Tag Archives: NRA

Institutional Capture

I’ve mentioned before that the left has, in the long-term, won almost every political battle of the last century. The one big area where the US (and just the US) has not been moving overly left is gun freedom. The main reason for this is the NRA, but the NRA wasn’t always as powerful or hardline as it is now.

In the second half of the 1970s, the NRA faced a crossroads. Would it remain an Establishment institution, partnering with such mainstream entities as the Ford Foundation and focusing on shooting competitions? Or would it roll up its sleeves and fight hammer and tongs against the gun-control advocates? Or flee to the Mountain West? The latter was appealing, and the NRA leadership decided to move the headquarters to Colorado and also spend $30 million to build a recreational facility in New Mexico called the National Outdoor Center.

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite.

“Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Carter, a longtime NRA board member, had arrived in Washington in 1975 as founding director of a new NRA lobbying unit, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA). His pugnacious approach, which rankled the Old Guard, was captured in a letter he wrote to the entire NRA membership to discuss the fight in Congress over gun control: “We can win it on a simple concept —No compromise. No gun legislation.”

The right is holding its own in this particular battle because hardliners captured the NRA (and then later recaptured it after a moderate pushback). This is how the left has always won, by capturing institutions: the academy, NGO’s, the media, the bureaucracy, etc.

If the right wants to win, it needs to figure out a way to take over pre-existing institutions. Making institutions is also good, but it takes a lot more effort. Conquering pre-existing institutions and their resource base is better.

5 Reasons Gun Owners Should Join the NRA

Luke McKinney at Cracked has an(other) idiotic article lacking that substitutes snark and insult for anything resembling logic or reason over at Cracked on why we should hate the NRA (Spoiler alert: Because they think you should be free to own a gun). So, I’m going to reply to his distortions:

#5. They’re Paid By Gun Manufacturers

In 2013, Business Insider reported that less than half of the NRA’s revenue came from membership dues and fees …

Which means almost half of its funds come from member dues and fees (it has 5 million members according to wiki). Compared to other lobbying groups, that’s pretty high. For example, the AMA (the second largest lobbying group next the the Chamber of Commerce) supposedly represents physicians. It gets only 16% of its fees from dues.

In this section, Luke throws out a bunch of random unrelated trivia, but never gives any reason why they matter. Why is it bad that the NRA is half-funded by the industry? Luke never explains, he just says it is. In fact, I’m happy that the gun companies support their customers and their freedoms.

Also, notice how Luke links an article saying the NRA engages in illegal activities, when the article’s big findings (after the updates are taken into account) were that a website page was accidentally improperly routed, that taxes were properly paid but incompletely documented, and that a single box was left unchecked on tax papers (not effecting taxes paid).

So, Luke McKinney believes that if your webmaster screws up a link and you screw up your tax forms, nobody should ever associate with you again. I’ve done both, you all must never read my blog again.

#4. They’re Allowed To Casually Talk About Shooting People

Ted Nugent made a joke about shooting senators, therefore the NRA is evil. (That is literally his argument).

Cracked made multiple jokes about beating retarded children, therefore Cracked is evil. If Luke McKinney has any decency at all he will quit writing for Cracked. Or does Luke support beating developmentally disabled children?

#3. NRA Board Members Are All Kinds Of Scary

According to McKinney, because one NRA member argues for school paddlings you should leave the NRA. Maybe you don’t agree with school paddlings, but it is a normal practice and is hardly that frightening to support. 26% of the US supports school corporal punishment: so Luke literally thinks a quarter of the US is so evil you should not interact with them.

Fellow board member Don Young, a congressman from Alaska, described the BP Gulf oil spill as a “natural phenomena,”

What he actually said, right where Luke links is:

Young said: “This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a national phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. … We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover.”

If you are not retarded (sorry Luke) you can easily read, even in that conveniently clipped quote, that it is referring to oil spilling into the sea is a natural phenomena, not that the BP spill itself was.

Then Luke just flat out lies:

and thinks wolves would be a great solution to the homelessness problem.

Actually, if you read the article Luke linked, you can see that he wasn’t talking about solving the homeless problem at all. He was talking about how wolves are dangerous and how urbanites who never had to deal with the danger of wolves are making laws to prevent rural folk from protecting themselves. Of course, Luke, being an ignorant urbanite, has no idea about the danger of wolves in rural areas where their aren’t a lot of police and where animal control is far away. It almost seems like he supports wolves killing people.

So, if you are one of the quarter of the US who support paddling in schools and believe that rural people don’t deserve to get eaten by wolves, you are so scary that everyone should disassociate from you.

