Category: Gun Rights Organizations

There seems to be a meme floating around right now that NRA is sitting out of fights. The big one appearing today in the Wall Street Journal, quoting from some of our leaders in the movement, and from Josh Horwitz, all along similar lines that NRA is, “no longer absolutely the 800-pound gorilla.” I worry when our people and their people start singing the same tune. But I think this pretty much says it all:

The NRA’s political action committee has taken in $10.25 million for the 2010 elections, and ranks sixth in terms of receipts among all federally registered PACs, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks Federal Election Commission disclosures. The NRA’s total revenue, including member dues, investment income and contributions, rose to $307 million in 2009, from $268 million a year earlier.

If the fragmentation is hurting NRA, they are laughing all the way to the bank. You want to know why no one is touching the gun issue on the Democratic side? That part I bolded. In D.C. money talks and bullshit walks (though in DC the you call the walking bullshit Congressman or Senator), and NRA is sitting on a boatload of money for the 2010 elections. That’s going to do more for the movement, in terms of achieving goals than a lot of the other activity you see going on.

That said, I’m not opposed to other groups joining in the fray. If Dudley Brown wants to form a PAC, more power to him. Forming a PAC is an example of engaging seriously in the issue. But it takes more than forming a PAC to fund one. GOA, for example, has a Political Action Committee, but currently has a balance of less than 30,000 dollars, and spent less than 140,000 dollars in the 2008 election cycle.

What I’d really like to understand from Marbut, Brown, and many of NRA’s detractors, is in what world is it a successful strategy to downplay the role of the one organization who spent more than 11 million dollars on the 2008 election. If MSSA and NAGR’s messaging were really that compelling or effective, they’d be able to raise serious money. But why can’t they? Back to the article:

But Ben Cannon, 29, of Healdsburg, Calif., a founding member of the board of Calguns Inc., an Internet-based organization founded in 2002, said some younger gun owners felt that because the NRA must cater to all gun owners, it didn’t embrace their own interests enough.

I think that one statement sums up why NRA shouldn’t be the only game in town, but also explains why it’s the biggest and most important. If you want gun rights to win, it has to be a big enough tent to attract the kind of PAC funding, membership numbers, and support that NRA can attract. Any effective side organization is going to understand and work within that reality. My problem with guys like Dudley Brown, Larry Pratt, and Gary Marbut is that they want to replace the big tent strategy of the NRA with a smaller tent that’s more emotionally satisfying because in the small tent you don’t have to compromise or coalition build as much. You can revel in your purity, and not have to dirty your hands with the unsatisfying work of trying to bring 70 and 80% allies along with you.

I look at younger, more professional groups like Calguns, which have formed a viable organization and strategy as a stark contrast to the ridiculous “no compromise” gun rights groups of the past. Calguns has not sought to displace the big tent, but to find a role within it. It’s never seemed to me to be smart strategy to purposefully make the movement smaller by not only trying to displace the big tent strategy, but by trying to burn down the big tent and everyone in it.

Days of our Trailer links to more VPC Google Research that creates assumptions out of thin air. Unfortunately, it’s not just the other side that engages in this. Over the past few days I’ve noticed some folks in our movement struggling with the fact that NRA seems to have gotten behind and passed a Constitutional Carry bill in Arizona. Why is it so difficult to believe that NRA would actually support such a bill where it’s possible to pass it?

I don’t have any problem with informed criticism of NRA, or its actions, and I’ve often enjoyed conversations about the problems with NRA with people who actually know and understand the organization. But so much of the criticism out there is half-assed an uninformed, almost to the point that I think some accusations and opinions are made from whole cloth.

The fact is that NRA supported Constitutional Carry in Arizona. NRA has a lobbyist in Arizona, and he was supporting this bill from the beginning. Todd Rathner is also an NRA Board member, and will be up for re-election next year. I think we can all agree this is the kind of presence we like to have on the Board.

I have to apologize to my readers for this, but because of continued work commitments, I never managed to compile the questions to send off to candidates for the NRA elections which end soon (be sure to get your ballots in). I suppose I should also apologize to our endorsed NRA board candidates this round, because my lack of attention has hurt them as well.

I’ve been working seventy hour weeks since the end of last year in a heroic effort to get the company I work for into profitability so we can survive these tough economic times. The fortunate thing is, it looks like it has a good chance of working. But if I’m not blogging, I’m working, literally from the time I get up until I go to bed. If I have any time to do something like, go to the range, it’s a treat. So bear with me. There were some good questions that I will try to get answered for everyone, one way or another.

In the mean time I urge everyone to get their ballots in. We have a lot of candidates this election who deserve your support.

