Category: Gun Rights Organizations

If anyone missed Ashley last night, you can download the MP3 here. She brought up a couple of good points toward the end in regards to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, who are currently infecting Pennsylvania mayors like the swine flu. There’s a rule in politics that perception of power matters just as much, and probably more, than actual power. When MAIG goes into a state legislators office to lobby their position, it’s quite powerful to be able to say

“You know Mr. Representative, we have four mayors in your district who support our position on this bill. This is something the mayors and people in your district want.”

Even if the reality is that NRA members have the power to unseat the Representative, we really want to avoid having to teach that lesson. What MAIG is doing is creating the perception of power. The perception that voting their way may have some tangible benefit for a state level politician. And an implication of cost or embarrassment for going against local mayors.

MAIG is bringing the culture war over guns to our towns, cities, and local communities, and we have to meet them with strong resistance. Ashley has worked to make MAIG membership a political liability in her states. But that’s something NRA can’t really do without us.

Ashley Varner from NRA will be on Gun Nuts Radio tonight at 9PM to talk about the Chicago case, and various happenings in Caleb’s home state of Indiana. Ashley previously worked in NRA-ILA Public Affairs, and handled the outreach for the bloggers, so we know her fairly well. She has since moved up as State Liaison for Oklahoma, Indiana, and her home state of Missouri. State Liaison is essentially the NRA representative to the states, and NRA’s presence in the State Capitol. She is a lobbyist, but that’s not all a State Liaison is involved with. Ashley has been involved with the fight against MAIG in the states she’s responsible for, and with Pennsylvania being the front lines in that battle, I feel good knowing she’s guarding our flanks in Indiana, Oklahoma and Missouri. So tune in tonight at 9 if you can, and feel free to call in if you want to ask her some questions about liaising, or other gun rights topics.

Jacob points out that the Brady Campaign is really stretching it to say NRA has shown its political weakness in NY-23. Bitter was also saying Creigh Deeds was down in Roanoke trying to talk up his NRA bonafides like he was the one carrying the endorsement. Now when NRA candidates in Virginia win in a landslide, Brady will no doubt claim it’s because of other issues. They would be right. But elections are often won on the margins, and research shows we’re quite a margin.

Gunpundit is reporting. I think his is a good candidacy, but there’s a questions I would have before I would consider endorsing him. But the Brownell family has certainly done a lot for the Second Amendment, and Brownells as a company is very supportive of NRA and new media. It’s shaping up to be a good election year.

With all of our coverage of Mayor Bloomberg’s work with the Brady Campaign to protect and promote anti-gun local politicians, it’s time to keep up the pressure. Last month I made a donation to NRA that was designated for their media programs to turn up the heat through the media. I guess you could say that heat has been appropriately raised. Bloomberg’s numbers are down, mayors are giving us dirt on his questionable practices of how they were unknowingly signed up for the campaign, and his professional staff have been outed as Brady Campaign representatives.

But it’s clear that Bloomberg is digging in, and we need to do the same. So with that I’ve picked two programs for donations to help NRA keep fighting this battle.

The first is obvious, it’s the Institute for Legislative Action in recognition of their postcard mailing and political work on the effort to get more mayors to leave the coalition. This is fundamentally a political fight because these mayors may be the next crop of regional, statewide, and federal gun control leaders.

The second donation goes to the Freedom Action Foundation. This new Foundation fund is focused on non-partisan and non-political fundamental outreach that can ultimately support the other fights. The money donated to the fund will help identify those who aren’t registered to vote and show them why it’s important. If we’re going to oust these mayors from office, keep them from climbing to higher political office, or swaying federal and state lawmakers, we need to make sure more gun owners are registered to vote. You’d be surprised if you checked voter registration records how many gun owners are not registered to vote. But, once registered, the likely voter rate is quite high. So if we can get these men and women signed up, we can hope they get involved with ILA to find out what’s going on in their districts.

If you want to turn up the heat on these mayors and other politicians, I hope you’ll choose to give to one of these funds. Donations to ILA are not deductible, but donations to the Freedom Action Fund are.

Sensibly Progressive has a different take on the NSSF AR video from yesterday that I think is pretty interesting. He thinks it’ll be very useful in trying to educate hunters who don’t know much about guns and shooting. I agree it would be pretty useful for that, and it’s certainly not a small problem.

Over at SayUncle, he’s highlighting a new video from the National Shooting Sports Foundation on AR-15s.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqj23j7smVU[/youtube]

Caleb has also highlighted it as good work. I think how good it is depends on the intended audience. Is this something aimed at general media, or outdoor media who mostly write about hunting?  Because which audience this is targeted to depends on whether or not I think it’s a good video.

If this is a video aimed at educating general media, I’m not a big fan. It’s certainly not a bad video, but I think it underestimates how unfamiliar many journalists are when it comes to hunting and shooting issues. We all know that no one would hunt with a machine gun, but how many journalists know that? I think the video’s big problem is failing to address the fact that an AR-15 is not a machine gun. Any time you present this issue to laymen, this needs to be stressed. You don’t even really need to say it in this context — just showing an animal being taken by a single shot from an AR-15 would be sufficient to get the point across. I would also question why the hunting context would be used? I fully recognize that the public views hunting as a legitimate use of firearms, but NSSF’s own research has shown public perception of the shooting sports is better than hunting, and AR-15s are ubiquitous in several types of popular competitive shooting sports. But that’s assuming the target audience is general media, which it might not be.

If the target audience is outdoor media, basically the Jim Zumbos of the world, in an effort to help them understand the issue, I think it’s a pretty good video. Those folks will know the difference between a semi-auto and a machine gun, and will know no one hunts with the latter. In that instance they really just need to understand how technology and the culture is changing, and I think this video accomplishes that goal.

I guess another question is, what kind of outreach we need to be doing more of? Reaching the outdoor community or reaching the general public? I’m generally of the opinion that the latter is more important, and I hope to see more good work from NSSF targeted at that audience, particularly in relation to the shooting sports.