Tag Archives: NRA

Daily Comment: Socialism Vs. Freedom NRA-Style.

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I normally don’t post a Friday column, but today the golf course is just too wet. Plus, I wanted to get this up here before it becomes stale.

All the week the media had a grand time covering the so-called collapse of the NRA, given the leadership contretemps that emerged during the 2019 meeting at Indy. Front and center to those stories was the relationship between the boys in Fairfax and their long-time advertising agency, Ackerman-McQueen, which appears to have been double or maybe triple-billing for producing NRA-TV.

I suspect that most of the readers of my website have never watched NRA-TV. For that reason, and as a public service, here’s the latest NRA-TV production featuring the ‘relentless’ Dana Loesch. Dana got started as a spieler for Glenn Beck’s network before it went bust. She then moved to NRA-TV. She competes with some other, alt-right female spielers like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, both of whom, along with Dana, try to outdo each other in terms of throwing insulting commentary at the liberal ‘elie,’ and never appear in front of a camera without a little chain around their necks displaying their Christian-identity cross.

Lately, the NRA-TV website makes a point of making sure that the title of every segment contains the word ‘socialism,’ as in how the Left, or the Democrats, or whatever you want to call the enemy of God-fearing Americans represents an international, Socialist threat. And how do these spielers define socialism? Simple. It’s any politician who wants to take away your guns.

The decision to frame 2020 as a contest between America’s new greatness and the dangers of socialism hasn’t been finalized yet, although Schumck-o Don has been running it up the flagpole here and there. But this theme has clearly become the centerpost for gun-rights groups like the NRA, who have been warning of the dangers of a Socialist state whenever any kind of gun-control narrative rears its ugly head.

Remember how Ben Carson knew for ‘a fact’ that disarming the Jews in Germany resulted in the Holocaust? You can read the same argument in a book published by an NRA attorney, Stephen Holbrook, who happens to be a very nice guy, even though he’s totally misinformed.

Having grown up during the 1950’s, when there was a Red under every bed, I find this new appeal to the dangers of socialism to be rather quaint. After all, it’s not as if anyone has yet to suggest that we should protect ourselves from the socialist menace by re-instituting loyalty oaths or the Blacklist. Speaking of the Blacklist, I just finished reading Stefan Kanfer’s remarkable book, Journal of the Plague Year. You might want to try it out.

I simply can’t believe that even the NRA would stoop so low as to put its name alongside a commentary by Dana Loesch which is so completely stupid, filled with obvious mistakes and goes beyond anything even remotely connected to the truth. If this is what Gun-nut Nation is going to promote as an attempt to capture the 2020 vote, the last thing my friends in Gun-control Nation should do is to try and shut the NRA down.

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It’s Time To Stop Talking To Ourselves.

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              Here’s the takeaway from last week.  The NRA dumped Ollie North, who turned out to be a very good fundraiser for himself, and replaced him with a woman best known for her involvement with a group which preserves a Confederate memorial that graces the side of a mountain considered sacred ground by the Ku Klux Klan. On the other side of the ledger, the House Appropriations Committee put $50 million for gun research into the  budget of the CDC. 

              In the greater scheme of things, neither of these two events will make a big difference in how we try to deal with the 300 intentional gun injuries that we suffer from each day. But they do symbolize, to quote a Nobel-prize winner, as something ‘blowing in the wind,’ and the wind seems to be getting a lot stronger every day. Maggie Astor got it right yesterday in the ‘failing’ (ha-ha) New York Times, when she said that the national gun-control movement has now built “an infrastructure that had previously existed only on the conservative side of gun policy.”

              I see evidence of this infrastructure in terms of the number of fundraising emails I receive (and I get them from both sides), in terms of media coverage where outlets like The New York Times now seem to carry a feature about guns and gun violence seemingly every other day, and most of all, I see it in the pronouncements by the 20-odd candidates who have announced their intention to chase schmuck-o Don out of Washington, D.C. Just four years ago, conventional wisdom still considered it to be a big risk if you ran for public office and were anti-gun. That bit of received sagacity has disappeared. Fartig (read: finished.)

