What has made "the NRA"---really, gunowners, the NRA has but a fraction of them as members---so powerful?
Well, first of course there's a lot of us. Even having only a fraction, the NRA now has 5 million members. The EFF? I would be surprised to learn they had more than 50,000 (couldn't find a number in a quick search).
2nd, we vote, and many of us vote first and foremost on this issue. Especially since it's a good general touchstone, not that more than a tiny tiny fraction of national level politicians really give a damn about either issue no matter what they say most of the time.
3rd, there are many major elections where it's clear gunowners were a necessary if not necessarily sufficient part of the winning side. Gun control at the national level mostly disappeared in this century until Newtown after the Democrats suffered a string of catastrophic defeats from losing both houses of the Congress in 1994 to Al Gore losing by a whisker in 2000. That it was even close is telling, especially since Bush isn't much of a conservative or friend to gun owners, e.g. he officially supported renewal of the "assault weapons" ban.
(Note that it's in our cultural DNA to defy being told we can't or shouldn't have something, be it guns or e.g. drugs. But those are tangible, literally put your hands on them things, not like "privacy", the loss of which isn't immediately visible.)
On the side of the Stupid Party, every post-Reagan defeated Presidential candidate was, or appeared to be bad on gun ownership (Romney's actions were good, but his rhetoric was very bad). Again, the very narrow margins by which Bush won in 2000 and 2004 are probably also telling, bad rhetoric and very few good actions.
Now for some historical specifics that made a difference:
The biggest is how extreme gun grabbers are. While businessman Eric Schmidt is notorious for some creepy even if possibly true statements, I'm not aware of any national level politician who's willing to go on record saying we have no right whatsoever to privacy (whatever they actually believe).
Nothing compared to e.g. Dianne Feinstein's "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here.", or Michael Dukakis' "I do not believe in people owning guns. Guns should be owned only by police and military. I am going to do everything I can to disarm this state."
Legislation stripping us of gun rights are much more in your face than e.g. FISA, and have much more concrete results (see below). Privacy is much more a Federal issue, although there have been a number of gun privacy atrocities at the state and local level. Whereas the nation frequently watches some state go crazy and e.g. tell you that you can load only 7 bullets in your 10 round magazines ("clips"), and arrest people on that basis. Plus hypocrisy, there are many many carve outs for the anointed, be they police or politicians, or the frequent discovery that a prominent gun grabber owns guns. And all the politicians with armed bodyguards telling the rest of us we don't deserve that level of protection.
Then there are specific atrocities, cases well known by gun owners of innocents brutalized or killed by abusive organs of the states. This became big a while after the national Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed, when the BATF had to find something to do for its Revenuers after sugar price supports killed the moonshine industry.
Our side can point to kittens killed ("I swear I am not making this up"), pregnant mothers who miscarried, people crippled for life, mothers shot dead while holding a baby (Ruby Ridge, in which the BATF was enlisted to try to force her husband to spy), and many many outright killed (Waco started out as a BATF "ricebowl" operation, they wanted some nice video for their first budget in the Clinton Administration). Plus a constant drumbeat of gun owners ensnared by "flypaper" laws in gun grabbing localities; even NYC has realized it's damaging their tourist industry.
And how could I forget Fast and Furious, just one of several Federal Government gun running operations that sent thousands of guns south of the border, resulting in 350 deaths and counting, just to generate better statistics for gun grabbing propaganda (that reason is now on record and any other explanation suffers an Underpants Gnomes logical error).
The very secrecy of our national security privacy problems makes the latter problematical. Ignoring that the targets of the DEA are seldom ones we can empathize with, that they launder the tips they get from the NSA means that as of now I don't think there's a single specific case we know of.
And one final general point: lots of public figures are willing if not happy to demonize gun owners of almost every sort, and gun organizations (we can see the latter in this discussion). That results in strong push-back from the targeted (again, it's not in our cultural DNA to take that lying down).
