I absolutely support gun rights, gun advocacy necessary to protect those rights, gun education, and gun safety.
But elements of the NRA leadership have been irretrievably corrupt for some time, in my opinion, and I tell them that every time they call to ask for a donation. I'm not paying for
Wayne LaPierre's private jets.
Those who do not defend the principle of free speech, even the speech of those who would not honor it themselves, will be shocked when the censor comes for them...
Your position that only "acceptable" speech should be defended shows you have no respect for free speech at all
They are not as bad as the rest up there. But the ACLU is populated by old timers. And from time to time they have vacillated so has the EFF. The EFF tried hard to placate Twitter and Facebook banning accounts on account that they are public companies and they could do as they pleased with regard to speech.
That's not arguing for freedom. That's playing politics.
Now Twitter feels free to ban things like Sci-Hub. And who knows who's next. That's the thing, if you don't stand for your principles, because you disagree with someone's politics, then you don't have principles, or at least not the right principles to defend the primary principle you are set up to defend.
It's like saying you believe in due process upholding the law, but then a murderer comes around and you say, nope, sorry, I cannot defend murderer in court. If that's your stance, then you actually don't believe in due process and the law.
> The EFF tried hard to placate Twitter and Facebook banning accounts on account that they are public companies and they could do as they pleased with regard to speech.
> The decisions by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others to suspend and/or block President Trump’s communications via their platforms is a simple exercise of their rights, under the First Amendment and Section 230, to curate their sites. We support those rights. Nevertheless, we are always concerned when platforms take on the role of censors, which is why we continue to call on them to apply a human rights framework to those decisions. We also note that those same platforms have chosen, for years, to privilege some speakers—particularly governmental officials—over others, not just in the U.S., but in other countries as well. A platform should not apply one set of rules to most of its users, and then apply a more permissive set of rules to politicians and world leaders who are already immensely powerful. Instead, they should be precisely as judicious about removing the content of ordinary users as they have been to date regarding heads of state. Going forward, we call once again on the platforms to be more transparent and consistent in how they apply their rules—and we call on policymakers to find ways to foster competition so that users have numerous editorial options and policies from which to choose.
This doesn't read like placating these companies to me. It affirms their general legal right (it can be more harmful to regulate this right if done incorrectly), and yet criticizes them for not properly wielding this right responsibly.
The problem with the NRA is not "intertial rot" as you describe, where the mission drifts off one path and onto another (although the NRA's mission has also drifted).
The problem is corruption, where the NRA's leadership has taken money given to support a cause and instead spent it on themselves for their own personal benefit.
I thought about supporting both... but then I went to their websites to check them out and within seconds skipped out with a huge NOPE.
GOA's top story was about how the seditionist Boebert is being treated unfairly by Pelosi. That's the exact same turdhole of dangerous partisanism that I bailed from the NRA a lifetime ago on.
Same rejects that supported Trump cheered when he said "Take the guns away and worry about due process later". And then he did take firearm equipment away with an executive order, not legislation, not a bill, just whipped out his pen and blammo... gone.
What are some of the supporting reasons for gun rights? Last I heard from a heated coversation is that having a gun has no meaningful opposition to the government in this day and age. Good luck opposing the US military.
Many nations around the world work well without it. What would happen if US bans all forms of guns and ammunitions and abolishes the 2nd amendment?
The US military has not done particularly well in Iraq/Afghanistan and esp Vietnam.
There are a bunch of reasons personally.
Protecting yourself + your property. Outside of a city, good luck getting the police to come to your house. Where I used to live they would take at least 20 minutes and it wasn't particularly rural. If you're in actual middle of nowhere I'm sure it's even worse.
Hunting + fun.
Freedom, I'd say our gun culture is engrained in individualism and property rights. Seems like a celebration of that. (Unlike somewhere like Switzerland where it might come for a sense of collectivism)
And obviously to scare the govt into behaving.
American gun culture is definitely a complicated beast though! If you're interested generally ppl are friendly and helpful, regardless of stereotypes.
Everyone still deploying this argument like people didn't storm the Capitol on the 6th. In that incident, the insurrectionists didn't have guns but instead beat a cop to death with a fire extinguisher.
This line of reasoning is why the Capitol is full of national guard sleeping on the floor at the moment, and the national security apparatus is slowly trying to figure out how to do an inauguration without it becoming a mass shooting.
That's a bad comparison. The people storming the capitol didn't have any real reason to. Look at the actions of John Brown during the 1800s for a mostly positive example! The roots of the modern NRA were actually founded by Black Panthers attempting to defend their communities.
If the insurrectionists used a fire extinguisher it probably doesn't matter if they had guns or not, since you can create mayham in other ways esp en masse. Maybe American gun culture isn't to blame for our current crisis, if guns weren't involved? I'd think their mass delusion would be a bigger issue.
