Same reason there is no anti-Walmart, Lockheed, EXXON or AIG lobby: Big Business is untouchable, even in the face of mass murder.
the real question there was “why does the left place such an emphasis on the NRA?”
Because they keep losing to it.
Regards,
Shodan
I would have thought that was obvious. Fools typically do what they do because they’ve somehow been convinced or deluded themselves into believing it’s in their best interest. The smart money keeps a very low profile on this issue. The NRA is the only overtly tangible target.
As the OP, maybe I should clarify what I meant by “anti-NRA”: an effort that’s not against the NRA per we, but one that uses the NRA’s tactics for exactly the opposite ends: raising funds, lobbying lawmakers and organizing voters for gun control.
As I recall from the excellent PBS/Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition, state-level prohibition in the early 20th Century, and the 18th Amendment at the national level, were the result of a highly-organized single-issue voting bloc marshaled by the Anti-Saloon League. The League would endorse or target candidates based entirely on whether they supported or opposed prohibition, and its members voted and donated accordingly. And the League was successful: generally, “dry” candidates endorsed by the League won their elections and “wet” candidates targeted by the League lost theirs.* Conversely, the 21st Amendment passed when the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), an equally one-issue organization, arose to seek repeal of the 18th Amendment.
Carrying this over to the present issue, the NRA like the League points a cadre of true-believer voters in the desired direction, to vote for and against candidates based solely on their position on gun control, and those voters are motivated to indeed vote in the desired manner. So long as the NRA has enough money to publicize the gun-control positions of candidates – not terribly expensive in the age of Facebook and Twitter – it has political power. I’m sure donations etc. from gun manufacturers don’t hurt the NRA, but IMHO that’s not the NRA’s source of power, a bloc of voters willing to vote based solely on a candidate’s gun-control stance is.
However, unlike the AAPA who could unify around a single position – repeal of the 18th Amendment – an anti-NRA does not have a ready-made unified position because, as has been noted above, “gun control” is not a single position. The NRA merely has to keep saying “no,” but an anti-NRA would have to reach a broad and motivating consensus on what its members want to say “yes” to. Make the desired/fought-for regulations too strong, too close to the NRA stereotype of “gun grabbing” and you lose the support of moderate supporters of gun control. Make the organization’s position too compromise-y to attract moderates and undercut “gun grabbing” rhetoric, and it likely has (to paraphrase Daniel Burnham) no magic to stir voter’s blood and probably itself will not be realized. The NRA will still call that moderate compromise “gun grabbing” and its voters will not be divided or unmotivated.
*That’s the impression I got from the Burns documentary, but a little googling on the subject is more ambiguous about the League’s success in promoting drys and punishing wets at the ballot box.
That’s an interesting analysis John, but I see a couple problems with it. Alcohol’s pervasiveness in our culture goes far beyond guns in terms of the single-issue demographic. You either liked to drink or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you didn’t care about the politics. There are plenty of people on both sides of the gun issue and most all of them with the exception of the remainder somewhere in the middle (remember there was no “middle” ground when it came to prohibition), care deeply about it.
You point out the 2nd problem with the prohibition analogy yourself: Publicity. Back in the day, influencing public opinion and politicians (lobbying) in any direction desired, good, bad or otherwise was a relatively trivial proposition for deep-pocketed power brokers with the right contacts in newspaper and government. The Internet and media of all kinds make pulling the wool at a societal level much more difficult today with higher ratios of educated, better-informed information consumers doing exactly what we are doing right now.
At the end of the day, it’s really not the voters and their issue or issues that matter at all. Legislators are the ones actually doing the bidding, and their proclivity to follow voter’s wishes is notoriously fickle anyway. Maybe we need some single-issue congressmen.
There are two problems with the idea of a gun control lobby, although they do exist:
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Pro-gun voters are single issue voters. Anti-gun voters generally treat it as a low priority. This of course has been mentioned numerous times in this thread.
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There are differing approaches to gun violence. One, obviously, is to limit access to guns. There are weak lobbies for that, such as the Brady Coalition and whatever the heck Michael Bloomberg is doing. But there is a much stronger anti-gun lobby: crime victims, and they tend to call for tougher sentencing for those who misuse guns. The NRA supports tougher sentencing as well. Think of it like MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Instead of calling for closing the saloons as in the prohibition days, they called for stiffer sentences for those who misused alcohol. This approach tends to be much more popular than trying to limit access. And it makes sense. If 99% of gun owners are responsible, then gun control is stupid. Just jail the 1% who are assholes. Same with liquor. You don’t ban liquor, you jail people who liquor up and get behind the wheel.
Yes, regarding the first point, I was one of the ones who alluded to that in #27, but it’s been suggested that with the spate of spectacular gun violence in recent years, attitudes may be shifting towards stronger support of gun control.
Your second point sounds reasonable on the surface, but not when you think it through. The myth of “tougher sentencing” is in large measure what has filled American’s prisons to levels rarely seen elsewhere in the free world, yet perversely, also created a high rate of recidivism. The reasons it’s not very effective are numerous and complex, but I can give you some simple reasons that just ratcheting up penalties for drunk driving has limited effectiveness. To be sure, it’s important to have strong penalties and effective enforcement as a way of changing the cultural wink-and-a-nod toleration of drunk driving, but beyond a certain point more draconian penalties just don’t accomplish much.