              Before you read further, let me make one point. My perspective on gun control and gun violence doesn’t date back to Sandy Hook and 2012. It doesn’t date back to 1999 and Columbine or 1994 and the Assault Weapons Ban. It dates back to 1966 when Chuckie Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas Tower and began blasting away. That’s when I first started paying attention to gun violence, okay? So when I say that we are in a very new and different state of affairs as regarding what to do about America’s love of guns (including my love of them) I’m taking the long view, probably longer than any of you. And my long view tells me this.

              Sooner or later, if you want to make a real dent in gun violence, the gun-control community is going to have to start talking to gun owners not as enemies but as friends. And this doesn’t mean just coming up with some ‘reasonable’ gun laws which allegedly garner support from both sides in the debate. What it really mean is talking to gun owners about why the ‘good guy with the gun’ narrative is a myth.

So here’s my challenge to my friends in Gun-control Nation. There are somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 gun shows held in the United States every year. This means that on any given weekend, there are probably 100 locations where 5,000 to 10,000 bone-fide gun nuts get together to play around with guns. I’m going to a nearby show next weekend, in fact. Here’s a calendar of upcoming shows.

              I am willing to pay the costs of renting a table at one gun show a month for the next 12 months. I’ll send a check to the show’s sponsor which will be in the name of the gun shop that I own. And then you come to the show, sit behind the table, maybe give out some literature or whatever, and engage the gun owners who attend the show in a discussion about their guns.

              I don’t care what you say. I don’t care which organization you represent. Or maybe you’ll just represent yourself. Fine with me. But let’s stop talking just to ourselves, okay? Let’s see what happens when we talk to the other side. And by the way, I have been to hundreds of gun shows and the food is always great.

North Vs. LaPierre.

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              Now that the NRA has decamped from Indianapolis with LaPierre still standing and Oliver North down for the ten-count, let’s try and figure out what really took place. Because I’m sorry to say., but most of the reportage about the big battle at the annual meeting didn’t get it all wrong, but did miss some of the most important points.

              On the second day of the confab, a letter from North was read to the membership in which the NRA President informed the faithful that he was going to resign. Later at that same meeting, Wayne-o delivered his standard ‘us’ versus ‘them’ speech (patriots versus gun-grabbers) and didn’t even bother to thank the newly-retired President for his service or time. Because the Democrats haven’t yet decided who is going to run against sleazy Don in the 2020 electoral campaign, he rambled on about Andy Cuomo’s hatred of the NRA.

              The big deal got started when The New Yorker magazine published a detailed article by our friend Mike Spies, which went into details about how the organization’s finances were in tatters because of some sweetheart contracts between the boys in Fairfax and their long-time PR agency, Ackerman-McQueen.  The title of the piece, ‘Secrecy, Self-Dealing and Greed at the NRA’ set off a media wave which then set off a nasty exchange between Ollie and LaPierre, which ultimately resulted in North announcing that the NRA Board would not sanction another Presidential term, so goodbye.

              Two days before the Spies article appeared, The New York Times published what I thought was a much more significant article describing  a just-filed lawsuit against Ackerman-McQueen by none other than the NRA! This suit, which you can download here, claimed that the two parties had been negotiating for almost a year, discussions which centered around the behavior and compensation of Oliver North, who has evidently been double-dipping salaries from both the NRA and the PR agency, a clear violation of not-for-profit regulations in New York State (which is where the NRA has been registered since 1871.)

              North was hired by the NRA precisely to help the organization recover from the deficit it ran by giving sleazy Don $30 million or more for his 2016 campaign. In fact, the 2016 operating deficit of $45 million was cut to $17 million in 2017, despite the fact that revenues also declined by some $25 mil. You may recall that North ran for Senate against Chuck Robb in 1994.  He lost the race but set a single-year record for direct-mail donations of $16 million bucks. He has remained a prodigious fundraiser for various right-wing causes ever since, and no doubt his efforts in this respect are what pushed him into the President’s position of the NRA.

