National Rifle Association – Page 2

NRA Shoots Itself in the Foot

As a pro-gun, anti-campaign finance reform libertarian, I was actually excited to see the National Rifle Assocation debut its NRA News web site. But the actual implementation of the site just plain sucks.

In case you haven’t followed the story around NRA News, the latest campaign finance reform bill places additional restrictions on the ability of groups like the National Rifle Association to take out advertisements, etc. against candidates. So the NRA is routing around the damage of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the First Amendment by essentially establishing itself as a news media organization. It’s started web broadcasts of a talk show and is looking to buy a radio station to carry its message as well.

Great intentions, but the website is horrible on a number of counts.

First, it requires you to give your name, e-mail address and zip code every time you want to visit the site. This isn’t a “register and the login” system, this is a “give us your personal details” everytime you visit the site. This from a group that has fought vigorously and successfully to prevent the creation of any sort of national database or registration system for guns.

Second, it requires Flash. The PSAs and the video of the talk show are broadcast in Flash media player. Ugh. Sure Flash is common, but I hate it being required (and it’s not currently installed in my main browser).

Third, because of this, it isn’t obvious how to save the video to my hard drive. An advocacy group like the NRA should both a) make it easy to download video to the users hard drive and b) encourage users to redistribute said video. After all, the point here isn’t to make a profit but to get the NRA’s message out. Building barriers to that makes no sense.

Consider a group that I personally detest but that has an excellent web strategy — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Unlike the NRA, there’s no registration or request for personal details. Unlike the NRA, the site uses HTML and doesn’t require Flash except for some interactive applications. And unlike the NRA, PETA makes almost 300 videos — all its PSAs and quite a bit of other video — available for viewing in three different formats and offers a high bandwidth download of all of its video. Moreover, PETA encourages people to distribute and share the video files which widens their audience and saves on bandwidth costs. I have hundreds of megabytes of video from PETA on my web site at the moment. If the NRA were smart, it would make it easy for me to do the same thing with their video.

First the NRA, Now Black Democrats, Opposing Campaign Finance Reform

In May the National Rifle Association and Sen. John McCaine traded pot shots after the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre told ABC that the main purpose of McCain’s campaign finance reform bill was to short circuit the rights to free speech guaranteed under the Constitution.

LaPierre said,

It’s an American tradition that citizens … get to say anything we want any time we want about these politicians. Under the McCain-Feingold bill, if we speak out, what we’ll have to fear is federal investigation by the FBI and a federal prison sentence. … What that bill is for citizens is a Big Brother with a baseball bat.”

McCain responded by saying that the NRA was simply afraid of losing its “influence and access … and that’s really what this is all about.”

Now Salon.Com reports that as many as 15 to 20 members of the House Black Caucus may vote against the House version of the campaign finance reform bill. While the average House candidate raised a little over $900,000, members of the Black Caucus — who often run in heavily Democratic districts where there victory is all but certain — raised on average just under $500,000. Some of the members of the House Black Caucus fear the restrictions on campaign funding will make it harder for them to raise money.

This is especially ironic since most of these members have voted for such bills in the past when it was clear there was no chance they would actually pass.

Source:

Black Democrats vs. McCain Jake Tapper, Salon.Com, June 27, 2001.

McCain Battles NRA over campaign finance reform. The Associated Press, May 20, 2001.

Ban Guns — After I’m Finished Shooting

I vividly remember Barbara Graham’s appearance on CNN during last year’s “Million Mom March” because she symbolized everything that is wrong with the gun control argument. Here she was on national television explaining the tragic death of her son who was murdered in Washington, DC, in 1999. Graham went out about how stricter gun control laws would have prevented her son’s death, the only problem being that Washington, DC, already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country (not to worry, when they can’t buy guns, criminals make them — a 1986 study found that 20% of illegal guns seized in the district were homemade weapons).

I felt sorry for her loss, but that’s no reason to go around arguing for ineffective laws that ultimately end up disarming victims.

Anyway, it turns out Graham herself appreciated the power of guns, and decided to avenge her son’s death by shooting the man responsible. As with her gun control efforts, however, Graham went after the wrong target — she mistakenly shot the wrong person! She ended up shooting Kikko Smith who is now paralyzed from the waist down. Smith remains in the hospital with a bullet lodged in his spine.

On February 1, Graham was convicted on nine separate charges and faces up to 50+ years in jail.

