Category: Guns

I’ve often said that NRA needs to be a big tent organization.   We have to make common cause with people who are mostly on our side, but might not be willing to take things as far as you or I would.  This would include hunters, many in law enforcement, traditional shooters, and people new to the issue.   We have to reach out to these people and work with them, rather than sizing up their second amendment purity, and choosing to ostracize them if they don’t meet sufficient muster.

It’s no secret that one of my big pet issues is repealing the 1986 Hughes Amendment, and allowing new registration of transferable machine guns under the NFA.   Does this mean I support the NFA?   Well, not entirely.   But it does mean I’m willing to accept it for now because a more realistic goal is getting rid of the Hughes Amendment.   By standing on the NFA, even if I don’t really agree with it, it helps to build a larger coalition against the part you do want to get rid of in the short term.

One of the traps we tend to fall into as gun-rights activists is believing that we are not a very very small minority.   If you’ve ever looked at GOA’s Form 990, based on estimates from income reported from membership dues, they would have, at most, about 30,000 members.  Even, absent NRA’s existence, GOA could pick up another 20,000 member of dedicated, hard-core, no-compromise activists, that’s stil 50,000, and politicians in Washington will safely ignore you.   This is why it is necessary to reach out to less hard-core members of the shooting community; we simply don’t have the numbers in order to be politically successful.

The failure to build a “big tent” is no where more apparent than in the Libertarian Party, where a dedicated group of hard-core activists have worked very hard to build an organization that’s based on strong principles, and fields candidates based on their ideological purity.  The Libertarian Party also can’t win elections, and isn’t building a movement.  Libertarian principles are now safely ignored by politicians.

Let’s not let this happen to the gun-rights movement.

Ryan presents a somewhat differing view than I’ve been espousing here in terms of HR2640.   I say somewhat different because I do think the current law is completely inadequate, and that more still needs to be done, even after HR2640 “restoration of rights process” is in place.

But as much as I do wish we could have gotten more, I still think HR2640, on the whole, is a small push in the right direction.  Any means to address a firearms disability, even if it’s fraught with trouble, is better than not having any recourse at all.  I consider HR2640 to be half a step back and a step forward.   Not as far as I’d like to go, but I’ll take what I can get out of this Congress.

Thirdpower takes on some anti-gunners and ends up chatting wtih Gary Mauser.  Good show.  It’s interesting to me that they accuse a lot of second amendment scholars of being gun lobby stooges, when a lot of the time there’s either no association, or very little.

But, of course, we’re not the only ones who do this.