hunter safety classes for 18 years, recalled that when he worked in the field in the mid-1990s he would see perhaps half a dozen hunters each season using an assault-style weapon.

Out of how many hunters interacted with? If you interacted with 25 hunters every season, this would amount to a large percentage. This is meaningless for defeating the claim without proper context. From the reporter:

And Smith said that from his experience, while firearms such as the AK-47 and the AR-15 “have gained favor among some hunters and sport shooters in recent decades, they constitute a small fraction of deer hunting rifles in use today and were an even smaller fraction in 1994.”

The AR-15 is the hottest selling rifle on the market today. It is also the most ubiquitous rifle on the sport shooting circuit.Â To me, if you’re seeing it fairly regularly in the field, that means it’s not unusual. I don’t hunt, and certainly didn’t in 1994, but in sport shooting the AR-15 is not only common, it’s ubiquitous. I think the mistake here is mistaking the word common, which is not a strong a word as ubiquitous. Common, to me, means it’s not unusual to see in places where you see people with guns.

That’s not to say there’s not traditionalist hunters out there that frown on the popularity of the AR-15. The whole Zumbo incident never would have happened if he hadn’t noticed more hunters using the platform, and loudly echoed his disapproval.Â The claim was that they were common hunting rifles, not that they were ubiquitous, and the claim was never tied explicitly to the 1994 time frame. If this is more true today, then that’s Tom Barrett’s problem, not ours. That they’ve become so popular for hunting and target shooting 20 years later is just all the more reason that Barrett’s position on this was wrong to being with.

As far as NRA’s actual claim, I’d rate it is as somewhat true. It’s a bit overstated, but that’s a far cry from “mostly false.” Tom Barrett is a gun banner, and the rifles he chose to ban are not uncommonly used by hunters. That’s all that really ought to matter.

In other news, if you live in Wisconsin, you might want to spread the word that the Wisconsin Deer Hunter’s AssociationÂ is run by a guy who doesn’t give a crap about your Second Amendment rights. Actually, given I can’t find a 990 for this organization, I question its legitimacy when it comes to speaking for deer hunters. This looks a bit more legit to me. Anyone in WI care to comment if Wisconsin Deer Hunter’s Association is a false flag designed to give anti-gun Democrats some pro-hunting pro-outdoors cover? Kind of smells like one.

Eddie Eagle

Our opponents are always cynical, and critical of the effectiveness of NRA’s Eddie Eagle program. Well, here is one instance where a kid found a gun and did the right thing. In their minds, Eddie Eagle has to be a sinister, cynical plot by the gun lobby, because if it’s not, and if it actually works, it means our side is doing more to reduce gun violence than they are.

Gander Mountain’s Opposition to Gun Owners

There’s a question over whether Gander Mountain’s position of banning NRA-ILA’s grassroots events from their property is simply an issue of not getting involved in politics. There are a few fundamental issues with viewing it through such a simple lens.

1) Gander Mountain’s business model requires the freedom to own and use firearms. They have no doubt profited off of the more than 100,000 concealed carry license holders in Wisconsin that NRA-ILA fought to promote. They will take the money of gun owners and run, laughing all the way to the bank, but they are unwilling to even allow NRA members to meet on their property to discuss the political process that leads to these kinds of changes. They are an inherently political business by the decision of what they sell and how they market.

2) An early blogger who raised the argument against NRA to Gander Mountain that they should stay out of politics is, in fact, a political blog working to defeat Scott Walker. The blogger brags that this is what he told Gander Mountain:

The eventsâ€™ focus was to train pro-walker [sic] supporters in the art of deception and propaganda in order to build support for Governor Scott Walker. … When Politiscoop contacted Gander Mountain in both Eau Claire and Wausau, Wisconsin, managers were quick to inform us that the company was unaware of what the focus of the meetings were when they were scheduled by the NRA. It wasn’t until citizens opposing Scott Walker inundated the company with phone calls and emails, demanding they cancel the event.

Really? In fact, they repost Democratic Party press releases calling for Republicans to condemn those affiliated with NRA, but provide no other points of view. That’s hardly unbiased and non-political.

