Would the private ownership of guns in the USA be banned like they are in other countries or would liberal politicians leave gun ownership alone?
I’m asking this because at work we saw the new Micheal Bloomberg ad where he talked about fighting the NRA. All the guys I work with, including many who were democrats, well they are also to a tee pro gun, hated the ad.
What I would like to discuss is if it wasnt for the powerful lobbying work of the NRA, what gun restrictions would we see?
To clarify the scope of your proposed debate, could you explain which countries you have in mind which have banned private gun ownership?
The 96 AWB would have been renewed. When Obama was elected, without the NRA stoking fears of confiscation, gun sales would have continued their downward trend. Owning small arsenals of AR-15s and carrying a concealed weapon at all possible times wouldn’t be seen as “patriotic” ways to stand up to the Democrats. The guy who came up with the “American flag but made out of 5.56 rounds” decal that I saw the other day wouldn’t have sold as many stickers.
With gun sales down and owning AR-15s no longer seen as “one’s civic duty,” a few high profile mass shootings wouldn’t happen, including Sandy Hook. With the AWB still in place, Democrats wouldn’t be under so much pressure to “do something” about the problem of gun violence, which would go back to being a problem that only affected poor black and brown people.
I think that’s about it in a nutshell.
The NRA is a symptom of a political problem: there are a LOT of gun owners and many of them are single issue voters. If the NRA disbanded tomorrow, these gun owners would still exist, they would still vote the same way, you’d just have a temporary vacuum which would quickly be filled by a new gun rights organization that would represent all those voters.
Attacking the NRA is politically convenient because it’s a political action group that most people don’t like, which is true of most political action groups that get involved in legislative fights on issues of controversy. But politicians are avoiding the real issue, which is gun owners and their votes. Because attacking actual voters never works out well for politicians.
The poltiics of gun control are similar to the politics of abortion. In an environment where everyone acknowledges gun rights, opposition to common sense regulation would not be significant. But gun rights advocates see ANY regulations as an attempt to move the ball towards the eventual goal of total bans on civilian gun ownership. Just as in the abortion debate, pro-choice activists will tolerate no regulations whatsoever because they know pro-lifers don’t want a half a loaf. They want the whole loaf. In Europe, where everyone is basically pro-choice, abortion is restricted and there isn’t much controversy around it because the basic idea of abortion rights is not under assault.
True.
Demonizing lobbing groups like the NRA and AIPAC ignores the fact that their views are in sync with a large and active portion of the electorate. These groups can be countered by equal or better organization, tactics and (shudder) even new ideas.
You guys are thinking too short term.
Remember, looking back until the spike in crime in the 1960s - and cold fear of communist invasion - the NRA was one of the leading advocates at both the state and federal level for gun regulation. The current scorched earth no compromise positions developed in the 1970s. Hell, the group didn’t even have an official lobbying effort until the mid-70s.
But, success and opposition builds more success. While the NRAs ‘members’ are useful, the bills are really paid by the big manufacturers just as occurs in all large trade groups in Washington.
New positions led to much more lobbying money and some success led to opposition and the hardening of positions across the political spectrum. This led to even MORE lobbying money to maintain the fight and keep the public worked up about buying guns and gun-related merchandise.
So by hardening their position, the NRA ended up moving from an advocacy group to a money machine. And once the money starts flowing the people to which it is flowing, regardless of their own beliefs, will work hard to maintain that flow. People respond to incentives generally in the short term.
That’s how we got where we are.
It’s very possible that, absent the NRA - founded to teach former soldiers to shoot because their officers found they couldn’t - there would have been no AWB, no persistent gun fetishism and we’d be arguing about private ownership of spatulas or something. Gun ownership had been trending down during the 1950s and 1960s until the new militant management came into play. It’s possible that would have continued and having one in the present day would have been a curiousity for the neighborhood like having a beehive or a classic car is today.
Yeah, but have you seen it now? Their members are very busy nowadays making it a glass house.