              If you read the lawsuit between NRA and Ackerman-McQueen, particularly Section D, you’ll discover that North has, indeed, made good use of his fundraising abilities, largely for himself.  It appears that as an Ackerman-McQueen employee, North may have not only oversold the value of his name, but didn’t even deliver the content to NRA-TV that was going to generate more cash both from sponsors and fans. 

              The boys from Fairfax have made some dumb business decisions over the last several years, chief among them moving from face-to-face to digital training with the accompanying Carry Guard insurance scam. Both of these programs have weakened the organization’s membership base, but anyone who thinks that or hopes that the NRA is now facing Armageddon doesn’t know how to read the tea leaves.

              I’ve said it in previous columns but I’ll say it again. The NRA‘s existence reflects the fact that a clear majority of Americans, including non-gun owning Americans, believe that owning a gun for self-defense is more of a benefit than a risk. And it really doesn’t matter that the evidence proves exactly the reverse. Until and unless my friends in Gun-control Nation figure out a convincing argument in response to this remarkable case of cognitive dissonance, we will remain enamored of those little pieces of polymer which fit neatly in the pocket and hold 16 rounds,

It’s Time To Stop Worrying About The NRA.

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Now that the NRA is about to celebrate the importance of gun ‘rights,’ in Indianapolis, it’s not by accident that an energized Gun-control Nation has started throwing as much dirt as possible at America’s ‘defender of freedom,’ or ‘America’s first civil rights organization,’ or whatever the boys from Fairfax are calling themselves these days.

It wasn’t that long ago that the annual NRA meeting attracted almost no attention at all. However, if you’re a gun-control advocacy group, it’s become almost de rigueur to jump on the bandwagon and energize your membership by revealing yet another scandal that can be laid at the feet of the NRA.

The piece written by Mike Spies concerning various financial flimflamming by Wayne-0 and his friends has been ballyhooed all over the place, but in terms of serious financial violations, it doesn’t really amount to a row of beans. The fact that Everytown has sent a letter to the IRS claiming that the tax-exempt status of the organization needs to be reviewed is also, to quote my beloved grandmother, hai cock and a bubba, which means it doesn’t mean anything at all.

In that regard, my friends at the Center for American Progress (CAP) have joined the parade by issuing a report, “Guns, Lies and Fear, Exposing the NRA’s Messaging Playbook,” which claims that the way the NRA promotes gun ‘rights’ is no different from the “authoritarian and undemocratic political regimes around the world that deploy disinformation campaigns to secure control over public discourse,” strategies employed by, among others, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary and Putin in what we used to call the U.S.S.R.

The demagogue communication playbook now being used by the NRA consists, among other things, of constructing an ‘us versus them’ political identity, creating an atmosphere of crisis, controlling media and vilifying the opposition. So by dint of gun owners versus gun grabbers, the ‘slippery slope,’ the NRA-TV videos and the demonization of every office-holder who doesn’t parrot the NRA line, Wayne-o now takes his place alongside some of the worst, most anti-democratic political drek-meisters floating around these days.

Let me make one thing very, very clear. Despite the fact that I have been an NRA member since 1955 and currently hold the membership status of Life Patriot Benefactor which means I get multiple fund-raising emails from Fairfax every day, if I were to receive a letter from Wayne-o tomorrow telling me the NRA is kaput, I couldn’t care less. I’ll always be a gun nut, I’ll always enjoy going to a gun show or wandering into a gun shop, and if I could drive to the NRA show in less than 10 hours, I’d be there this coming weekend because the show’s a lot of fun. But I have made it clear again and again and again and again that the NRA‘s promotion of armed, self-defense is simply wrong and has no basis either in logic, safety or effective self-defense. For that matter, this whole notion that our Constitutional freedoms rest on the 2nd Amendment has about as much basis in reality as my decision this morning to go back on my diet.