3) The event that Gander Mountain banned is actually about civic engagement. Yup, that’s right. It’s not directly about Scott Walker. If you’ve ever attended a grassroots workshop hosted by NRA, then you’ll know they focus on several issues:

Registering Voters: This is especially targeted in helping hunters and gun owners register to vote.
Communicating with Other Gun Owners: This is the most political element in that it teaches NRA members who want to know how to talk to other gun owners about politics how to approach the issue and why it’s relevant to their interests.
Being an Effective Advocate for the Second Amendment: The lessons NRA members learn about different methods of reaching non-NRA members with messages about politics or the general issue of gun ownership aren’t about any specific candidate. It’s about being a generally effective communicator so gun owners can articulate to everyone from their local lawmakers to Aunt Bertha why their sport and rights are important to them.
How Elections are Won: This is a broader spectrum message that isn’t specifically cited for one race because it’s a broad message across the board. Whether it’s a right to hunt amendment or a candidate, it applies. In St. Louis, many of the details NRA-ILA staffers shared focused on why younger voters made a difference for Barack Obama’s election. That certainly isn’t a pro-Scott Walker message. That’s simply a statement of electoral trends and facts.

That’s the larger lesson plan of the event that Gander Mountain chose to ban from their facilities. In other words, the events focus on teaching gun owners how to be involved in their communities and encourage civic involvement. What I would like to know is how Gander Mountain decided that such messages were negative things.

4) The blogger mentioned above also targeted a conference center that was rented by NRA-ILA to host an event. They tried to attack the center as taking a position on the Walker election, but the conference center remained firm in noting that NRA-ILA rented the room the same way that advocates on any side of the aisle may do. They noted that their business is about renting rooms, and that’s exactly what they did.**

To me, attacking a business for even accepting business from NRA members seems to go along with a trend in trying to dehumanize political opponents. Consider a Twitter debate recently where an anti-gun advocate argued that unless you agreed with her position on details of gun control policy, you could not be considered an educated person. (I would point you to the conversation, but she blocked every pro-gun person & deleted all of the related tweets.) I asked her if she actually believed that my college degree did not count as an education despite the fact that it is from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country, and she said it did not unless I agree with her to support gun bans of her choosing. To her, I was not a person worthy of acknowledging as a potential equal simply because we did not agree on a matter of political policy.

In this case of Gander Mountain, the company is responding to a blog and activists who aren’t actually arguing for the company to stay out of politics. They are working with a group of political activists who believe that NRA members shouldn’t even be allowed to talk about political issues or even civic engagement because of our belief in the Second Amendment.
Continue reading “Gander Mountain’s Opposition to Gun Owners”

Boycott Gander Mountain

You’d think that outfits like Gander Mountain would have learned where their bread is buttered by now, but under pressure from left wing activists, they’ve given the boot to NRA, which intended to do grassroots workshops to help train activists ahead of the recall election for Governor Walker in Wisconsin.

Gander Mountain are certainly free to be cowards if they want, but we are also free to go take our hunting and shooting dollars elsewhere. I ordinarily cut companies a break for trying to be apolitical, because when policy does not directly impact your business, it’s smart business to stay out.

But hunting, shooting and outdoor companies are directly impacted by policy, and I expect them to join the fight against those who want to destroy their line of business, and destroy our constitutional rights. We should accept nothing less. Gander is certainly benefitting from the passage of the concealed carry bill that Scott Walker happily signed. Turning around and stabbing him in the back with cowardice is unacceptable and disgraceful for a company like Gander.

I would encourage every gun owner to contact Gander Mountain and express to them your outrage at their decision, and inform them that you’ll be taking your hunting and shooting dollars elsewhere until they capitulate on this matter.

UPDATE: Here’s Bitter’s take on why Gander Mountain’s ban on NRA-ILA events is really about keeping gun owners from organizing to support the Second Amendment and hunting rights.

NRA Endorsement of George Allen

Extrano’s alley questions George Allen’s stance on guns based on this bit over at On The Issues. On The Issues is out of date, incomplete, and often misleading, and it is in this case when it comes to Allen’s record on guns. It is true that Allen voted against the PLCAA, as we would have wanted him to, because it ended up with an assault weapons ban renewal attached to it. Some may recall back in 2004 an Amendment to PLCAA was brought up to renew the ban, and served the very important purpose of getting John Kerry on record as supporting renewal. Once that goal was achieved, the bill was killed. Eventually Allen did vote for final passage of the clean bill after the elections in 2005.

On the Issues mentioned that he does not have an absolutist view of gun ownership. I’m aware of very few politicians that do, and any candidate for Senate that was telling me he believed that is probably a liar. Allen’s record on guns has been quite good, as he’s been willing to introduce, sponsor and help move legislation, which isn’t all that common among Senators. I thought his political career was going to be over after the “Macaca” incident, but apparently he’s on a comeback.