I disagree. I don’t feel the main agenda of the NRA is to oppose actual gun control laws. It’s main agenda is to create a fear of hypothetical gun control laws. They’re presenting themselves as the solution to a problem that only exists in people’s minds because they created it.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton never actually said they wanted gun confiscation. So if we didn’t have the NRA going around claiming that they wanted gun confiscation, the subject would never have come up. The single issue voters you spoke of wouldn’t have had the issue.
Strawman arguments are easily dismissed aren’t they?
The NRA doesn’t fight gun confiscation (at least not in reality) as that would take a whole lot of changing the constitution and the very fabric of our culture. The NRA does fight against ANY law that limits the rights of law abiding gun owners.
If there were no NRA (and I am imagining that no one else filled a void) then the gun issues of today would probably be sanctioned by our legislation after gun incidents. We would definitely not have gun confiscation but we’d likely have the AWB in place as a red herring to those wanting to “do something” about any public gun incident that the media sensationalized.
Too many single issue voters for anyone to think that sans the NRA, that the US would be anything akin to any other country that allowed total or relative gun control.
Yes, but the postulate is what if there were no NRA.
I’m saying that, absent the NRA’s efforts since the takeover in 1975 those single-issue voters would not be single issue voters. They’d be more mainstream voters for whom gun ownership may or may not be a part of their voting calculus.
We saw a lot of those pop up in the 1970s in response to the leftward drift of the country. Abortion, evangelicals, guns and so forth. All came about - and were massively funded - in the 1970s as a political force. There may be some overlap now, but there wasn’t then. These voters have now almagamated into the ‘conservative movement’ that we see today. They now have an identity and vote that way.
It works both ways, too. A large identity and unitarian push on one side tends to radicalize and single-issue the other.
The mindset that the NRA represents has already been alluded to, but I’ll put it in stark terms. They are white people who want protection against Others, mostly people of color and immigrants, an overlapping set.
The mindset would exist without the NRA, although with less political clout and focus. Without that clout and focus, a limited number of gun control laws would have been implemented, mostly to expand background checks and restrict guns and devices whose sole purpose is to kill large numbers of people in a very short time. You know, exactly what is being asked for today.
The Second Amendment would stand just as it has since the 19th century. The white people who want protection from Others and “liberals” would still have their guns. Only a handful of people would think twice about bump stocks because there wouldn’t be 500,000 of them sold since 2010 and which are now illegal despite the NRA. And mass shootings would still happen regularly, though perhaps will smaller numbers of dead.
The NRA is fighting against the various Red Flag laws that have been enacted?
Is it your stance that red flag laws hamper law abiding gun owners?
The NRA certainly seems to think so, but only in some cases. I’m not well versed on what the difference is between the various red flag laws and which ones the NRA has “permitted” and which ones they’ve fought against, but there’s no doubt that all of them limit the rights of law abiding gun owners. That’s kinda the point of them. If you could only take guns away from non-law-abiding gun owners they wouldn’t be doing anything to prevent mass shootings, which are typically committed by law abiding gun owners.
Of course. These people have broken no laws, and they get their guns taken away. If that is not “hampering law abiding gun owners” then I don’t know what is.
Of course they do, in the sense that someone is getting their guns taken away because someone else thinks they might do something dangerous with them. Are you presuming that anyone facing a red-flag hearing is by definition a law-breaker? Just from wikipedia, for what it’s worth:
So that’s, what, 64 prevented suicides versus 698 law-abiding citizens who were unfairly subjected to temporary infringement of one of the most important (some argue MOST important) civil right? Sure, it might prevent some mass shootings, but… rights!
I think it’s worth pointing out that for some gun owners, the NRA is a moderating influence. They give cover to the anti-gunners to pass (some modest) gun control legislation. I know it’s hard to see from where most of the board’s members sit on the political spectrum, but more than a few gun owners view the NRA as too timid in defense of the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
On a different note, I strongly suspect that without the NRA or something else like it few people would consider the second amendment an important civil right.
I doubt it. The NRA didn’t transform itself into the premier RKBA advocacy organization in the country and then attract a bunch of people to the idea (of the RKBA as an important civil right). People adopted the idea first, and then essentially took over the NRA to use it as a vehicle to express that idea.
That is a frightening thought.