It looks like NRA has redone their web site yet again, and it is also another Flash monstrosity. If I were giving lessons on the problems Adobe Flash creates for web developers, NRA’s web portal would be my Exhibit A. Let me just review the ways this screws NRA and its membership:

• It does not get NRA message out there. It’s a giant black hole to Google. One reason NRA-ILA and Blogs rank so highly on gun searches is that we’re not a black hole to Google, because we only use Adobe Flash sparingly.
• It’s slow to load. It takes several seconds to load even on my 35 megabit/sec FiOS connection. To someone with a slower DSL connection, or, God Forbid, a dial-up or Satellite connections (something still prevalent in rural areas) it’s going to be excruciating.
• It imposes a size on the user. In my preferred browser size, I cannot see the entire page. I have to scroll, or re-size my browser in order to see the whole monstrosity. A good page design won’t impose unreasonable size requirements on a user. The total page size is gigantic. It imposes itself over most of my 1440×900 laptop screen.
• Breaks web usability standards. Browser navigation buttons fail to work, but most importantly, disabled users can’t increase the font size so they can read, nor could a blind user have the web site read aloud to them.
• Breaks analytic software. Flash breaks the ability of knowing which pages people are coming and going on. Now it’s possible this is built into the flash application, but I don’t notice anything on the front web site that loads analytics software. NRA probably has no idea, and can have no idea, how people are using their site with Flash. If you’re a webmaster, that’s a critical bit of information.
• Not linkable. I can’t link to anything that’s not a URL, and a Flash page is not a URL, but a bit of code that’s embedded into a Flash application.
• Breaks Mobile Devices. It looks like NRA’s web folks have redirects in there for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but that doesn’t help the millions of users who use alternative devices like the Droid and Blackberry. Even when these devices are Flash enabled, the site is not friendly to the small screens.

This “classic” page is a much much better home page for NRA, and would work much better as NRA’s main portal. But even this could still use some work. NRA would be wise to trash the flash monstrosity and make the “classic” page the default. At the very least, it should at least remember that a user picked the “classic” site and load that upon subsequent visits. Good web design and programming are easier than good Flash programming, so if NRA has the internal ability to do one they ought to be able to do the other. It’s just a matter of adhering to good practices.

I’m going to join with Dennis Henigan for a minute in denouncing dangerous and inflammatory political rhetoric. So says Dennis Henigan:

It is too easy for politicians and political commentators to treat our increasingly incendiary political atmosphere as a product merely of disparate extremist individuals and groups on the fringes of our political system. Treating the problem as the product of a relatively few misguided individuals with bizarre violent fantasies misses a far more troubling reality. What we are seeing is the acting out of an ideology of violence as a tool of political power that has long had a home on the American right – particularly in the “gun rights” movement dominated by the National Rifle Association.

Bravo! Monsignor! Bravo! I heartily agree this ideology of violence, but have you ever looked at how far and deep the rot has run, Mr. Henigan? NRA’s inflammatory rhetoric is everywhere. In fact, I have fairly good evidence that NRA rhetoric is not only inflaming our present political situation, but must, somehow, be making its way to the past. For instance, take a look at this dangerous insurrectionist, going by the name of George Washington:

The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference – they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.

Clearly this man has been brainwashed into NRA’s “guns everywhere” mentality. But he’s not the only crazy wingnut preaching insurrectionist thinking from the past. Let’s look at a man who goes by the name of Thomas Jefferson:

“The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exclusions and incapacitations are removed.”

The horror. This Mr. Jefferson is full of seditious blather. Mr. Henigan is surely right about the right about this crazed militia nut. He even wrote a document that had the audacity to propose a framework by which it was even acceptable to wage violent war against one’s own government. Let me read a passage from it:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

This is crazy! How far off are we from blowing up federal buildings with maddening drivel like this floating around!?!?  Language like this only enables domestic terrorism. Let’s look at another dangerous militant known as John Adams:

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”

I think the Secret Service should consider paying this Mr. Adams a visit, before he gets any ideas. Same with his buddy John Hancock:

“. . .In defence of the freedom that is our birthright. . .we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the agressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.”

If this isn’t strong evidence of NRA’s message affecting even our past, I don’t know what is. Our nation never experienced any kind of armed revolutionary overtones before NRA started drilling their insurrectionist nonsense into the American Body Politic back in the 70s. I’m glad there are good Americans like Mr. Henigan out there exposing this dangerous undercurrent emerging in our political discourse, because clearly it is not just affecting our present, but our past as well.

Hat tip to Joe Huffman for the inspiration.

UPDATE: I’m told the first quote by George Washington was bogus. Thanks to Clayton Cramer for catching it. I have removed it.

