Category: Guns

I’m absolutely baffled right now. The Brady Campaign appears to be going in circles with their messaging strategy surrounding this non-White House non-beer summit.

Yesterday, they were highlighting how horrible the NRA is for not participating and reminding their followers that the NRA was the only party the media was talking about coming to the table for a policy discussion. Today’s post seemingly takes the other strategy of highlighting their participation as though it meant more than the NRA’s attendance.

The Brady-written post sounds like they are taking a serious leadership role in advancing policy. It describes the meeting as though Paul put out the plans for reform and the administration just wondered how to make it happen.

I began the discussion by listing basic measures that the Brady Campaign, and others, felt could make a difference. The list included: a strong background check system, with good and complete records of dangerous and irresponsible people, applicable to all commercial gun sales; more tools for law enforcement to stop trafficking in illegal guns; increasing the number and type of military-style weapons, including “assault clips,” that should not be readily available to civilians, like machine-guns and fully automatic weapons. Administration officials then asked questions.

But the Paul Helmke quote to another outlet sounds like they weren’t even sure what was going to come out of the non-summit and that the gun control groups were the ones trying to figure out just what they can possibly take from the debate.

“We asked a lot of questions, and they indicated they don’t have any particular policies that they’re pushing or any particular legislation that they’re pushing, right now they’re basically out gathering pieces of information,” Helmke said.

More importantly, they are publicly refuted on most of the policy issues Paul named in today’s official Brady post.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported that administration officials are exploring potential changes to gun laws which can be secured through executive action alone.

The outside sources also highlight that the policies officials were willing to consider were focused on data-sharing and background checks, not gun or magazine bans.

I really don’t understand what the Brady message is in all of this. The posts from their internal staff seem to have conflicting key messages, and their own statements to outside media don’t match what’s coming from the rest of the Brady communications efforts. At the rate they are contradicting themselves, we can just sit back and enjoy the show.

P.S. Anyone else amused by Helmke’s measure of success being that he met with staffers at an agency for a whooping 90 minutes? Even the cop from Cambridge got 40 minutes at the White House and a beer with the President himself.

From Paul Helmke:

On Tuesday, I attended a meeting at the U.S. Department of Justice with representatives from the White House, the Vice-President’s office, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the FBI, and others from the Obama Administration, along with leaders from the gun violence prevention movement, to discuss how to reach the goals outlined in the President’s statement. Officials from the Administration indicated that this was the first of what they hoped would be a series of discussions. They said they had not settled on, or excluded, any relevant proposals.

The question in my mind is whether the Administration intends to keep this “series of discussions” going right on through the 2012 elections, or whether he’s going to be foolish enough to get behind specific Brady proposals before then. Helmke noted that the length of the meeting (90 minutes) and the number of White House officials at the meeting “signaled to me that the President is serious.” We’ll see.