Last year in St. Louis, AHSA paid people to stand in front of the NRA exhibit hall and protest. This year they took out a full page ad in a local Louisville paper, and are drumming up some local media coverage:
What you didn’t hear is that many gun enthusiasts balk at the NRA’s devotion to the Republican Party. They resent the NRA for appropriating their values, radicalizing their views and, perhaps, jeopardizing their ability to own guns in the future.
“In many circles, the NRA stands for the National Republican Association,” said Bob Ricker, executive director of the American Hunters & Shooters Association, which last month endorsed Obama for president.
We stand by the party that poops on us the least. There are plenty of fine pro-gun Democrats that NRA endorses, and that number is increasing. If Bill Richardson had received the nod from the Democrats, this would be a very different race. If Bob Ricker wants to go off and endorse Democrats that want to take away guns from hunters and shooters, that’s his prerogative, but I don’t see how that makes his organization anything other than a false flag.
The AHSA was started two years ago by Ricker, a former NRA assistant general counsel and longtime gun industry lobbyist, and Ray Schoenke, an avid hunter and former Washington Redskins lineman who ran unsuccessfully in 1998 for the Democratic nomination to be governor of Maryland [once donated $5000 dollars to Handgun Control Inc.]
There, now it’s accurate.
The AHSA has signed up about 25,000 dues-paying members over two years, Ricker said. That pales in comparison to the 4 million members of the NRA, which had a 135-year head start. But Ricker notes that the NRA’s 4 million is only a fraction of the nation’s estimated 60 million gun owners.
And I eagerly await pulling AHSA’s form 990 to verify these 25,000 dues paying members.
FOIA can be a wonderful thing.
No FOIA necessary. You can just request a 990 from the IRS. They’ll fax it to you.
Cool! We should all get one! :-)
His blog entry on this store is here:
http://tomeblen.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/some-gun-owners-resent-nras-devotion-to-gop/
I once wrote to AHSA as a prospective member, asking for their definition of the “assault weapons” that they favored banning, and promising to join if I found their definition reasonable. Who should know the definition better than a “gunowners” group? And with a prospective membership in the offing, they had good reason to reply.
They did not.
“That pales in comparison to the 4 million members of the NRA, which had a 135-year head start.”
So the people who joined the NRA 135 years before the ahsa was founded are still paying members? If not, wtf is his point?