The threat is certainly more direct and concrete. A lot of people don't know that the recent assault weapons ban that was proposed would make millions of people felons and punishable by 10 years in prison if they did not register their rifles under the NFA (which is currently used for machine gun collectors - it's a painful bureaucratic process that takes months, but allows the ownership of machine guns, suppressors, and other items deemed dangerous by the government).
Practically, NFA registration is something that is not accessible to many citizens due to local roadblocks (requirements for local law enforcement to sign off who have no obligation to do so). It also takes well over 6 months with the relatively rare items it covers now. Adding millions of records to that would have overwhelmed the ATF, and instantly turned millions of people into felons for doing absolutely nothing.
At the state level we have many examples of this actually happening.
California passed an "assault weapons" ban 1989, and in an act of amazing bureaucratic/political gymnastics first said a particular obsolete WWII rifle design, the SKS which has an integral 10 round magazine and a medium power round, was OK but you've got to register it, then reversed and decided they were illegal, and for anyone who registered one....
Keeping with the old gun designs issue, let's say you live in NY state and own a "Keep Off My Lawn" WWII era M1 Garand rifle, which has an integral magazine and is fed with an 8 round "en-bloc" clip. Well, now, outside of certain types of competitions you can no longer use those clips, you'd have to carefully bend sheet metal to reduce them to 7 rounds and likely suffer reliability problems. I carry a pre-WWI M1911 design handgun, with modern 8 round magazines; if I lived in NY state, I'd be a felon if I missed unloading one of them by one round.
There are many many other examples of these state and local "flypaper" laws and their enforcement.
As an aside, gun trusts are a decent way around the CLEO signature requirement for NFA items, at least in states which don't ban them outright (sigh, California). (acutely noticed since I've seen <$200 .22lr suppressors on the market recently. Almost like cheap airline tickets, where the tax > the fare.)
Note that the NFA branch has a rule change out for public comment that would include removing the CLEO signature requirements for individuals. It's expected to go into effect sometime next year if I remember correctly.
Of course, since nothing they do comes without a trade-off, they will be making the trust route somewhat more painful (requiring fingerprints and background checks).
I don't think we need SBR/SBS/suppressors (and probably AOWs and most DDs) under NFA at all, but I'm kind of ok with at least making the requirements for select-fire consistent for individual vs. organization, especially after that LAPD Dorner guy.
His is the only second case I'm aware of since 1934 of a legally owned NFA weapon being used in the commission of a crime. I'd strongly disagree with the claim that two criminal incidents in 79 years is sufficient reason to put additional roadblocks in front of the 2nd amendment.
Honestly, it doesn't make sense to put anything under NFA. Silencers are harmless, SBR's are bigger than handguns, and full auto is going to be less effective in the hands of a nutcase than semi auto. There is really no sane justification for it at all.
I'm fairly pro gun but I feel slightly uncomfortable with random people with crew served weapons, mortars, GMGs, etc. Although I trust most random people with $50k to spend more than I trust police departments with weapons like that.
There's an upper limit, I'd say. For me, it's a .50 cal M2 or similar machine gun. I don't think those should require extra paperwork. If you want a 20mm or a destructive device, I can understand regulating that. The 2nd Amendment's intent is served well by free access to small arms, I would say. That is enough.
Pat Buchanan came up with a more permissive metric, "anything that doesn't require a trailer hitch", although I can't see there ever being support for indirect fire weapons like mortars.
However, if an armed citizenry is supposed to keep the government in check, why not HEAT warhead anti-armor weapons? E.g. in the context of this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186569 which touches on the widespread police procurement of light armor.
I gather that in a lot of states they haven't been put to the legal test. Not a good bet where judiciaries lean more left than the state itself, e.g. any that picks judges with the Missouri Plan, like my home state of Missouri where our Castle Doctrine has been judicially nullified. Especially since you won't find many political profiles in courage supporting ownership of NFA items.
In the cases I've seen state first hand, state law regarding NFA items usually just provides a blanket exemption for legal ownership so long as the item was procured in compliance with NFA procedures.
In those states, so long as the NFA branch issues the stamp and you are (federally) legally allowed to possess the item under the NFA, it doesn't matter whether you or a trust owns it.