One of the interesting aspects of the case is how liberal newspapers chose to cover it. The Washington Post, for example, ran several stories on Graham’s trial over the past couple weeks but somehow never thought it was relevant to point out Graham’s prominence at the “Million Mom March.” If Graham had been a member of an “extremist” organization such as the National Rifle Association and had actively protested and spoken out on the right of people to bear arms, it is hard to believe that The Post wouldn’t have found a way to include this prominently in their stories. In fact, the headlines would have almost certainly read “Gun Advocate Convicted of Murder” or some such headline rather than the plain old “Mother convicted in shooting” headlines The Post went with.

When guns are outlawed, apparently only gun control activists will have guns.

Source:

Mother Convicted in Shooting. Donna St. George, The Washington Post, February 2, 2001.

‘Million Mom’ activist convicted in shooting. Jon Dougherty, WorldNetDaily.Com, February 5, 2001.

Peter Jennings Pro-Gun Control Ad

In case you missed it last night, ABC ran an hour-long pro-gun control commercial disguised as a news broadcast. The most hilarious part was a profile of the National Rifle Association’s disagreement with Bart Stupak, a Michigan House Democrat who until recently voted with the NRA 100 percent of the time. Then he voted for an inane anti-gun show bill that would have required all gun sellers at gun shows to run 72 hour background checks.

The NRA argued 72 hours checks would have killed gun shows; Stupak says they wouldn’t. Either Stupak doesn’t understand the bill he voted for (which failed, thankfully) or he doesn’t understand gun shows.

Anyway, the interesting thing was how Jennings and ABC chose to portray this as the big, bad horrible NRA vs. the likable, reasonable Stupak. While they gave Stupak plenty of air time to make his case, and spent time debunking the NRA’s claims, it gave almost no time to the NRA to offer an alternative position (in fact ABC simply assumed Stupak was right). Jennings intoned about how Stupak lost the NRA’s support even though he disagreed with them on only “a single vote” to lose their support.

It is hard to imagine ABC giving similar treatment to another civil rights organization. Imagine a member of Congress receiving money from a pro-abortion group, who at some point decides to vote in favor of banning partial birth abortions. Does anybody think for a second that if women’s groups decide to stop giving this Congress person money because of this single vote that this would even make national news, much less be the centerpiece of a pro-life screed in prime time attacking the pro-abortion lobby?

I think not.

Gore Driving NRA Membership Through the Roof

Al Gore has clearly tried to mute his anti-gun pronouncements, going so far as to arrange for Tommy Lee Jones to describe the vice-president hunting. Unfortunately for him, gun owners aren’t buying it and membership in the National Rifle Association has grown by leaps and bounds since Gore wrapped up his party’s nomination.

This month the NRA passed the 4 million members mark, and NRA officials were hinting that membership was continuing to increased rapidly enough that they were well on their way to 5 million members. All of those extra members mean extra money that will in part be used to target Gore and other anti-gun politicians — the NRA will spend up to $20 million in the remaining few weeks until the presidential election.

About the only thing that can be said in favor of Gore’s record on guns is that he isn’t quite as extreme as former Sen. Bill Bradley, who challenged Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination and flat out favors a ban on most guns. Gore, though, favors mandatory registration of all guns which is the first step on the way to a ban.

In an article about the increase (Bush’s Silver Bullet?), John Fund noted,

It’s fashionable for national political reporters to demonize the NRA. But it’s also true that few journalists have ever bothered to find out why so many Americans belong to such a controversial organization. Most NRA members look at the recent successful efforts of governments from Canada to Australia to limit gun ownership and are resolved to give no quarter when it comes to public policy in this country.

Of course the NRA could probably get 15 million members and the media would still insist on trying to marginalize it as a bunch of wacko extremists. The media love to tout the importance of the Constitution, except when it comes to organizations that dare defend the Second Amendment.

Gore is probably wise to avoid going on the attack on gun control because exit polls in the past have suggested that when it comes to guns those who oppose gun control are very likely to be single issue voters who will reject a candidate based simply on that issue alone, whereas while many Americans tell pollsters they favor gun control, they are much less likely to vote for or against a candidate based solely on that issue.

From personal experience, I’m amazed at the number of people I know who don’t own guns, but who have nevertheless joined the NRA in the past 4 to 6 months. Like me, they don’t necessarily want a gun in their home at the moment, but at the same time they don’t want Al Gore and the Justice Department telling them they can’t if they feel they need a gun for protection (and let me tell you — the two kids who live next to me each have an armed robbery conviction and for awhile a woman in our neighborhood was dating a man just out of jail on a homicide charge. I and my wife have a fundamental human right to adequate self defense of ourselves and our daughter, which means a gun if we so choose).