Last night Bitter and I attended the Philadelphia Friends of the NRA Dinner. Normally I have pretty good luck at these things, but went home empty handed last night. That’s a real shame too, because I absolutely wanted to win the auction for the NRA Deputy Cat — an approximately two foot tall cat sculpture made out of scrap metal. Unfortunately, the bidding got a little too rich for me on that item.

While I think hardly anyone could disagree that the world needs more NRA Deputy Cat, a good reason to go to Friends dinners, other than to help out NRA’s shooting programs both nationally and in your state, is the fact that you stand a pretty reasonable chance of walking away with a gun. I’ve generally had good luck at Friends events, and have won both a gun and a locking cabinet. I also picked up a pretty nice wooden NRA branded tool chest at silent auction.

It was very good to see that NRA can still fill a pretty large venue even in Philadelphia. The Philly folks were playing the raffles more than participating in the auction, but everything raises money at the Dinner since all items are donated. I spent about 200 dollars on the raffles, hoping to have a good chance as either a Ruger LCP, a Weatherby Shotgun, a Glock 22, a Kimber 1911, or a Weatherby 12 gauge. But it wasn’t my lucky night. I didn’t win any guns, or the 50/50 drawing. The guy who won that took the 800 dollars and spent part of the money to buy a Remington 700 in .300 Win Mag at auction, which effectively donates the money back to NRA. Since all the guns they don’t raffle get auctioned, you can actually get some pretty good deals if everyone in the room already blew their money on the raffles, which seems to have been the case tonight. Some of the more expensive stuff was going for a bargain. Not NRA Deputy Cat though. Damn! I had just the place for it too.

Lobbying a legislature is a difficult task, and something I don’t think a lot of people have an appreciation for. Knowing a few people who do it, across several issues, it’s skill I’ve come to have a lot of respect for. I have no doubt lobbyists often over or underestimate how much they can get. Reading a legislature can be difficult, and plotting a winning strategy through one even harder. There’s plenty of trip-ups and pit falls that can happen along the way. That is why I am generally very reluctant to be an armchair lobbyist and second guess their judgements. In regards to Iowa, here are some questions I would ask that are relevant to the current bill. These are not questions I know the answer to, but knowing them is critical for assessing whether the right balance is being struck:

• How many anti-gun or pro-gun-control politicians in Iowa voted to bring the Vermont Carry bill to the floor so that they could vote to kill it and put a lot of their political opponents in an awkward spot?
• Every legislature has a handful of politicians who are mostly with us, but don’t feel they could vote for something that goes really far. How many of those are in the Iowa legislature?
• What other things in the bill could really be improved? You want to propose repealing the 0.08 CWI provision? You think any politician wants to have to hear from his opponent in the next election how he voted for guns for drunks?
• What is Governor Culver expecting to be in the bill for him to sign it? Culver has said he’ll sign it. But will he? How certain are you that he’ll sign? Will he find something in the bill that he’ll use an an excuse to veto?
• If he does veto, how many votes do you lose on the override vote? Which politicians are going to switch sides to avoid going against the Governor? Do you still have enough for an override?
• How many of the “yes” votes on both bill would have been “no” votes if you had, say, removed the training requirement? Does that get you to fall below half? Do you lose the Governor? Do you lose the Governor and lose the override?

Because I don’t know the answer to these questions, I’m going to tend to give NRA and Iowa Carry the benefit of doubt. Both groups have lobbyists on the ground who are in a much much better position to know what’s going on in Des Moines than any of us. Some of these questions even they might not know the answer to, but they will have a better idea than we do. Could we have gotten a better bill in Iowa? Maybe we could have. But what we got is pretty good, and you don’t really exercise finite control over this process even if you’re a great lobbyist with powerful friends in the legislature. You go into something like this having an idea of what you want, what you think you can get, and what you can live with. No matter what the issue, that’s just how this process works.

Thirdpower shows Abby Spangler what a protest is supposed to look like.

Jeff Soyer brings us a piece from the Baltimore Sun that highlights a mailing done by JPFO. JPFO denies distributing them, but admits to putting them on the Internet for other people to distribute. For reference, the flyers Jeff talks about are here, and here.

This is why JPFO will never see a dime of my money. Now, the charge of anti-semitism is rather silly when this material is produced by someone who is Jewish. But what do you think someone not part of the pro-gun community is going to think upon seeing one of these flyers? I can assure you the folks in this Sun article’s reaction is not going to be atypical.

I stick to donating my money to NRA and SAF. Many of the other groups out there aren’t doing any favors for the movement. JPFO has lately been one of them. This is a shame, I think, because JPFO can often have a powerful message about the importance of gun rights for the Jewish community, but Zelman can’t seem to help going over the top with ridiculous crap like this. I agree with Jeff wholeheartedly on this one.