Of course, the trust must be valid under the trust law of the state you reside in or else it cannot legally own the items, but competent trust attorneys are not too hard to find.
I think this was meant in reply to the comment about NFA weapons and crime. If so, yeah, I find that particularly interesting too.
It also fits with the published data showing that police officers commit violent crimes at a significantly higher rate than non-LEO concealed weapons permit holders.
Yeah. My long-term plan involves either running as CLEO (in a low-population county in WA), and/or becoming a manufacturing FFL (looking at how to make .22lr mini-mag clones at <$0.05 all day, in the $10-20mm+/yr scale -- it's sadly a bit of a black art)
I don't know. It's a pretty standard thing to do these days. Surely you have to make sure you cross all the t's and dot all the i's. But it's not like the practice doesn't have a long history. Seems there are more pitfalls for owning personally.
I think part of the NRA's effectiveness is that "gun people" spend serious money on guns all the time, and there are active ways to use the guns (going shooting, hunting, etc.) which are concrete, and both could be taken away. Privacy is much more abstract, loss of privacy doesn't have direct physical or financial cost to individuals (voters) as it happens, etc.
I'd also be wary of pushing this NRA analogy too far, for fear of deterring anti-gun pro-privacy people (who do exist, and can be quite principled) from the pro-privacy cause. While most pro-gun people are pro their own personal privacy, and pro gun owner privacy (anti-registry), there's absolutely a large contingent who are fine with the government keeping watchful eyes on "those other people", within and without the US, so it's not as if NRA members are inherently anti-NSA/pro-privacy either.
I ultimately care about the tech/crypto/privacy issue a lot more than guns (which I also care about, along with low taxes, non-intrusive regulation, drug decriminalization, open immigration, etc). To the extent that being ardently pro gun turns people off from supporting privacy, I'd personally be more than willing to tone down/cut back on the pro gun message.
Actually, many, perhaps most gun owners don't constantly spend "serious money on guns all the time". There's a whole bunch who have one or two for self-defense in the home and almost never touch them. There are the "Fudds" who buy a few boxes of shotgun shells every year for hunting season, or a box of 20 rifle rounds every few. They're very ... there for concealed carry types, but we don't necessarily regularly spend money on them (most should, because for most skill decays rapidly, but real life gets in the way).
Plenty do, but every one of us feels threatened when we hear someone like DiFi say "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in" (even if that was technically only about "assault weapons", a politically defined category, we know what her end game is, guns for her but not for us).
Trying to split the "sporting gun owners" from the "ccw and evil black rifle crowd" was an effective anti-NRA tactic (attempted again recently). I guess I know a weird subset of gun owners who have to buy new safes regularly.
I think CISPA was an attempt to split the security/privacy crowd as well -- there certainly are those who care about infosec just to keep their corporate IP unrustled, vs. those who care about it from individual liberty grounds, the same way.
To me, this is shamefully low...it means that only tiny fraction of people who claim to have a strong interest in online freedom actually have joined.
The sad reality is that in modern politics, money talks, and the tech culture tends to strongly reject that ("the better idea should win"), and thus we don't participate in the political money game, and it's why we keep losing political battles.
> every post-Reagan defeated Presidential candidate was, or appeared to be bad on gun ownership
Curiously, Reagan himself was quite successful as a Presidential candidate, despite pushing through one of the first strong gun-control laws during his term as Governor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act). I wonder when the GOP tide shifted on that; mid-'80s?
Despite a long history, the NRA was just getting started in politics when Reagan was elected, and was a lot softer back then. The transformation that began with Cox and Carter in 1977 and was later carried on by Lapierre took time to gain strength. Even in the mid 90's I'd say the NRA was not as strong as it is today.
The 1994 assault weapons ban was a wakeup call, and probably contributed to the rapid sales growth of that type of rifle (it's the fastest growing segment in the industry today), which increases support for the NRA - you see how it goes. The more they try to ban the stronger the gun rights folks get. In 1994, AR15's were a niche product that even some gun owners scoffed at as useless. Today they are very much mainstream.