That being said, I also have to say that the CAP report comparing Wayne-o to some tin-horn politicians in various banana, goulash or halvah republics is simply nothing but crap. The only reason the NRA is considered such a formidable political lobby is because until Sandy Hook, when it came to lobbying for or against guns, they were the only game in town. The so-called demagogue playbook which CAP believes has been used so effectively by the NRA, actually reads exactly like the messaging strategy of a certain New York landlord who, if we are lucky and work hard, can drag his fat ass back to New York City in 2021.

In the meantime, let’s stop pretending that the NRA is the enemy when, in fact, one-third of American adults are legal gun owners but two-thirds believe that a gun keeps you safe. Are my friends at the CAP and other advocacy organizations ever going to explain that one to me?

Is The NRA In Trouble? I Don’t Think So.

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              Far be it from me to question the motives or behavior of advocacy groups trying to reduce gun violence, because I happen to agree with the idea that there is simply no rational reason to justify or even attempt to explain 125,000 deaths and injuries from guns every year. I also know that if you want to have any voice in any public discourse at all, it doesn’t come cheap. So I’m not overly concerned when I get the multiple, daily emails from Everytown, Brady, et. al., asking me for dough. I receive just as many, if not more requests from the other side. 

              In the midst of all the sturm und drang over the recent so-called ‘revelations’ about financial mismanagement at Fairfax, however, I think something needs to be kept in mind. For all the talk about how Wayne-o has been given a golden parachute, how money and wine flow freely at certain NRA executive events, how cash is borrowed from outside sources to keep the organization afloat, blah, blah, blah and blah, what seems to be missing from the outrage and umbrage of Gun-control Nation is an acknowledgement that the way in which the NRA maintains its basic premise – representing the interests of gun-owners – hasn’t changed at all.

              NRA is and has always been a charitable organization registered in New York State. I happen to have managed a not-for-profit organization that was also registered in New York State, so I have a pretty good idea about how New York regulates charities and what this regulation means and doesn’t mean for the NRA. And what it basically means, because New York happens to be a state which does a greater degree of non-profit regulating than most states, is that the tax-exempt donations you receive have to be spent on the charitable purposes for which the organization is chartered to provide. And I don’t see one single activity that the NRA is currently providing that doesn’t fall within the definition of what it is supposed to do, namely, promote gun safety and gun training, and protect gun-owning rights.

              Now the fact that these activities often result in messaging that is offensive and misleading to some of us, doesn’t mean anything at all. And the fact that the defense of gun ‘rights’ puts the NRA in opposition to even the flimsiest, most benign gun regulations, is also in no way against non-profit law. And even the fact that management is pissing away money by giving some vendors all kinds of sweetheart deals is also not outside of the relevant regulations, as long as those vendors are providing services that further the organization’s goals.

              Let’s be honest here for a minute folks, okay? When phony videos purporting that Planned Parenthood was selling aborted fetal tissue began circulating in 2015, the pro-choice movement got up in arms and rightfully so. I’m not saying that any of the current criticisms of the NRA are inventions or aren’t based on certain facts. What I am saying is that, taken together, none of the financial flimflamming that has been detailed by Mike Spies to date necessarily constitutes anything more than a combination of sloppy financial management and reading the tea-leaves of current public opinion in the wrong way.

              I don’t think the NRA ever imagined that their support of Sleazy Don would generate the headwinds that have been blowing ever more fiercely from the #Resist network which, at this point, appear to have Schmuck-o going back to being a New York landlord in 2021. I also don’t think the boys in Fairfax understand the degree to which Gun-control Nation has both expanded and solidified its activist base. Frankly, some of the political diatribes wafting out from NRA-TV are stupid beyond belief.

None of which, however, comes even remotely close to helping consign America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ to the ash-heap of history or running Wayne-o into jail. My friends in Gun-control Nation shouldn’t need to sensationalize something out of nothing in order to justify their existence or raise funds.

