Hoodwinking gun owners
by David Atkins
Joshua Holland at Alternet has a great piece today on how the NRA deceives its membership. First, it’s important to note that most gun owners do not buy into the NRA’s extremism:
As Cliff Schecter noted last month, studies of public opinion find that a majority of gun-owners are in favor of closing the gun-show loophole the NRA championed (85 percent of all gun owners, and 69 percent of NRA members). Eighty-two percent of NRA members believe that people on the federal terror watch list should be barred from buying firearms. Almost seven in 10 NRA members disagree with the organization’s efforts to prevent law enforcement from determining the origins of weapons used in crimes.
Schecter writes that the NRA has “fought all efforts to make reporting lost or stolen guns to the police a requirement,” and in some cases has “actually threatened to sue to overturn these laws.” But 88 percent of gun owners – and 78 percent of NRA members – think that requiring people to report lost or stolen weapons is a pretty good idea.
The uptake from all this is that we can have reasonable, commonsense restrictions on firearms, but we’ll never achieve that until people realize that nobody’s trying to ban all firearms, and that the NRA in no way represents the interests of most gun owners.
So why does the NRA take such extremist positions? For money, of course:
The NRA president’s motives for lying to his members are clear: his fearmongering brings a windfall of fundraising to the organization and expands the market for the arms manufacturers — his true base — that finance much of the lobby’s work. As Alan Berlow wrote in Salon, “The only way to avert this calamity, the NRA’s 4 million members are told in daily email alerts, the organization’s various magazines and regular fundraising appeals, is if they all dig deep into their pockets and send money to the NRA.”
While a lot of gun owners are quite concerned, the arms industry is laughing all the way to the bank. Just after the 2008 election, the New York Times reported that “sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.” A year later, CNN noted that “Gun shops across the country are reporting a run on ammunition, a phenomenon apparently driven by fear that the Obama administration will increase taxes on bullets or enact new gun-control measures.”
There will come a day when our descendants look back in amazement at a culture that placed the pursuit of reckless profits ahead of all other goods and freedoms. Those who stand up to it will be honored. Those who helped perpetuate it will be the shame of posterity.
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