There also seems to be a rise in Libertarian-like thought across all parties these days that probably contributes to the NRA's cause.
But it is a mistake to paint the NRA as a Republican organization. It is far from it. That Republicans tend to support the NRA is a fact, but the NRA is non-partizan. If you look at successful lobbying groups, you'll see that they are for the most part non-partizan. The big unions are an exception, but I would argue they limit themselves by aligning with Democrats.
I wonder if part of it also relates to a shift in which parts of the political spectrum people associate politically tinged, "potentially subversive" gun carrying with. In the '60s it was mainly associated with the militant left, especially groups like the Black Panthers. That may explain why conservatives of the time, like Reagan, supported gun control as part of a general strategy of supporting the police and law-and-order against armed subversives. Nowadays open carrying of guns by groups identifying as left-wing is rather rare, and instead the politics/gun association tends to be more associated with groups on the right, like the militia movement.
This is one issue on which my elderly conservative relatives almost entirely come down on the "liberal" side, though not enough to vote for Democrats. They tend to associate gun ownership with weird thugs and revolutionary communists and generally people who are up to no good. Admittedly, they are not from rural areas, where I assume views have always been quite different (the very conservative relatives I have live in suburban-conservative areas, e.g. some live in Orange County).
The move towards libertarian influence is a good point. I think of traditional conservative views being strongly pro-police (you don't find many liberals in friends-of-the-police type community organizations), but younger libertarians like Radley Balko tend to be very critical of police.
It could be. The NRA is actively engaged in working with a traditionally liberal segment of the population - poor minorities. There are lots of reasons for that, but one big one is that they are mostly Democrats, and the NRA has become too dependent on Republicans lately.
The nation is polarizing, e.g. too many Blue Dogs got sent home to spend more time with their families, too many never really on our side (re)turned against us like Harry Reid ... we'll see how it goes. Then again, ask ex-Senator Richard Lugar what he thinks of the NRA and gunowners.... What we really need, for both issues, is this bit of wisdom from Milton Friedman:
"I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office."
Of course, for privacy, if everything is kept secret including the courts, how will we know...?
Compared to Carter and Mondale he was OK; neither of them would have signed the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, which stopped the BATF from extinguishing the nation's gun culture.
Echoing damoncali, a lot of Republican politicians who were sent home to spend more time with their families have discovered to their dismay that the NRA doesn't give a damn about the party they belong to.
Wait, can you get me the source for your claim that Fast and Furious was to boost gun death stats? There is no way I'm going to be able to convince anyone else of that without some official memo. I'd assumed it was to generate traces of the flow of guns to various gangs and thereby collect data on suppliers.
Sorry for the delay in replying, some more directly relevant replies had higher priority.
There is of course no official memo, these people aren't that dumb, or rather know the MSM wouldn't get away with carrying their water if one came to light. But there's pretty clear testimony by a BATF whistle-blower of a supervisor's comments that laid it out. While I don't have much respect for anyone in the organization, the rank and file properly had drilled into them the principle that they weren't to let guns walk, it's a cardinal rule and a lot of them are very upset at what happened.
And it's clear to anyone capable of following a logical argument based on three undisputed facts about the Arizona operation (it looks likely there was also a Texas one, and we have some evidence for a Florida/Miami area one targeting Latin America below Mexico):
When gun stores called up the BATF about extremely suspicious buyers, it told them to allow the sales, around 2,000 guns in total.
Unlike the Bush era's Wide Receiver operation, which put radio transmitters in the stocks of rifles, no attempt whatsoever was made to follow the guns south of the boarder, including informing, let alone involving the Mexican government (they're not happy).
Top Cabinet level officials like Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, plus many figures on down, made statements about how American gun stores and shows were supplying Mexican drug cartels despite a paucity of evidence.