The New Yorker Magazine Talks About Guns.

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On July 1, 1972 The New Yorker Magazine published a book-length article, ‘Fire in the Lake,’ by a 32-year old journalist, Frances Fitzgerald, which set a standard for contemporary reportage, in this case, reportage on Viet Nam. Not only did this work achieve a degree of importance and influence in the annals of non-fiction writing, it also solidified The New Yorker as the prime media venue for content that could define the narrative on any subject for years to come.

I was reminded of Fitzgerald’s work when  I read The New Yorker piece about the NRA written by  Mike Spies, staff writer for The Trace (where you can also read this piece.) Because it occurs to me that in certain respects, the debate about gun violence bears some resemblance to the disagreements about Viet Nam; i.e., neither side in either argument was able to produce a narrative which was sufficiently cogent enough to convince the other side. In the case of Viet Nam, Fitzgerald’s writing ended that debate. So the question now is: could The Trace produce a narrative that would do the same for the gun violence debate?

It’s one thing to write a kiss-and-tell story about how the NRA is flimflamming money. Big deal. If anyone on the gun-control side thinks that such an article will make gun owners rethink their love of guns, think again. Going after the NRA is a simple and easy way to attract some readership from the gun-control gang, but it won’t do anything to change how gun owners and even non-gun owners think about guns.

When it comes to gun violence, we have a simple problem. It’s not that we have 300 million guns floating around, because at least two hundred million or more of those guns never figure in gun violence events at all. The reason we have gun violence is because Americans have free access to those small, high-powered handguns which are purchased by people who believe that having a Glock on your night table or in your pocket will keep you safe.

And despite incontrovertible evidence proving that guns are more of a risk than a benefit no matter how they are stored, a solid majority of Americans believe the reverse. And since less than 40% of Americans are legal gun owners, obviously there are many non-gun owners who also believe in what scholars like Alan Fiske and Tage Rai call ‘virtuous violence;’ namely, that using a gun to protect yourself is a good thing.

My friends who conduct public health research into gun violence can publish as many articles as they like showing that this reasonable law or that reasonable law may, if enacted, result in fewer gun injuries and gun deaths. But the truth is that the only way to really reduce or eliminate gun violence is to restrict ownership of certain types of extremely-lethal guns. But the more we try to regulate gun ownership, the more we will need buy-in from the folks who own the guns. And the only way that will happen is if someone explains why so many Americans believe that nothing will keep them as safe and secure as owning a gun.

I am still waiting for the first researcher to figure this one out. Because until and unless this issue is explored and understood, the community which wants to reduce gun violence is going to go nowhere fast. Yea, maybe red flag laws will bite off a bit of risk and injury here and there. But in case you didn’t know it, after Colorado passed a comprehensive background check law in 2015, gun violence in that state increased by fifty percent. 

So here’s my challenge to Mike Spies and his colleagues at The Trace. Why don’t you sit down and instead of covering yet another case of mismanagement at Fairfax, think about writing a definitive study on the realities of gun ownership which will do for the gun debate what Frances Fitzgerald did for the debate about Viet Nam. You obviously have the talent and The New Yorker has the space.

How Deep Is The Hole That The NRA Has Dug?

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              This week’s New Yorker magazine includes a major article by one of my favorite gun journalists, Mike Spies, about the financial mess at America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’ otherwise known as the NRA. Since I happen to be a Patriot Life Member Benefactor of the NRA (I actually have a plaque signed by Ollie North) and have been a member since 1955, obviously I have more than a passing interest in the goings on at the home office in Fairfax, and according to Mike, the goings on ain’t  very good.

              According to Mike, in a detailed and lengthy report, the NRA’s leadership has not only been hiding the extent to which serious amounts of organizational money have been flowing into the coffers of various PR companies, but it appears that these companies may be nothing more than business entities founded and run by Board and staff members of the NRA itself. Worse, the payments to these outfits have been so large that the NRA is facing a financial squeeze that could ultimately jeopardize the existence of the gun-rights organization itself.

