...
new gun laws won't work, they said.
...too many gun laws on the books, they said. (yeah. they go around saying there's 20,000.)
Meanwhile, they work to water down the existing laws and frustrate law enforcement. Your NRA membership dollars at work!
So, this piece from the USA Today is the latest news which should surprise, ballpark figure here, absolutely no one. Congressional records, lobbying forms and former ATF agents all agree, the NRA works to weaken our gun laws and stops attempts to help the ATF enforce existing law. They have a few samples.
The Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986. This law mandated that the ATF could only inspect firearms dealers once a year. It reduced record-keeping penalties from felonies to misdemeanors, prohibited the ATF from computerizing purchase records for firearms and required the government to prove that a gun dealer was "willful" if they sold a firearm to a prohibited person.
The Tiahrt amendments. Beginning in 2003, the amendments by then-representative Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., to the Justice Department's appropriation bill included requirements such as the same-day destruction of FBI background check documents and limits on the sharing of data from traces.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Reform and Firearms Modernization Act. Most recently introduced in 2011, the bill proposed changing several regulations, including redefining the burden of proof for agents investigating firearms dealers accused of selling to prohibited individuals and capping fines for other violations.
In the case of the 1986 FOPA law, a former ATF agent described how a gun dealer's false record keeping was reduced to a misdemeanor, so that it would not qualify as a federal offense, and so discourage federal prosecutors from pursuing cases in court.
In other cases, the NRA pressures Congress to keep the ATF underfunded, draining resources away from enforcement. And so, laws seem to fail...and then the NRA barks about the failure of gun laws, and applies pressure to prevent new ones, and to water laws down...it's a neat circle of self-fulfilling prophecy, but whatever gets the job done, eh?
So, this is what the NRA takes in money for. That and spending it on failiing to elect candidates for office, lately. But since I was reminded today that we have some NRA members here...seems worth mentioning what that dues money accomplishes. For example, the extreme Republican bias to their spending habits.
I particularly like how they have to insert a number figure for the cash spent
for Democrats, because if they didn't, you couldn't see it on the chart. Here are the numbers broken down in text.
Total Independent Expenditures: $18,607,180
For Democrats: $35,076
Against Democrats: $13,276,083
For Republicans: $5,712,894
Against Republicans: $221,054
Total Electioneering Communications: $0
It's already well known how ineffective that NRA spending was in the last election cycle, but this particular trend of the NRA spending overwhelmingly to support Republicans is very well established over decades of tracking on OpenSecrets. It's easy enough to switch to their tracking of
all cycles to look at data stretching back all the way to 1990.
Yes, there was some incredible event in 1994, where the NRA and Republicans supposedly swept to power on the wave of RAAAAGE over gun control legislation passed during Bill Clinton's first term and nothing else, that is, that's the myth they peddle about it. And yet, when one examines the data on NRA spending, it seems to have been rather one-sided for a very long time.
An earlier chart on the same page shows that 2000 was the peak year for "soft money" contributions to the NRA, easy to get curious about that one. I remember 'soft' money, back before it fell to the dark side and became 'dark' money. The other thing I notice about this chart is that the split doesn't change that much. The NRA donates on behalf of largely Republicans, not Democrats. It doesn't matter much if some gun law's been passed, or if the assault weapons ban is expiring in 2004, or if it's 2005 and the NRA-sponsored bill
protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits passes with the help of 15 Democrats in the Senate and 59 more in the House.
Now, this has been explained to me simply enough; if the NRA doesn't have your soul on file, Democrats are assumed to be "antis," as the President found out after experimenting for the last few years -- gun rights were only enhanced during Obama's first term, and what did he get for it? Nothing but conspiracy theories that he was just...waiting, for no apparent reason, but he was coming to get your guns...eventually. Sort of like waiting for the Rapture.
Only in this case, the 'rapture' is the paroxysm of fury amongst right wingnut gun enthusiasts and self-styled 'patriots.' And of course, amongst the gun manufacturers eagerly raking in profits as they churn out guns for this paranoid subset of the populace whose fears have been so well stoked by the NRA. A job well done.