One of the great bogus refrains Second Amendment zealots repeat over and over again is that if the federal government or even states created a more robust background check and registry for gun owners, it would turn into an epic data privacy issue. Forget about the fact that the same people frequently say that voter ID laws are just like having a driver’s license, but hate when you mention that one needs to register with the DMV when becoming a car driver but not a gun owner.
You might remember Cambridge Analytica from its work to destroy democracy. The political consulting firm was created by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. Along with Steve Bannon, the group was turned into an analyzing and disinformation planting machine that would help divide and conquer, one lie at a time. In order to do this Cambridge Analytica needed data, and they were able to legally and illegally get well over 50 million Facebook users’ personal information, which they weaponized as part of their campaign to help Donald Trump win the Electoral College in 2016. Many of Cambridge Analytica’s former staffers have silently and not so silently returned to the Trump campaign this time around.
One of those former scumbags is Matt Oczkowski, who headed Analytica’s product division before the company went bankrupt in 2018. Well, new documents from “a former Cambridge Analytica insider” show that among other things, Oczkowski and his crew were working on getting all kinds of data from the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation in order to build some predictive models of manipulation. Shock! And it looks like the NRA obliged. Double shock.
According to reports, Oczkowski and friends were able to get the data by way of business with the failing Second Amendment groups for their “Trigger The Vote” initiative. Get it? Trigger! Well, as documents show, the move was clearly a way to get around tax and campaign finance laws. In fact, Oczkowski writes “Each year, they run a large campaign aimed at ‘voter education.’ They call it voter education to avoid the corporate proxy tax by directly endorsing any candidates.”
NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter told The Washington Post that the gun lobby firm did indeed help with the “Trigger the Vote” scheme but wouldn’t go into details about what and how the membership data was used. What a con game these Second Amendment cabals are running on their members.
It’s not simply the NRA. Oczkowski explained the goals of the deal they were embarking on, and it included retailers and online gun dealers, using “fire arms manufacturing warranty cards.” The happy ending of this story is that Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt. The part that good guys with guns might want to worry about is that before they did, Oczkowski and Cambridge Analytica got the contract to get all that info. I wonder where it is now? I wonder who is using it? In order to hold the hand of Second Amendment patriots everywhere, it’s probably being used by the people that used it last time for the benefit of one specific group, and that group’s name rhymes with the Pepublican Rarty.