              This is hardly the first time that mainstream media has carried articles on financial undoings within the NRA. Spies quotes  Brian Mittendorf, a Professor at Ohio State, who says that the organization has been spending money it really doesn’t have for seven of the past eleven years. In fact, Mittendorf published these details last year, and other media venues have carried the same news. What these stories all miss, however, is the fact that the NRA’s current financial problems aren’t basically caused by having given too much money to Schmuck-o in 2016 or investing heavily in video programming with costs running far ahead of returns. The serious financial issues facing the boys in Fairfax has much more to do with a fundamental shift in the behavior of gun owners and the inability of the NRA to adjust to this new view.

              In 1978, Florida passed its concealed-carry (CCW) law, which basically gave every resident of the Gunshine state who could pass a background check the right to walk around with a gun. Over the past 40 years, what is called ‘shall-issue’ CCW has become law in 43 of the 50 states. But the licensing difference between just buying a gun as opposed to carrying one around, is that in the latter case, most ‘shall-issue’ states require some kind of training before the CCW is approved.  And here is where the rubber has now met the road.

              Because in the olden days, the NRA held a monopoly on gun-training, and the NRA certified trainers, of whom there used to be more than 100,000 around the country, were the organization’s shock troops when it came to recruiting new members, as well as responding in force whenever a political situation, such as a debate over a gun law, required that gun owners show up and make some noise.

              Given the appearance of the internet, the emphasis on face-to-face gun training, indeed face-to-face training for any skill or work requirement has gone down the tubes. Instead, everyone now goes to a website, pays a fee, watches a video and then takes an online test. In that respect, the NRA is hardly the only training organization which fell behind the curve. Take a look at the online training offerings of Butler Community College in Kansas. The school has six campuses throughout the state, but you don’t have to ever show up at any physical location in order to qualify for hundreds of job-related certifications. Now take a look at the NRA‘s online training website. It’s a joke.

The article by Mike Spies gives lots of details about how the NRA invested enormous financial resources in the internet, but what it fails to point out is that by promoting personalities (Dana Loesch, Colion Noir) instead of training, they went the wrong way. Judging from the emails I receive every day, I’m still not sure that the boys in Fairfax recognize their mistake.

Try A New Book On Gun Violence.

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Igor Volsky is a nice young man who is trying to move the argument about gun violence in a new direction, and he has just published a book, Guns Down – How To Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future with Fewer Guns, in which he both explains how he came to be a player in the gun debate, as well as explaining what he believes needs to be done. The book, well written and easily read, is available on (where else?) Amazon.

              Igor also happens to run a website, Guns Down, which has made some interesting efforts to “weaken the gun industry, the gun lobby and the lawmakers who support them.” Most recently, they have published a list of banks who are actively financing the gun industry, with 6 national banks, including Chase and TD Bank, receiving the grade of ‘F.” They graded the 15 largest consumer banks in the United States, and only one bank, Citibank, received the grade of ‘B.’ In other words, most banks treat gun companies and gun advocacy organizations the same way they treat all their other customers. Gee, what a surprise.

              Behind this campaign and the other initiatives undertaken by Volsky and his group is a basic idea, namely, that in order to reduce gun violence we need, first and foremost, to reduce the number of guns. And in focusing most of his efforts on ‘defeating’ the NRA, Volsky is hopeful that without the money and communication strength of America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’ that many politicians will retreat from their pro-gun stance and vote for “bold reforms” that comprise what Volsky calls a ‘New Second Amendment Compact” that will “build a future with significantly fewer guns.”

              Volsky’s book is chock-full of data and he uses his evidence to  make a convincing case for the reforms which he would like to see enacted, although many of the 10 planks which comprise his 2nd-Amdenement Compact (end PLCAA, regulate dealers, assault-weapon ban, fund gun research) are part and parcel of the agenda of every gun-control group. One idea, however, caught my eye, which is to ‘provide incentives for people to give up their existing firearms.” Which basically means that the government should fund ongoing buyback programs. Considering the fact that I happen to run an organization which conducts buybacks in multiple states, this idea gets no argument from me.

