Gun Control & RKBA

Last edited Thu Oct 8, 2015, 01:10 AM - Edit history (1)

What people refuse to understand is that the NRA only has about 5 millions members. There are 80-100+ million gun owners in the USA. At best, the NRA represents about a mere 5-6% of the people who legally own a firearm, and a lot of them are only members because it's necessary for certain range and shooting clubs or they received life membership eons ago. Also, don't forget about people like myself who've never owned a firearm, don't support the NRA, yet still support the individual right to keep and bear arms. If you can reach the tens of millions of non-NRA members, the organization can easily be marginalized.

NRA lobbying wealth is also vastly overstated, and the records are mostly public. Besides, gun control proponents have ample money for their cause, including a pet billionaire, and numerous celebrities, politicians, photogenic family members of victims, sympathetic media, and organizations willing to advocate their cause. Notably, in the recent Colorado recall elections, Bloomberg and his allies actually outspent the opposition by 6 to 1 and still badly lost. Gun control simply isn't losing because of money, NRA or otherwise.

Focusing on mass shooting is self-defeating. They're still extraordinarily rare, and with the acknowledged steep decline in the crime rates, people are safer than they've been in generations. If all the proposed policies are designed to eliminate a statistically unlikely event (and most suggestions, such as UBC's, would have had no impact in the recent mass shootings), and in the process penalizes millions of American who are not real threat, the push-back is well deserved and unsurprising.

As for figures concerning support for gun rights and opposition to restrictions, particularly after the very small and extremely transitory bump in gun control support immediately after Sandy Hook, see below.

http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pew-study-gun-rights-20141210-story.html

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2015/oct/02/mass-shootings-have-no-impact-on-support-for-gun-rights-in-the-us

http://www.gallup.com/poll/179213/six-americans-say-guns-homes-safer.aspx

http://www.gallup.com/poll/179045/less-half-americans-support-stricter-gun-laws.aspx

http://www.people-press.org/2014/12/10/growing-public-support-for-gun-rights/


Lastly, your claims of the efficacy of the 1994 AWB, or AWB's generally, are certainly in dispute. The Department of Justice and the National Institute of Justice under President Obama found the treasured AWB's to have no real measurable impact, and any support is largely based on faith. It's usually the same story, the law's ineffectiveness is used as proof of the need for more of the same type of laws.

Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf


Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies

https://archive.org/stream/NijGunPolicyMemo/nij-gun-policy-memo_djvu.txt