> the national security
apparatuss is slowly trying to
figureee out how to do an
inaugurationn without it
becomingg a mass shooting.
You can't legally carry a gun into DC in the first place, I highly doubt even before now that they didn't screen for them at the inauguration.
> The roots of the modern NRA were actually founded by Black Panthers attempting to defend their communities.
Yes! And the roots of the Black Panther movement were using open carry to intimidate police officers into behaving. It was really interesting to me to learn about the Black Panther movement and story, and i think BLM activists should all read historians point of view about what part of the BP movement actually scared Hoover, and implement the same things. And hope that the next Fred Hampton won't get assassinated this time around
I'm not pro-gun at all in my country because it isn't needed imho, but i think until the US solve its social class issues, open carry is needed.
Cool to see someone else is as interested in the story as I am!
I think you're right, and there are many within the BLM movement who are doing exactly what you describe.
Much like any large social movement there's a bunch of different ppl doing a bunch of different things, and with various levels of engagement and seriousness.
> The roots of the modern NRA were actually founded by Black Panthers attempting to defend their communities.
[citation needed]; I would be particularly interested to see if you can find any evidence of the NRA actually supporting the Black Panthers, or the Black Panthers "founding" bits of the NRA.
> Maybe American gun culture isn't to blame for our current crisis, if guns weren't involved? I'd think their mass delusion would be a bigger issue
I don't think the two are clearly seperable any more. The ideas are being pushed by the same people on the same "news" networks. Neither can be disentangled from white supremacy. It's not an easily settleable question but I think the idea of a constitutional right to armed revolution is itself delusional!
The idea is seperable, I'm not sure if you're American or from what part of the country you're from, but gun culture extends beyond Fox News, Qanon, and conservatism in general. Lots of people in Michigan, Vermont, and Washington have guns.
I also don't think you know what you're talking about with White supremacy, generally gun control has been passed specifically to disarm minorities. For e.g. the time the NRA and Ronald Regan teamed up to pass gun control. [0].
Much like freedom of speech generally giving the majority absolute power, like a monopoly on violence, ends badly for the minority.
Everyone has the right to an armed revolution, under the right circumstances, regardless of the second amendment. Read the first paragrph on the declaration of independence.(Which basically says we're doing an armed rebellion bc of the right circumstances)
> Outside of a city, good luck getting the police to come to your house. Where I used to live they would take at least 20 minutes and it wasn't particularly rural.
Even living in the city doesn't necessarily help. I once called the police because a guy was in my apartment complex looking for me with a gun. It took them 45 minutes to arrive, and this was in the city only a mile and a half from the nearest police station.
It was pretty clear to me after they arrived that since I lived in a bad neighborhood, they didn't want to deal with the situation. They figured they could wait, let whatever was going to happen happen, and then roll in and take statements.
I think it's foundational to the character of our nation. The United States has always been a free country and the right to bear arms is one of our core freedoms, alongside the first amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and free exercise of religion. I would never want to see any of those rights taken away.
The societal costs of gun violence are just a price we pay for that freedom, and I think it's worth it.
Edit: To answer the question about what happens if the U.S. were to ban guns, I'd say that we would lose one of the core freedoms that made us great.
Many Americans say they have more freedom than Australians, because (among other reasons) there are a lot more hoops to jump through in order to legally buy a gun in Australia than in the US (and the range of weapons you are legally allowed to buy having jumped through those steps are narrower, and the regulations around storage/carry/etc are more restrictive.)
On the other hand, in the US the government (federally and in 28 states) has the right to kill you if it can get 12 jurors to say you've done something so bad you deserve to die. So, it seems Australians may not have the same right to own guns, but they have a greater right to life. Why count one right and ignore the other?
I think the freedom to live is the most fundamental freedom of all – every other freedom is dependent on the freedom to live, because to enjoy any other freedom you first have to be alive.
If capital punishment is justice, why isn't corporal punishment equally so? If justice can be served by killing a person, why can it not also be served by flogging them or cutting off their hand? Do Iran and Saudi Arabia, in that regard, therefore have more justice than America?
Capital punishment is an issue of injustice, given how many people have been executed on questionable evidence and of the racial disparity in execution rates.
> To answer the question about what happens if the U.S. were to ban guns, I'd say that we would lose one of the core freedoms that made us great.
And how exactly has this "core freedom" made us great? All you've talked about in this thread is this abstract notion of freedom and how it's an unqualified good. But obviously people cannot have complete freedom; that's why we live in a society of laws. So please make an argument to why this specific freedom is so important to the flourishing of the human condition.
" The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. " -- Frédéric Bastiat
The law was not founded to curb liberties, or to control populations, the law was founded to protect liberties and the allow people to be free
"But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. "
That really depends on how you define freedom, Do you take a John Locke position of Natural Rights, or do you believe governments are the source of rights.
