Ah…
So, the NRA does not represent most gun owners but rather an extreme wing and minority of gun owners.
Gotcha.
I honestly thought that most people believed this.
That might be connected to one of the problems in the public discourse, which is that conservatives and moderates are better at understanding the moral concerns of liberals than liberals are at understanding the moral concerns of conservatives (cite). It is going to be difficult to understand the extent and basis of whatever power the NRA has without understanding what NRA supporters want. Saying “how can they have so much power when they are just an extreme minority” misses the point.
I don’t think the power of the NRA is so much “overstated” as “not understood”.
If someone believes this, he or she isn’t ever going to understand anything real about the NRA.
See also “50% of Trump supporters are deplorables”, “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”, etc.
Regards,
Shodan
The NRA understands politics in a way that laypeople don’t. The NRA spends very little on lobbying and direct giving to candidates. It spends almost all of the money on issue advertising through PACS. This gives them total control of their messaging and allows them to focus solely on the gun issue.
They are single minded. So many other groups just want to be good members of the coalition and will patiently wait their turn to have the coalition address their issue. This allows those groups to be taken for granted. The NRA will oppose anyone or support anyone solely based on their issue.
They are inflexible. Momentum is a powerful thing. They refuse to let the camel’s nose in the tent. They fight everything to keep the opponents as far away from any actual damage.
They don’t care about bad PR. They know the media hates them and they don’t care. This allows them freedom to live outside the news cycle and fight the long term struggle.
Their members are motivated and vote. 10% of the voting public is more powerful than 90% if the 10% really cares and the 90% does not. The real question is not how many people agree with the NRA versus disagree, it is how many people are willing to change their vote based on their agreement or disagreement. Guns are expensive and many gun owners have thousands of dollars wrapped up in their hobby. They are much more motivated to keep those guns than other people are to take them.
You would probably lose that bet.
according to their 990:
gross revenue in 2015 was $336MM
$165MM was from membership dues
$14MM was from program fees (like concealed weapons permit classes, etc.)
$19MM came from related organizations (mostly NRA-ILA AFAICT)
$76MM came from donations (some of which comes from the gun industry but a lot of it is individual donations)
$24MM came from advertising revenue (this is mostly the gun industry)
$14 MM from selling NRA stuff (caps, bags, etc. mostly to individuals)
$17MM from licensing the NRA brand (most of this is probably related to selling gun related products)
If I’m a pro-choice pro-gun politician, I can get gun votes.
If I am a pro-life anti-gun politician, there are no anti-gun votes for me out there.
Guns are a political loser for Democrats for the near future and Democrats have to think hard about how much further they want to estrange gun owners.
Pinmin wrote: “Ignoring E-DUB’s snarky swipe at gun owners.” The sentiment was actually articulated to me, albeit minus the “snark”, by the most pro-second amendment person that I know. And actually I’d state that if the NRA lobbyists aren’t exploiting that fact, they’d be gotten rid of and replaced with people who would. Face it, if there’s one organization that is going to use every weapon in its arsenal, it’s them.
Wait, a 2nd amendment supporter said that the NRA uses the specter of crazy gun owners to get more political bang for their buck?
Yes. But my initial post said only “every politician knows that every member is a gun owner”. They (the NRA) don’t have to rub it in.
-
I don’t know how successful it is outside liberal bubbles, when it comes to the NRA, maybe more successful in other applications. If it were really successful v the NRA, the discussion would be how the US came to have strict national gun control.
-
But of course this is the answer and the focus on the NRA is foolishness, at least if anyone really believes some small organization or the ‘huge’ (minuscule actually in the context of the US economy) gun industry is the reason. Way too many voters strongly opposed to more gun control, many of whom verge on being one issue voters on the issue, v. a far, far smaller number of highly motivated pro gun control voters. That’s the obvious reason for the bleak prospects for significantly tightened national gun control in the US.
It’s also pointless to debate if the number of ‘gun owning voters’ is really 30- something% or higher or lower %. The political layout in Congress is as follows. There are a few competitive Congressional districts where a Republican soft on gun rights has a chance of winning, or even has to be somewhat soft to have a chance. Some GOP districts in my state, NJ, are examples but it’s small % of the 435. Then there are safe Democratic seats, a minority; then safe GOP seats where the GOP’er would get primaried if soft on gun rights. Then there are a fair number of competitive districts but where a Democrat must strongly support gun rights to have a chance. The only way to have a Democratic majority is including a bunch of those members from such districts (not numerous now, then again the Democrats aren’t close to a majority given the small % of competitive House seats). The Senate situation is essentially comparable. You have to engineer a basic change in that situation for tight national gun control to have any chance: nowhere near it now. To keep carrying on about the NRA is howling at the moon as a solution, if you think lack of national gun control is a big problem.
Of COURSE the power of the NRA is exaggerated, both by the NRA itself and by its enemies.
