America’s leading gun-sales lobby, the National Rifle Association, hasn’t given up on its hyperbolic fearmongering approach to getting its way politically. Just watch one of spokeswoman Dana Loesch’s unhinged internet ads. But even with the treasonous Oliver North now president of the organization, resistance to the NRA’s extremist agenda has soared, especially since the slayings last February of 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Kate Ackley at Roll Call reports that the NRA is showing signs of “potential decline.”
Among the problems are two consecutive years of being in the red financially; “ties to Maria Butina, a Russian who pleaded guilty late last year to charges of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent”; and a Mother Jones magazine investigation indicating the organization may have broken campaign finance laws by coordinating its independent campaign spending with candidates. NRA as outlaw is not exactly the image the organization has cultivated for itself.
And, at the federal level, it’s run into trouble on the policy front as well:
Even though the NRA’s favored candidates, including Donald Trump, won big in the 2016 elections, the group didn’t have any landmark successes in the 115th Congress and still will be pushing some of its key legislative priorities in the 116th Congress, including a bill from Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn that would allow people with concealed carry permits from one state to use them in other states.
But such a measure is unlikely to get traction in the House. With Democrats now in control, the NRA will be on defense in the chamber, although any new gun-control measures passed there are unlikely to move in the Senate.
The question in Washington is how effective the NRA will be at blocking proposals put forth by gun-restriction advocates, including a Democratic House bill mandating universal background checks on gun buyers and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s reprise of a ban on semi-automatic, military-style assault weapons. In 2013, similar proposals failed in the Senate. The assault weapons ban went down in a 45-60 vote that included 15 Democrats in opposition. The NRA was a ferocious opponent of both. Since those proposals were made in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook, Connecticut, slaying of 26 elementary school students and staff, many observers felt that if that horror couldn’t move the needle, nothing would shift the odds in favor of new restrictions. Given that polls at the time showed 83-95 percent of Americans in support of universal background checks, this failure was disheartening, to say the least.
The aftermath of the Parkland shooting, particularly the fierce advocacy of some students who survived those slayings, has changed the perception that passing new gun laws can’t get past the barricades the NRA and its puppets in Congress have erected. Whether the new perception will match the reality is the question. The NRA has been reprising its tired, old arguments:
“So-called universal background checks will never be universal because criminals do not comply with the law,” said NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker in a statement. “Instead of looking for effective solutions that will deal with the root cause of violent crime and save lives, anti-gun politicians would rather score political points and push ineffective legislation that doesn’t stop criminals from committing crimes.”
Taking that assertion to its obvious conclusion, we shouldn’t pass laws against murder, bank robbery, rape, embezzling, or shoplifting either, since those crimes occur in abundance despite statutes against them having been on the books for centuries.
While the make-up of the Senate and presence of the orange squatter in the White House will probably keep anything more than the mildest gun-law reforms from happening this year, some real success may be had for advocates of new restrictions by focusing on state legislatures. Those are places that, after the many Democratic victories in November, have made the standard NRA propaganda and election threats vulnerable in a way they haven’t been for decades.