"freedom is not unlimited" is a clear reductio ad absurdum fallacy brought in ways like "well you can not murder anyone you like so clearly your freedom is limited" and it is no way refuting on my argument about Self Defense.
I can not proceed further though until I have an understating of what you define as freedom. I am coming from a Locke / Libertarian understanding of liberty. Which at its core is based in the Principle of Self Ownership and the Philosophy of Liberty [1]
The U.S. has a lot of negative rights (free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms) and not a lot of positive rights (e.g., rights to food, water, shelter, internet access--although we do have a right to counsel in criminal cases).
In my view the combination of those two things is a big part of what has propelled us forward, fostering a culture of self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and innovation that has resulted in the U.S. being at the forefront of science and technology in many fields for the last 100 years or more.
We're different. If we give up gun rights, or any of our other major rights, we would be taking a big step towards losing our edge and being more like any other modern western democracy.
I think that is a big reason why many Americans intuitively oppose some of the positive rights that have proven popular in other countries. That includes even a positive right to privacy against other citizens, e.g., the GDPR--which in practice ends up being more of a restriction on individual freedom than a protection of it.
You're still talking in abstract terms though. You're arguing that if we accept more limits on the right to bear arms, it would somehow make us "lose our edge," but you haven't explained how or why you expect that to occur. I want to know in concrete terms what great benefits we're getting from the current state of gun regulation and how it outweighs what you aptly called "the societal costs of gun violence."
Self Defense is a core human right, I do not consent nor should anyone consent to have that right outsourced to the "police" or any other government body. When seconds counts the police are minutes away.
Guns are a tool for self defense, as such it is my human right to own one for my own protection.
“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” – Thomas Jefferson,
“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.” – St. George Tucker,
Finally for me it comes down to a simple truism, if the government can not trust me with a gun for my own defense, I sure as hell can not trust them with a gun to "defend" me with. So if the government wants disarm the population, it should also disarm itself, for how can a government be "For the people by the people" if the people in government do not have to follow the same laws as everyone else
So if all government agents are barred from owning guns, then I will also give up mine.
Yeah, the NRA still does some useful stuff at the local level (hunter education, NRA ranges, etc) but they really need new leadership. For the moment, GOA seems like the best alternative for advocacy efforts.
Seeking an end-run around an investigation by the New York attorney general, the National Rifle Association said Friday that it was declaring bankruptcy and would reincorporate in Texas. ... Typically, non-profit groups that are chartered in New York and under investigation are prohibited from relocating during an inquiry...
This doesn't appear to be a consequence of their politics but of their grift: the money has been taken from the organization by its officers in what looks like a standard control fraud.
Typically, that results in the responsible officers facing civil or criminal consequences and being replaced by new leadership. In this case however, the New York attorney general is seeking to dissolve the organization entirely, an extreme step that certainly appears to be motivated by partisan animus.
Once, the NRA was a membership organization, where votes from members elected officers that ran the operation. Politics and complications of tax law made stuff "complicated" even in the late 80s.
They did do some good things, like the training programs, but they were early victims of the business of activism.
I'd agree with this. I give every time they ask, but it's gotten to be less and less. The turning point was when they sent me a knife, a nice little pocket knife. I opened it up and written at the base of the blade: CHINA. Could they not find ONE knife manufacturer in America???
The NRA has expected it would be targeted (whether justly or not) for years.
Which is why must fundraising hasn't gone directly to the NRA in probably 20 years, but to other, financially separate entities, like "Friends of the NRA." The segregation isn't arbitrary for legal purposes of piercing the corporate veil because these entities have more specific and specialized purposes, like safety training programs and responsible ownership initiatives.
I don't know if the strategy will end up working. In fact, I suspect it's made the NRA's finances look even more suspect, since it's basically designed to absorb liability without accumulating donations.
But even if they aren't able to "move" to Texas, I expect there's little direct extractable value from NRA proper, other than the bad PR of the continued investigation. Which of course, will also be used as a reason to send more donations and support.
I think for tax and organizational purposes there's legit reasons to have your PAC, lobbying group, and your 501c3 organizations separate from the overarching 501c4. IIRC any donations to the mothership aren't tax deductible, but a donation to Friends of the NRA would be
And if you don't trust the US Senate, just use duckduckgo or whatever and just put in "NRA Russia" and check out all the stories and photos of them gladhanding Russian agents in Moscow and the checks they got from it that went into NRA accounts.
What's separate is the lobbying arm -- the Institute for Legislative Action, and it always has been separate.
LaPierre's corruption is why there was a takeover of the Board majority by actual activists (the Knox faction) in the early 1990s. That's when Tanya Metaksa led ILA.
But elements of the NRA leadership have been irretrievably corrupt for some time, in my opinion, and I tell them that every time they call to ask for a donation. I'm not paying for Wayne LaPierre's private jets.