I can envision an NRA where paying the CEO $800k/year is warranted. But this NRA isn't it. This NRA has tied its fortunes to the Trumpist GOP and promoting tired culture war narratives, seriously harming their political influence and their ability to advance gun policy favored by gun owners.
Once again on hackernews the bastion of online discourse and rational debate, merely mentioning Trump gets you downvoted without any counterargument regardless of argument. If you support him at least make a case
Wouldn’t this be the logical result of the demonisation of guns by the left? I understand they can’t pretend to be bipartisan when one of the parties want to strip them of their rights.
No, it's pretty clearly counterproductive. Over the past 10 years, the NRA has successfully reduced the share of gun-friendly Democratic Party members from 25% to nearly 0%. (https://www.thetrace.org/2020/09/nra-grades-2020-election/) Gun-friendly people on the left like myself are basically unable to talk about the issue nowadays; forget concealed carry or large-capacity magazines, in a lot of circles I'm not comfortable discussing even absolute basic things like "you might want a gun for home protection if you live in a high crime area".
Making your cause a parochial concern of a single political party is almost always going to be good for that party and bad for your cause.
> the NRA has successfully reduced the share of gun-friendly Democratic Party members from 25% to nearly 0%
While your trend is correct, I think you're mixing up cause and effect as evidenced by your later statement:
> in a lot of circles I'm not comfortable discussing even absolute basic things like "you might want a gun for home protection if you live in a high crime area"
That more closely describes those circles' perceptions and positions than anything else. A positive rating from the NRA for a Democrat seems like a bigger risk for the Democrat than the NRA and probably correlates with them being primary'd.
I'm not familiar with any cases of a Democratic candidate getting primaried for being too gun-friendly. Obviously it's hard to prove the direction of causation here, but it's my strong subjective sense that it's just become politically toxic to talk about guns positively when the biggest gun rights organization is leaning so hard into culture war nonsense.
So you're saying that the reason there are no pro-gun democrats anymore is not because democrats are very anti-gun, it's because a pro-gun democrat would be associated with the NRA which is "leaning so hard into culture war nonsense"? So basically its republican's fault that there are no pro-gun democrats?
Is it also republican's fault that there seem to be no democrats opposed to putting transgender women into women's sports?
Is it also republican's fault that repeating the n-word in the context of trying to have a discussion with a student about its meaning will get you fired?
Or maybe the better explanation for all this is that democrats have moved substantially to the left?
It's not the fault of Republicans. They're a big political party with positions on a lot of issues. It's the NRA's fault for allowing all these random controversies you're describing to get tied into the gun rights debate.
For a more concrete example, concealed carry has been a large and unambiguous gun rights success story, with shall-issue going from pretty rare in the 80s to near-universal today. What I'd expect an effective gun rights organization to produce is a roadmap for how to convince the holdouts. Illinois passed their shall-issue law with 76% in favor, and Washington has had it for decades; what lessons does this teach us about how to get left-leaning people on board? If a group of California residents wants to convince their sheriff to issue more permits or their assemblyperson to support statewide shall-issue, what should they say? I'd really like to see answers to these questions (please do send me links if you have any!), but as far as I can tell the NRA is wholly uninterested in thinking about them.
> in a lot of circles I'm not comfortable discussing even absolute basic things like "you might want a gun for home protection if you live in a high crime area"
Why not? What will be the consequences for you to state such an "absolute basic thing"?
It would be seen as a strong, disruptive political statement. Some people in my generation have legitimately never heard a pro-gun message other than the weird trolling the NRA prefers on their social media accounts, so when I say "you can take steps to feel safe when there's a burglar in your neighborhood" they hear this guy with his flamethrower: https://fb.watch/3wkI4gq4WM/
It's not really "the left", as most actual leftists I know also own guns. The problem is that the NRA basically took the side of school shooters, so now being a gun owner in liberal-left circles puts you on the side of the people who support school shootings.
Well, the party platform of the DNC is solidly anti-gun. The DNC is not the left, but I’m not sure the left is the the left either. ;)
It would suffice to say though that if you assume a democrat politician supports gun control either by personal conviction or the nature of caucusing, you would be right 95+% of the time. It is as much of a shame that a democrat majority is de facto hostile to gun rights as it is that the NRA hitched its wagon to unrelated culture issues.
A major reason why that shift happened was because if there was a pro-gun Democrat and a pro-gun Republican facing off against each other in a tight race, the NRA would back the pro-gun Republican and claim that the Democrat was going to take your guns away. The net result is that it is always a losing position for a Democrat to be pro-gun.
So over the past 20 years the pro-gun Democrats have almost entirely died off. The NRA is probably the single most significant driver of this shift.
There used to be pro-gun Democrats the NRA would give “A” ratings to, that’s true. But your reasoning about the demise of pro-gun Democrat politicians doesn’t make much sense. First, all else being equal, of course the interest of gun rights would side with the politician whose party is less hostile to gun rights. Again, all else being equal. Not sure how far you want to go back but as long as I’ve been alive the major federal gun control agendas have always been initiated by one party in particular. It may be fine to give an “A” rating to Democrat Dan’s record in support of gun rights, but if his election turns control of a legislature to a party openly hostile to the 2nd Amendment, Democrat Dan’s election on the balance isn’t going to be good, is it? To be honest, the NRA rarely goes beyond issuing their report card on a candidate’s voting record and public statements. I don’t recall seeing them “endorse” a politician where their opposition has a strong pro-gun record, though ai wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen if the election was high-profile enough. I’ve just never seen it happen.
As to why there aren’t outspoken pro-gun democrats, I hardly think you can blame the NRA for that. The NRA just doesn’t matter all that much, bogey man reputation aside. Realistically, how much of a chance does a Dem candidate have in a primary, all else being equal, if they are an outspoken advocate of gun rights? It impacts their funding, their volunteer support. The reality is that the DNC’s official platform is anti-gun, and a politician who doesn’t support a party’s platform (on either side of the aisle) is increasingly rare these days. It has more to do with the lack of opportunity for nuanced political positions.
Because it wasn't like this until the NRA ramped up their identification with the right. Again, as recently as 2010 there was a large minority of openly pro-gun people on the left.
To back that up, I know a great many left-leaning gun owners in LA that would never join the NRA as a matter of principle (due to its extreme positions), including members of law enforcement, retired military personnel, and regular joes who just like guns and things that go boom.
