They represent the people who will light up the switchboards at their congresscritters’ offices whenever the NRA gets a bee in its bonnet.
I stopped in to once again note the stupefyingly foolish and counterproductive nature of pretending that a lobby group like the NRA is a giant bogeyman and doesn’t reflect substantial public sentiment on behalf of its goals. Then I saw this gem.
Wow. That stings almost as much as when Bricker got ticked off during a thread about Conscience Pharmacists denying contraceptive drugs to women and swore that he was going to become a Conscience Activist because we were annoying him so much.
You fools - stop baiting Bricker into donating his vast wealth to causes you abhor!
One wonders what wealth and power other frequent targets of board disdain have amassed thanks to the Bricker Rebound Phenomenon - homeopaths? Anti-vaccine loons? 9/11 conspiracy-phobes? The mind reels…
I recall seeing reports as far back as the late 80s/early 90s that the NRA leadership’s positions and what they advocated for were in disagreement with what over 90% of the common membership believed. The general membership of the NRA and the leadership appear to be pretty different groups of people with separate agendas.
How much of that is industry money and how much that is the fact that only the most intense believers are likely to make gun advocacy their career I don’t know.
Hmm…by my calculations, if you take the upper limit of “gun industry” donations since 2005 into account, that’s still less than 1/4 of NRA revenue for a single recent year.
Maybe there’s something more than gun maker greed at work here?
OK, but looking at Part VIII (Statement of Revenue) on their 990, it’s rather hard to tell what the other >half is composed of. For instance, the second-biggest item besides member dues is the $58,572,260 on line 1f (“All other contnbutlons, gifts, grants, and similar amounts not included above”) which is not broken down any further, AFAICT.
Even assuming that the NRA ‘really’ represents gun manufacturers, how does this diverge from the lobbying wants of the gun owners who are members? To me, the NRA is a gun rights lobbying group, so ISTM they naturally would meet both groups requirements…right? My dad and his company are both members/contributors to the NRA, and he seems pretty happy with their efforts wrt lobbying for things he thinks are important, so I guess I’m not seeing the issue between whether the NRA represents one over the other…like I said, ISTM they represent both, and that’s the way both groups within the NRA want it.
This article is over two years old so it’s possible some information is dated.
The manufacturers clearly have a great deal of influence on the NRA board, and they contribute a lot to the coffers of the organization. It appears to be a symbiotic relationship- the manufacturers supply the money to the NRA who stirs up paranoia among its members to drive up sales. Policy comes from the board, and it seems that the big wallets have the best seats at the table and there is little chance for a regular guy to join the board. Sure, the NRA gladly takes dues from the great unwashed, but it certainly doesn’t answer to them.
It’s part of the spite Bricker out of his money campaign.
Boy am I stung by the idea of a conservative donating to conservative causes. I surely better stop arguing on a message board, or he just might donate again!
I have a hard time believing this. It’s been obvious for decades where the NRA is coming from, and people don’t tend to keep on sending in their dues to organizations whose direction they are unhappy with.
Maybe there was a period of a few years after the 1978 coup when there were still a lot of nonpolitical sportsmen and gun enthusiasts in the NRA, but that was 35 years ago. By now, if you didn’t like what the NRA stands for, you wouldn’t be a member. There are surely exceptions to that, but not in numbers that matter.
Good question!
Let’s explore that, shall we?
For the last few years what gun owners wanted was for the President not to take away their guns. Now, where ever did they get the idea that the President wanted to take away their guns? The NRA.
edited to add: And what were gun owners told to do to stop the President from taking away their guns? Just check that link I provided for the answer.
[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
Let’s explore that, shall we?
For the last few years what gun owners wanted was for the President not to take away their guns. Now, where ever did they get the idea that the President wanted to take away their guns? The NRA.
edited to add: And what were gun owners told to do to stop the President from taking away their guns? Just check that link I provided for the answer.
[/QUOTE]
So, what you are saying is a lobbying group spins things to make their members feel they need said group to lobby for them? In other news, dog bites man. 
And, of course, as soon as there is political traction, the President et al DO start making noises about new gun controls and regulation…and, what do they start with? Attempts to revive the ridiculous AWB, which is a huge red flag to gun owners since it’s so fucking stupid and pointless…which only fans the flames of paranoia and justifies the NRA’s gloom and doom to it’s members. Brilliant! Even if that’s not what the President and others really wanted, that well has been so poisoned by past gun grabber actions that almost anything wrt new regulations is going to get a knee jerk reaction…and, especially the first reaction of reviving the AWB.
“Whom does the NRA really represent…”
On a humorous note, you get 46,700 hits if you Google “NRA fires back”.
I’m utterly unconvinced that this is true. Here’s a cite:
Also, do you think that if Max Baucus believed that 90% of NRA members wanted him to vote for the Manchin-Toomey amendment that he’d oppose it? What sense would that make? What possible political upside would there be in that for him? Piss off 90% to curry the favor of 10%? Isn’t it more likely that he thinks Bloomberg doesn’t actually know what NRA members believe?
Bricker makes a good point, but it’s even more complicated. NRA membership fees aren’t used for lobbying. That’s a separate arm of the NRA called the NRA-ILA (Institute for Legislative Action).
I am an NRA member and I have been since childhood. However, I pay every year since I don’t want to commit to lifetime membership. I want the option of leaving if they change politically and I come to disagree with them in the future.
But in addition to the ~$20 or so I pay annually, I always cut another check to the NRA-ILA for them to have money to lobby with. The amount varies, but it’s always more than $20.
But as has been pointed out in other threads, the NRA’s power doesn’t come from money. It comes from the members.
Many groups or companies outspend the NRA by multiple orders of magnitude, yet don’t have nearly the influence.
Exactly. A coworker of mine used to bring in his letters from liberal causes like the ACLU and the Sierra Club. We’d compare them to my letters from the NRA and the over the top language COMPLETE with scary emphasis that was WAAAY overdone was equally foolish in each.
Advocacy groups must use the sort of hyperbole and rhetoric that they do because it gets better results. This is true of all of them, not just the NRA.
I’m sorry, but the groups and/or companies that give them the lobby money are the ones with the real power. If the typical NRA member isn’t contributing to the lobby fund, she/he doesn’t have a voice to speak of. Those lobbyists aren’t working for them at all.
And the same goes for any lobbying group. Basically, you wouldn’t give your money or be a member if you didn’t agree with the direction they were going in. This doesn’t seem that difficult to understand. As Debaser points out, it’s the same with environmental or liberal groups too…you join because they ARE going in the same direction you want to go and are lobbying for the same things you want. If they aren’t, then you don’t join or you leave the group for someone else who is doing what you want.
Adolphus Busch, mega money beer man quits the NRA due to his belief that
the NRA speaks mainly for gun and ammo mfg.
“The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established,” wrote Busch. “Your current strategic focus clearly places priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members.”
“One only has to look at the makeup of the 75-member board of directors, dominated by manufacturing interests, to confirm my point. The NRA appears to have evolved into the lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers rather than gun owners,” he wrote.
That’s all. For what it’s worth.