              Asking gun owners to get rid of their guns, however, brings up a problem that Gun-control Nation has yet to confront, and while I was hoping that perhaps we would get an answer from Volsky, I’m afraid the jury in this regard is still out. On the one hand, as he notes, the percentage of American homes containing guns continues to go down. But what he needs to acknowledge is that the percentage of Americans who believe a gun to be more of a self-defense benefit than a risk keeps going up. Indeed, more than 60% in the latest surveys feel that a gun in the home makes that home a safer place, which means that many Americans who don’t own guns also agree that owning a gun is a good thing.

              One other point of concern with this well-done book, which is that Volsky’s attempt to present the NRA as the ‘black knight’ in the gun debate is simply not the case. For example, he talks about how the NRA was weakened when the company that was underwriting their insurance scam pulled out of the deal. But in fact, there are other pro-gun insurance plans that have been extremely successful (example: USCCA) and took away much of the NRA’s insurance business before Volsky and Guns Down got involved. As for the vaunted financial power that the NRA wields over pro-gun officeholders, on average, members of Congress get 3% of the campaign funds they spend from the NRA – big deal.

              That being said, I think that Guns Down is an important addition to the organizational network working to reduce gun violence and I know that Igor Volsky will, in that respect, be an important voice. So read his book, okay?

Kamala Harris Knows How To Reduce Gun Violence - Carry A Gun.

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              Our friends at the Violence Policy Center (VPC) have just updated their Concealed Carry Killers report which now shows that at least 1,313 people have been killed by shooters with concealed-carry (CCW) licenses since May, 2007. Of these events, more than 500 were suicides, which is far below what must be the real gun-suicide number because rarely do suicides, regardless of how they occur, make the news. And since the VPC report is based on open (mostly media) sources, by definition the numbers must be read and treated with care.

              But that’s not the point of this column. The point of this column is to address a statement made last week in Iowa by Kamala Harris, who told reporters that she not only is a gun owner, but owns her gun for personal defense. Now she didn’t say what kind of gun she owns, and she also made it clear that she supports ‘smart’ gun-safety laws; I assume she means gun-safety laws that work.  And with all due respect to my friends in Gun-control Nation who keep touting the idea that ‘reasonable’ gun owners support ‘reasonable’ gun laws, my response is this: So what?  Know what happened to the gun homicide rate in Colorado after comprehensive background checks went into effect in 2013?  It went up by fifty percent.

              When Harris announced she was going to run against Schumck-o Don in 2020, she became an immediate darling for the gun-control crowd, in part because as California Attorney General she incurred the wrath of Gun-nut Nation by arguing against unrestricted CCW in the Peruta case. This case was a test of this stupidism known as ‘Constitutional carry,’ which Gun-nut Nation considers to be one of the hundred-million Constitutional ‘rights’ given by God and protected by the revered 2nd Amendment.

              I’m not sure that gun control issues will be as important in 2020 as they might have been in 2018, but what I do know is that once again, the arguments on both sides are being fashioned and pronounced with little, if any relationship to the truth. Last week, Kirsten Gillibrand went on CNN and made a bunch of statements about the NRA which simply fly in the face of reality, chief among them a statement that the NRA is ‘largely’ supported by the gun manufacturers, which happens not to be true.

It’s not even close to being true. It’s simply false. The ‘truth’ was then immediately offered up by home-school queen Dana Loesch, who delivered one of her brain-dead video spiels for the ‘losing’ NRA-TV where she starts off in typical Dana Loesch fashion, which means throwing a series of personal insults at the person speaking for the other side.