#2. They’re Pretty Racist

The NRA’s 2015 annual meeting featured a presentation on how whole swathes of American cities had been turned into Muslim “no-go zones,”

It seems Luke McKinney thinks Muslims are a race. I think that makes him a racist, not to mention just plain ignorant of biology, sociology, and religion.

“Demographically symbolic” is a masterpiece. Nine syllables that would be less obvious if he’d just screamed, “Racism sexism racism!” It’s a code word, but not a disguised code word;

He links to this:

Eight failed years of one demographically symbolic president is enough. Eight years of the Obama-Clinton regime has sent our nation into a tailspin of moral decay, deceit and destruction.

I guess Luke McKinney thinks the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein is racist for thinking of the emotional symbolism of Obama’s victory, or Habib Aruna for thinking of the sybolism of an African American winning resoundingly twice, or NBC news, or CTV news, etc. The symbolism of the first African American winning the presidency was a huge topic in 2008. I guess Luke’s ignorant of recent political history as well.

He went on to blame the president for all problems, to describe how guns solve all problems, and to explain, “For that right, NRA will always fight and, believe me, the fight is coming.” Of course, there’s no possible problem with the leader of an armed group blaming a single named individual for all the problems in the world in public and insisting “the fight is coming.” Not even in a country where a Cracked writer can be placed on the No-Fly list for writing a satirical article. Right now the only difference between NRA talks and Al-Qaeda videos is production value.

Do I honestly need to explain how retarded this is?

Maybe I do. Luke believes that using a fighting metaphor to describe a political battle (oh no, a war metaphor, I must be Hitler) is exactly equivalent to to literally talking about blowing thousands of other people, and yourselves, up. (But only when the evil NRA does it).

I am sure Luke has never used a war metaphor before.

#1. They Blame Victims (And Everything Else)

The NRA makes the very accurate point that if you vote against people’s ability to defend themselves they won’t have the ability to defend themselves. This makes them evil (somehow, he doesn’t exactly explain how).

After Sandy Hook, Wayne LaPierre blamed music videos, movies, video games — they’re on course to blame every object in existence for shootings except for objects that actually shoot. Blaming everything except the gun is their only job, and the angrier it makes people, the better it works.

Luke McKinney believes guns are magical objects that have their own agency and willfully kill people. People who don’t share this belief are implied to be evil (for some unexplained reason).

****

Finally, though, through all the distortions Luke finally gets to his real point:

Their sole function is to prevent rational debate…They’ve buried the country under so much bullshit that even intelligent Americans start talking about individual rights and waiting periods, as if there was any sane sequence of words that ends with a peacetime civilian holding an AR-15

He wants to limit any discussion of guns to “rational debate” and by “rational debate” he means people who agree with him that guns he doesn’t like should be banned being able to talk and everybody else should shut up. He wants to control the discussion and he wants to limit your ability for self-defence. And he is willing to distort the truth and slander others to do so.

The whole point of his rambling, illogical, unconnected anti-NRA rant was that he hates the fact that civilians can own a semi-automatic weapon. He wants to take them away from you.

Join the NRA so he can’t.

Join the NRA: where business and citizens work together to protect freedom, where celebrities make jokes, where people don’t believe rural dwellers deserve to be eaten by wolves, where people make and understand common metaphors and use basic communication skills, and where people don’t believe inanimate object have agency.

If you value sanity, join the NRA!

Establishment Conservatives and their Wives

I was reading this piece on the NRA (h/t: Instapundit). It charts the evolution of the NRA from a sportsmen lobby to the tyrant-fighting machine it is today. Anyway, while reading I noticed this line describing the old guard establishment NRA before they were ousted by the grassroots (emphasis mine):

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite.

“Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Everybody knows about the phenomenon of conservatives going the capital (or New York), rejecting their roots and become properly behaved house conservatives, representing some version of liberalism-lite as conservatism. The establishment conservatives are the bane of the conservative movement.How much of this trend is due to social pressue?

Once in the big city it must be difficult for conservatives to move in the social circles of the chattering classes filled with bigoted leftists, freedom-haters, and socialists.

How much of the spinelessness of establishment conservatives is because their wives don’t get invited to parties?

If you, your wife, and your family were being socially excluded and all that was necessary to get in the “in” crowd was to be more “reasonable”, how long would most remain “unreasonable”? How long could you put up with your wife’s complaints about your low social status and not being able to attend all the events “everybody is going to”?

I have no data, but it’s interesting to think about.

Could conservatives and conservative organizations create a conservative social circle in the political and cultural capitals that rivals the network of the chattering classes? If conservatives had their own events “everybody was going to” and wives regularly got invited to parties hosted by conservatives would we have less trouble with spineless establishment conservatives becoming one with the Cathedral?

Just a thought. Remember, it’s often the little things we don’t notice that matter lot.