We’ve all heard that even the NRA’s members support important, if limited, controls on guns and ammo. And yet it is painfully obvious that the NRA opposes them. And that it will continue to do so. Where does this inconsistency come from? And how do we fix it?
Like many national organizations, most NRA members interact with it through local chapters, made up of hunters, sports shooters, and people who consider guns a personal protection. When they go to chapter meetings that’s who they see — people much like themselves. Most of these folks are pretty reasonable neighbors. Yes, there are people in the NRA who are pretty loony on the subject, and probably chapters that they dominate. But for the most part, NRA chapters are devoted to gun safety education, environmental protection (to preserve hunting grounds), and learning about the latest gear.
Now consider that most people in this country avoid learning a lot about actual policy issues from detailed sources. They find policy details as exciting as an elementary school concert that doesn’t have any of their kids.
NRA members are no different.
When such Americans want to know what a policy question means — say, a gun control proposal — they do what anyone does: find some information source that they trust and believe what they hear. That’s what I do on, say, farm policy issues too. This is basic human behavior — address complicated questions by finding an expert and trusting them until you know otherwise.
So when it comes to guns, an NRA member is going to hear a lot about it from the NRA, and will consider it a reliable source. Is that new gun law going to take away my legitimate guns? Well, the NRA guys say it is, or will make that easier, and that’s plain wrong, so I’m against it along with them.
They don’t know that the national NRA is run by certifiable loons. They probably have heard that some people think that, but when it comes to gun issues, who do they trust? The NRA. Which says it isn’t loony, so there you are. It says the people who say it’s loony are the folks who will take your guns away, so you sure don’t need to listen to them.
This is the basic Fox News approach as well. Make folks distrust other sources, then you can say whatever you want, having set up your audience to reject contrary info as part of the problem. (Remember the term "epistemic closure”?)
As long as the NRA is controlled at the top by folks who are paranoid and in the gun makers’ pockets, they will continue to get NRA members to object to any gun safety legislation.
The only way out of this is for enough legitimate NRA members — people who speak the lingo and live the life — to recognize the leadership for what it is and change the organization from inside. This can’t be done from the outside because gun owners will trust nobody who isn’t gun advocate.
There are reasonable gun owners who know this, and there are potentially many more if those reasonable ones can get themselves heard and break the (dis)information loop. I have been hoping that Wayne LaPierre’s tirade about putting armed guards in every elementary school might help this along, which it’s too early to rule out.
From the outside we can cajole and scream, but you’ve got to be inside to break out. I just hope it happens soon.