Among the reasons for this is that alcoholism is a sickness, and you can’t legislate away sickness by imposing penalties on it. This is why so many convicted drunk drivers are habitual repeat offenders, getting caught time after time and facing increasing penalties but they just don’t care – or are unable to care. There are other reasons, too, like the perverse impairment of judgment caused by alcohol, leading to rationalizations that one is perfectly fit to drive and/or definitely won’t get caught. There are valid analogies with penalties for gun crimes, but as a panacea for gun violence the draconian-penalty approach is many ways even worse. Let’s start by taking your numbers at face value. Suppose only 1% of gun owners are irresponsible assholes as you suggest, and/or are mentally unstable. Are you going to lock up several million assholes for life to prevent gun abuse? And even if you did, what about all the other assholes and potential mentally deranged individual who are NOT gun owners, but are friends and relatives or live in the same household and have easy access to those guns? Meanwhile those millions of gun-totin’ risk factors are going to continue driving up American’s extraordinary rate of gun violence, unseen anywhere else in the civilized world.
Furthermore, as I noted in my post in this other thread, mental illness is not necessarily a binary thing that you either have or don’t have – just about anyone faced with a sufficient sequence of bad events can exhibit extreme emotions to a level that constitutes a clinical pathology and drives the person, at least temporarily, to irrational behavior, including homicide, suicide, or even random mass murder. There’s only one way to protect society from those hazards so efficiently enabled by guns, and it is assuredly NOT by informing everyone that homicide or mass murder by gun is going to be treated very, very seriously! What do you think just about every such maniac who has almost invariably ended up killing himself would care about the legal penalties for what he’s doing? The only way to fix the problem is the way that every other country in the world has done it.
There is a ton of support for the timid measures Democrats are supporting, but as long as it’s a #25 priority for Democratic and independent voters it just won’t happen. It’s not the only issue where that’s a problem.
I’d argue that in the case of drunken driving penalties and the odds of getting caught are still too low to deter behavior. I think we can probably do a lot more. And I’m not even talking about jail time. First offense-30 day suspended license. Second offense-10 year suspension.
Well, we’ve tried gun control in the 70s and 80s and gun crime increased. We tried getting tough on crime and it reduced crime across the board. Now of course there are other explanations possible, such as lead and increased access to abortion to explain the reduction in crime, but there is actually a correlation between tough sentencing and reduced crime and there is not one between gun control laws and reduced crime. And as states have pulled back a little over concern for mass incarceration, we are starting to see crime rates tick up again slightly.
But that’s all another argument. One of the problems with products that contribute to social ills is that there is a lot of division over how to deal with the problem for those who think it’s a problem. And they also have to fight with the people who think it’s not a problem at all. So on one side you’ve got gun rights supporters, and on the other you have gun control advocates and tough on crime advocates. And the gun rights supporters side with the tough on crime advocates! So you can see how challenging gun control is.
I am a member of the NRA they get their funding by their members that is why we are members. You can buy annually or I believe several years at a time but simply it’s just donating money to that organization the NRA or they can speak for all of us. People say strict gun control. There are sheep, sheepdogs and wolves. The sheepdogs in the words of wolves resemble one another but they are very different dogs are non-felons That can legally carry wolves are the criminals and the sheep Are all you people who will be standing behind the sheepdogs when chaos breaks out. Our country is what it is because of the Second Amendment. Correct me if I’m wrong in 1963 i’m not sure if it’s the Supreme Court or what but the laws change for you no longer had to register your guns and this was due to Nazi Germany they knew where and how many people had weapons and came to get them all door to door. Well this law was introduced for the purpose of the balance of power that no government coming to office could actually take all the guns off the streets of America as we seen happen in Germany.
In Mississippi and assistant principal carried his weapon to school every day and locked it in his office for nine years the law changed no longer were going to allowed at school even by people who mean no harm to others with them only for self-defense or the defense of others I think it was like a half a mile you had to keep your weapon away from the school. Well it just so happened that next year I stayed it brought a weapon to school And the assistant principal had to make a half mile run to his car and back to the school before he took control of the shooter by now two people were dead. I think it is very likely to say that to lives would not have a died if the assistant principal had his weapon in his office was locked up like he did for the previous nine years. It only takes one done regardless of the caliper to deter someone even the thought one could or may be in the school. But when they are no guns whatsoever allowed there’s no opposition to that person who brings a weapon to a school just to hurt other people that is an argument of the NRA Criminals do not care about Lwas anyways only law-abiding citizens
Wow! I didn’t know the Supreme Court changed the laws based on something Nazi Germany did 30 years prior. Thanks for setting me straight!
There’s no intrinsic contradiction between owning a gun or hiring an armed bodyguard on one hand and pursuing gun control legislation on the other hand. I can do a thing I wish I didn’t have to do.
By your kind of “logic,” a wealthy man who pays a high rate of tax is a hypocrite if he lobbies for lower taxes.
The rest of your post is a hijack, so I’ll put my response elsewhere.
/Taurus/Glock/Beretta, and like three other big ones? Gee, maybe because those companies have a single lobbying organization that they use effectively, and even get their customers to pay for, named the NRA?
Call me unreasonable if you must, but I think allowing people to legally carry wolves is a bad idea.
Not wolves, bears.
Regards,
Shodan
The right to arm bears?
(I know many people who carry legal wolves, but they are mostly the chihuahua or other easily concealed varieties. )
i don’t know about you, but I take this post as delightful progress in dispelling the myth that the NRA is primarily funded by gun companies.
There already exists many “anti-NRA” gun-banning groups which raise funds, lobby lawmakers, and organize voters. The current crop have existed in one form or another since the 60’s. When the voters grow weary of their “storyline”, they change their name and start over. If you wish to reinvent the wheel one more time, I say, “Go for it”. The futile exercise could do you some good.