Now let’s get back to Kamala and her attempt to stick herself into the middle of the gun debate. I don’t know whether she actually walks around with a gun or not, but her statement that she ‘needs’ to carry a gun as a protective device also happens not to be true. There isn’t a single study which even remotely proves that carrying a gun keeps you safe, there happens to be substantive research which shows exactly the reverse. To which my friends in Gun-nut Nation will immediately ask: So how come more than 15 million Americans now have the legal right to walk around with a gun? To which my answer is very simple: More than 30 million American adults smoke every day. Does that mean that those 30 million are healthier than people who don’t smoke?

Once again, my friends in Gun-control Nation are backing themselves into a corner by pushing the idea that we can reduce gun violence by the development and application of ‘reasonable’ laws. Obviously Kamala Harris considers CCW to be a reasonable gun law, at least when the cops have discretion to decide who can and who can’t walk around armed.

If that’s Kamala’s idea of how to reduce gun violence, welcome to another political campaign where the truth about guns and gun violence will take a whack.

It’s About Time! Shannon Watts Tells It Like It Was And Is.

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              Well it’s about time. The Indiana housewife who revolutionized how America talks and thinks about guns has finally sat down and explained how she did what she did after hearing about the tragedy at Sandy Hook.  I’m of course referring to Shannon Watts, whose accounting of her journey from her kitchen to Mike Bloomberg’s office and back to her kitchen, with many stops in between, will shortly be published by Harper Collins and I hope will force Shannon to get back on her horse and do the requisite book tour.

              The book is entitled, Fight Like A Mother, and the sub-title, which I really like, is How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World. The good news about this book is that while most folks write memoirs to sum up what they have done with their lives, Shannon is just getting ready to star in Act 2. Her first act, of course, was when she transformed a little Facebook group that she pulled together after Sandy into the first, truly grass-roots challenge to the NRA. And if anything, referring to her as the ‘NRA‘s worst nightmare’ is something of an understatement in this regard.

              I have been involved in the gun business in one way or another for over fifty years, actually for more than sixty years because my first connection was as a consumer when I bought a Smith & Wesson K-38 at a tag sale in Florida when I was twelve years old. Okay, okay, I know it was a straw sale. But in 1956 there weren’t any straw sales because there were hardly any laws covering gun ownership at all.

              When the feds got into gun regulation big-time, first in 1968 and again in 1994, the impetus for regulating the gun industry came not from the bottom but from the top. GCA68 was initially a response to the assassination of JFK in 1963; it was passed following the shootings of RFK and MLK in 1968. The gun law passed by the Clinton Administration in 1993 were also first introduced in 1991, although the idea behind the bill had been floating around since both Reagan and Jim Brady survived an assassination attempt in 1981.

              Not only did the 1968 and the 1993 laws pass muster without any great degree of grass-roots support, but in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when Al Gore couldn’t hold his home state because of pro-gun messaging from the other side, it became axiomatic in Democratic Party circles that the gun issue was best left alone.

              I am a Life Benefactor Endowment member of the NRA and I never thought that the organization’s alleged power and strength was such a big deal. Why not? Because I never met a single person who ever told me they would vote for the candidate supported by America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ who didn’t own a gun. And since a majority of Americana don’t own guns, how come everyone has always been afraid of the big, bad NRA?

              I’ll tell you why.  Because until Shannon went out there and began putting together a plan, the grass-roots movement to stop the madness known as gun violence didn’t exist. It was one thing to do what our friend Donna Dees Thomases did in 2000, namely, to fill the National Mall with nearly one million people for a demonstration against gun violence. It’s another thing to organize and sustain a national movement which puts out a coherent and continuous message every single day.

              Last month I attended a meeting of the Massachusetts chapter of MOMs.  Several hundred people filled a large room in a community library and listened to remarks from gun-violence survivors, community activists and other like-minded folks. What is most attractive about Shannon’s book is that it is not only a recounting of what she has accomplished over the last half-dozen years, it’s also a guide to building your own movement, to pushing your own community forward into making effective change.

              And by the way, with all due respect to the strengths of women in this regard, my male friends will profit from reading this book too.