A baby babbling to it’s parents would easily clear that bar.
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I agree. It would be far more effective if we actually figured out a way to reform lobbying, at least to where it’s not longer tied to campaign contributions. That’s where the primary poison comes in - the professionalization and commodification of the process of lobbying law makers for meaningful reform.
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Regional club bylaws
This is the 2009 national bylaws below
http://staging.progressive.org/sites/default/public_files/NRA%20bylaws.compressed.pdf
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Fair warning from an ex-NRA member: if you join, they will spam you endlessly over perceived issues and various calls for action. You can slow the spam but you cannot stop it, and unsubscribe requests are only honored when they feel like it.
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I guess they use the shotgun approach.
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Because there aren’t thousands of grieving mothers (of any race) in Chicago every weekend. In fact, Chicago isn’t even on the short list of most dangerous cities in the U.S.
But sure, let’s use the specter of blacks with guns to support the fears of whites. We all know what happens if all those grieving black mothers insisted on their Constitutional right to own AR-15s.
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The proverbial “good guy with a gun” failed.
I guess we needed maor guns.
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I wonder what a bloody assault on NRA leaders and national facilities would engender.
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Just found this video and it made me think of your earlier points.
The most interesting note to me (about halfway through the video) is when Velshi states he’s a gun owner who had never signed up to be an NRA member, yet he gets a membership every year in the mail.
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Like the Mormon and Catholic churches, that keep you in their records forever as a “member” unless you go through a very formal process to extricate yourself from their clutches?
Makes it much easier to claim large membership if they claim everyone.
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This is a pretty good recent summary, to my (British) mind:
http://www.cracked.com/article_25195_how-nra-lost-its-mind.html
My take on the NRA is that it’s a superbly efficient lobbying group, run by arms manufacturers, that has realised the best way to apply political pressure is to whip your grassroots support up into a fury and convince them that the single issue you are trying to lobby for (increased revenue for arms manufacturers) is the most important issue that its members could possibly care about.
Several other lobbying groups try to do the same thing (Sea Shepherd, PETA, MADD, ASH, WWF and FOREST spring immediately to mind but there are many, many more) but only the NRA has been truly effective in convincing their members that if they don’t vote exactly in accordance with NRA policy, their Entire Way Of Life Will Be At Risk.
The issue with the NRA isn’t funding, total membership, or even really belief; it’s about making sure that 90+% of their members vote, every time, in exactly the way they dictate.
5 million members is effectively nothing but if only 60 million people vote, and that vote is split down party lines, what politician in a swing state in their right mind would risk alienating a potential sixth of their voters?
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But once we get those social studies teachers armed, watch out bad guys!
I am very familiar with people who have hazardous duty training, and just being able to shoot a gun is not the same thing as being able to shoot it in a high pressure situation. You literally get tunnel vision. The whole experience of the world changes when the adrenalin is flooding your system.
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I just keep imagining this little YouTube series where we have the typical teacher stereotypes - the nerdy math prof, the wallflower social studies teacher, the stern librarian - and they are going about their day and then ACTIVE SHOOTER ALERT and there is the teacher whipping out their AR15 and taking the bad guy down!!
Seriously - my parents were teachers so most of their friends were, too, and not one of them I would give a gun to.
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Not to mention, if the shooter knows the teacher has a gun, guess who’s going to be the first target?
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Hitting them in the wallet seems to be working, but we’ll have to keep an eye on to make sure corporate sponsors don’t come back:
You can also find out business members of the NRA here, so you can not do business with them:
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You just need to get the teachers who play Call of Duty, don’t you? After all, it’s the violent video games and movies that are causing all of this, right?
I keep expecting Jack Thompson to somehow end up back in the spotlight again…
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honestly, the world’s been going to hell in a handbasket ever since the damn lindyhoppers. shakes cane
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