NSSF Is Not Advocating Expanding Classes of Prohibited Persons

It seems every time mental health issues come up in relation to gun laws, folks suggest that the class of prohibited persons is being expanded. That’s probably because mental health prohibitions are among the most poorly understood aspects of federal gun laws. NSSF stepped in it when they announced support for sharing of mental health records, since I’ve noticed at a number of blogs, folks suggestingÂ NSSF is selling out. This isn’t really the case, but to understand why that is takes a bit of an explanation on federal law. States often have their own prohibitions, which can be stronger or weaker than federal law, but I won’t dive into that here. I’ll concentrate solely on federal law, which is what most states generally follow in their own laws.

A mental health adjudication only occurs when a person is involuntarily committed, or held to be mentally ill by a competent judge, board or other lawfully composed body in an adversarial hearing. They cannot apply because someone sought mental health treatment on their own, or if they are suffering from depression, PTSD or what have you. The law very specifically requires an adjudication.

Now, that said, there have been cases in the past where some federal agencies, particularly the VA, entered veterans records into NICS who were deemed unable to manage their own affairs. This issue has been fixed, however, and the VA can no longer legally do such a thing unless there’s been a hearing. In addition, there is now a mechanism for restoration of rights from someone who has been adjudicated or committed in the past, but is now no longer a danger to themselves or others.

As to the issue NSSF is advocating for, which is that state mental health records in regards to commitments and adjudications be shared with the federal system. Many states currently don’t do this, either because they can’t be bothered, or they have legal issues that prevent it.

So why do we care? Because a number of states operate as what is known as a “Point of Contact” states, meaning they maintain their own background check system. Pennsylvania is one such state. The states have fairly mixed records when it comes to maintaining their own systems. Pennsylvania’s is atrociously unreliable, as we have a recent example of here. In contrast, the FBI has done a rather good job at running the federal system in a professional manner, and it works much more reliably and cheaply than the POC systems in the states that have them. Additionally, if everyone used the federal system, we’d only have one leviathan to worry about. The federal system has had more protections put in place recently to prevent the kind of abuse that happens in POC systems, such as using the system to compile a backdoor registry, as has happened in Pennsylvania.

It would be beneficial if we could get rid of all the POC systems and put everyone on the federal system. It’s not perfect, but a step in the right direction. The lack of mental health records in NICS is going to be a big club for our opponents to defeat anti-POC bills, as the lack of sharing is an issue that politicians are going to be inclined to listen to. If the federal system and state systems contain the same data, it’s much easier to make a cost saving argument to the powers that be, which helps give some softer legislators some cover to vote for an anti-POC measure as a bill that merely eliminates redundancy and saves taxpayer money. In addition, that can also be used as justification for eliminating restrictions on buying firearms out of state. If we’re all using the same system, and it has all the same data, what can be the justification for now allowing FFLs to make transfers to residents of another state?

So what NSSF is advocating is not in any way an expansion of who is and who isn’t a prohibited person. As I stated last time this issue came up, just because NICS didn’t have a record, and cleared you, doesn’t mean you have a get out of jail free card on being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm if you are under a mental health prohibition. There’s relatively little harm in what NSSF is advocating, in terms of mental health records, with the potential of a lot of ground that could be gained if lawmakers feel good that the federal system has all the records it needs to determine if someone is under a mental health prohibition.

Cozying Up to the Wrong Group?

Senate hopeful Don Stenberg seems to have put his faith in Gun Owners of America:

Stenberg had hoped to discuss the Fast and Furious investigation and Attorney General Eric Holder at the forum sponsored by Gun Owners of America, the Grand Island Independent reported.

A noble goal, but GOA doesn’t have the turnout machine to fill rooms. and as I’ve shown have questionable grading standards. Either way it goes, this ends up looking bad for gun owners. Sometimes I wish a lot of these smaller groups would understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and work within those. You should have some idea, if you’re a group like GOA, what you can accomplish in terms of turn out. If you fail, as has happened here, it just makes the movement as a whole look bad.

Richard Feldman’s New Gun Group

Independent Firearms Owners Association. Feldman was a disgruntled former NRA employee who wrote the book “Ricochet, Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist.” Keeping in mind the book’s point of view, it’s a worthwhile read. But Uncle notes thatÂ his issue seems to be guns and weed, as he’s speaking out against the drug war. I was wondering what the purpose of this group could be. Since it’s close to election time, it’s time to watch out for false flags like the now defunct American Hunters and Shooters Association.

But Feldman never struck me as a tool, since he’s remained pretty faithful to gun rights. Looking over the site I have to come to the opinion that the purpose of the group is further employment for Richard Feldman, rather than any false flag campaign, or for any other nefarious purpose related to the 2012 elections. I’d just be rather curious what IFOA’s strategy and goal is, because it’s not easy to discern what they plan to accomplish that other groups are not already doing.