E.g. you can't buy grenades or post-1986 manufactured automatic weapons in those venues, and for the usual reasons not really including effectiveness they prefer full auto M16s (originally supplied to the Mexican government by the US) and AK-47s (generally available on the black market, and much less bulky than drugs) to more expensive semi-auto US civilian versions. It should go without saying that the Mexican government doesn't ask the US government to trace weapons stolen from their armories.
Well, first of course there's a lot of us. Even having only a fraction, the NRA now has 5 million members. The EFF? I would be surprised to learn they had more than 50,000 (couldn't find a number in a quick search).
2nd, we vote, and many of us vote first and foremost on this issue. Especially since it's a good general touchstone, not that more than a tiny tiny fraction of national level politicians really give a damn about either issue no matter what they say most of the time.
3rd, there are many major elections where it's clear gunowners were a necessary if not necessarily sufficient part of the winning side. Gun control at the national level mostly disappeared in this century until Newtown after the Democrats suffered a string of catastrophic defeats from losing both houses of the Congress in 1994 to Al Gore losing by a whisker in 2000. That it was even close is telling, especially since Bush isn't much of a conservative or friend to gun owners, e.g. he officially supported renewal of the "assault weapons" ban.
(Note that it's in our cultural DNA to defy being told we can't or shouldn't have something, be it guns or e.g. drugs. But those are tangible, literally put your hands on them things, not like "privacy", the loss of which isn't immediately visible.)
On the side of the Stupid Party, every post-Reagan defeated Presidential candidate was, or appeared to be bad on gun ownership (Romney's actions were good, but his rhetoric was very bad). Again, the very narrow margins by which Bush won in 2000 and 2004 are probably also telling, bad rhetoric and very few good actions.
Now for some historical specifics that made a difference:
The biggest is how extreme gun grabbers are. While businessman Eric Schmidt is notorious for some creepy even if possibly true statements, I'm not aware of any national level politician who's willing to go on record saying we have no right whatsoever to privacy (whatever they actually believe).
Nothing compared to e.g. Dianne Feinstein's "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here.", or Michael Dukakis' "I do not believe in people owning guns. Guns should be owned only by police and military. I am going to do everything I can to disarm this state."
Legislation stripping us of gun rights are much more in your face than e.g. FISA, and have much more concrete results (see below). Privacy is much more a Federal issue, although there have been a number of gun privacy atrocities at the state and local level. Whereas the nation frequently watches some state go crazy and e.g. tell you that you can load only 7 bullets in your 10 round magazines ("clips"), and arrest people on that basis. Plus hypocrisy, there are many many carve outs for the anointed, be they police or politicians, or the frequent discovery that a prominent gun grabber owns guns. And all the politicians with armed bodyguards telling the rest of us we don't deserve that level of protection.
Then there are specific atrocities, cases well known by gun owners of innocents brutalized or killed by abusive organs of the states. This became big a while after the national Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed, when the BATF had to find something to do for its Revenuers after sugar price supports killed the moonshine industry.
Our side can point to kittens killed ("I swear I am not making this up"), pregnant mothers who miscarried, people crippled for life, mothers shot dead while holding a baby (Ruby Ridge, in which the BATF was enlisted to try to force her husband to spy), and many many outright killed (Waco started out as a BATF "ricebowl" operation, they wanted some nice video for their first budget in the Clinton Administration). Plus a constant drumbeat of gun owners ensnared by "flypaper" laws in gun grabbing localities; even NYC has realized it's damaging their tourist industry.
And how could I forget Fast and Furious, just one of several Federal Government gun running operations that sent thousands of guns south of the border, resulting in 350 deaths and counting, just to generate better statistics for gun grabbing propaganda (that reason is now on record and any other explanation suffers an Underpants Gnomes logical error).
The very secrecy of our national security privacy problems makes the latter problematical. Ignoring that the targets of the DEA are seldom ones we can empathize with, that they launder the tips they get from the NSA means that as of now I don't think there's a single specific case we know of.
And one final general point: lots of public figures are willing if not happy to demonize gun owners of almost every sort, and gun organizations (we can see the latter in this discussion). That results in strong push-back from the targeted (again, it's not in our cultural DNA to take that lying down).