The NRA wants to be feared, while liberals enjoy screaming “The Republicans are bought and paid for by the NRA.” In realty, the NRA doesn’t contribute nearly enough money to rent the GOP, let alone but it. They money they contribute to campaigns is insignifgicant. A drop in the bucket.
So if you pool conservatives AND moderates and compare them with a pool of just liberals you get a statistic that you think means something? Do you notice anything about the way this is set up?
But I love the comments section’s 2012 conservative “insights” into the world. A lot can happen in 4 years. Sometimes projection turns out to be introjection, I guess.
You might want to read the cite.
Regards,
Shodan
I did. Are you saying it’s not what you said it was? It seems to have been written in a different world.
I point out this paragraph: “Liberals see conservatives as being motivated by an opposition to liberals’ core values of compassion and fairness, as well as being motivated by their own (non-moral) values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and spiritual purity.”
At the time this was written it seemed like a knock on the limitations of liberal empathy. But is there anyone here who thinks that the liberals would be wrong in that feeling, here in 2017? You just have to be here for a little while to see it.
How is that deep principled conservative intellect going for the conservatives? It must have gone underground. Because no one can see it anymore.
“Conservatives, on the other hand, have a much more complex system of morality. In addition to caring about all of the things liberals do—while of course understanding fairness and liberty in very different ways—conservatives factor in loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity into their conception of morality. It’s these added dimensions that seem to baffle the Left.”
Is this really something that stands up today in 2017?
Conservatives have a hard road ahead. They may be the last to get caught out (Thank you gerrymandering and prejudice!) but it’s not going to go well.
I’m curious at how they arrived at a list of “moral concerns” that each group has. I am guessing it was self reported. If it was self reported then this “study” is of little use.
Consider how these liberals came to their supposedly erroneous conclusions (note that the study said all sides misunderstood the other). What do they have to go on?
Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Fox News and Breitbart leap to mind for starters. Note those are not fringe news sources but very popular in the among conservatives. Limbaugh has the most listeners of any talk show. Fox News is the most watched news channel. Alex Jones was praised by the current president of the United States who apparently listen to him. Beritbart had its founding member as a close advisor to the president.
I wonder where liberals could get the wrong idea with sources like that filling the national discussion?
Further, conservatives are certainly loud in espousing their morals and the superiority of those morals yet somehow rarely seem to apply them if it is inconvenient to them.
Consider their outrage at Harvey Weinstein (which the left joins in vilifying) yet this same crowd voted a self confessed serial sex offender and alleged rapist to the presidency.
Conservatives profess the sanctity of life when it comes to abortion but ignore/hand wave away the death toll guns cause when talking about gun control.
You claim the NRA is not understood yet offer nothing to clarify the issue. Instead you offer smoke and mirrors to obfuscate.
The linked article seems to be based on Haidt’s work, and more can be found here: http://moralfoundations.org/
The left ignored the accusations of rape and sexual assault against Bill Clinton, the right ignored Trump’s own words. The right is certainly loving the downfall of Weinstein, much like the left enjoyed the takedown of Roger Ailes.
As for the NRA - they know how to rally the troops (I am a Life Member).
There’s a link to the study in the article. It’s not behind a paywall. Here it is. I can only skim it right now but it looks like they address your concern and use a bigger dataset than their sample to define the concerns.
Someone like Alex Jones is a nutjob first, “conservative” second. When Bush was in office his nutjobbery aligned less with what is now called the alt-right. And Breitbart took it’s current state under the leadership and of Bannon and Yiannopoulos, it was more standard conservative before Andrew Breitbart died (2012).
Not a very good analogy. One involves a direct action that involves (what conservatives see as) a death, at nearly 100% chance. The other is exercised thousands if not millions of times per day, and only results in death much less than 1% of the time.
Otherwise, I’ll think you’ll find that people are very good at maintaining cognitive dissonance no matter their political alignment.
Maybe you should try actually reading the study which was, in fact, linked to on the web page Shodan cited. If you’d bothered to do that, you’d have found that the list of moral concerns came from the paper, cited right in the introduction.
It’s easier to leap to the conclusion that peer-reviewed research that doesn’t correspond to your prejudices must be wrong than it is to offer an informed criticism, but I see no reason to take your uninformed criticism seriously. Particularly as in this case obtaining the requisite information would take you about five minutes.
On preview – the first link was provided twice over already. The paper that establishes the list you’re concerned about is the one that was definitely peer reviewed, and is also not behind a pay wall.
Opponents tend to grossly overestimate and demonize organizations that act in ways they don’t like.
The NRA, AARP and AMA* are examples. What influence these groups have reflects their degree of support among the population at large that fits into their demographics.
*this is an especially silly one. A shrinking minority of U.S. physicians are members of the American Medical Association, which lacks the terrifying power ascribed to it by opponents, especially those identifying with alt med/quackery.