The NRA is slowly dying
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newsweek.com
Membership is declining at the gun right's group as it also faces financial difficulties. Critics say the future looks bleak.
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Good. The modern NRA has been the worst thing for guns rights in years. Wayne LaPierre can rot in hell.
It'd be one thing if they were only opposed by people for more gun control, but they aren't even really good at their core mission. All they do is simp for the GOP, even when doing so runs counter to their stated agenda.
Fixed it for ya.
JFC, really? I'm not up on the latest NRA lore but that sounds too bad to be true.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44885633.amp
This article is a bit old, after it was written Butina went back to Russia and is now a member of theit legislature.
I keep reading and it keeps getting worse. HOW?
well, citizens united mostly, but also because the GOP knows no shame, even dead children and collaborating with the russians.
citizens united. Those justices have decided to be on the infamous side of history.
The NRA is a marketing team for gun manufacturers, and what sells guns is fear of gun bans. The NRA does everything in their power to fuel those fears.
Pro and anti gun alike hate them. It's mostly just boomers keeping them going.
They aren't a gun rights organization. They aren't even a manufacturer's organization. They are Republican shills, first, last, and always.
I was finally convinced they had abandoned gun owners when they endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012. When a gun rights organization openly endorses the signer of a gun ban, there is something deeply wrong.
Did they endorse Reagan, too? He signed a gun ban.
That was slightly before my time, but yes, they did endorse Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and Reagan had signed the Mulford Act 13 years earlier. The Mulford act wasn't a gun ban per se; it prohibited carry of loaded firearms without a permit.
Reagan went on to support the Brady Bill and the 1994 AWB after his presidency. Reagan also banned carry in national parks. Clinton and 2 Bushes didn't undo that mistake; Obama fixed it in his first month in office.
But I digress: the NRA has done far more for the Republican Party than it has done for gun rights.
It's the same story with evangelical groups like Focus on the Family: They're just shills for Republicans, and are actively hurting their religion in the process.
That sudden ray of light is Huey P smiling.
Exactly. I belonged to the NRA way back when they were a safety and information organization. They began to sell high priced commemorative hunting guns, then commemorative military guns. Soon they started selling military style guns like the M1 Garand rifle and the M1 carbine. I quit. Their push continued into modern M16s while simultaneously pushing scare articles to convince people of dangers so great that they would need buy military style weapons. The NRA degenerated into a money and greed operation that became the opposite of its origins intent.
They've even wormed their way into schools. They have "Eddie the Eagle" that teaches elementary school kids gun safety. With NRA logos all over the place, of course. I was disgusted when my daughter brought the information home.
Absolutely kids should be taught gun safety. They just shouldn't get it with a heaping helping of NRA.
Gun safety was one of their original missions and where quite successful at it before they turned into a fear mongering lobbying group.
Someone else needs to do it now. But I'm guessing the NRA gives school systems plenty of money to use their program.
There can be only one.
I'd say it started with Harlan Carter. He was the one who decided that the NRA should be all about the profits of gun manufacturers, and not about safe and sane gun culture.
Gun culture is just a different and insane thing in the US. We have a bit of it in Canada and gun issues in the cities, but guns are highly regulated here, maybe too much in some specific aspects. I'm in favor of less restrictions for historical pieces similar to historical cars where you can apply for that status.
Where I'm from lots of people have guns but there's not really a gun culture, they're basically used for animal defense. Last incident I know of was a deliriously sick coyote getting in to a horse paddock in daylight.
The NRA changed American thinking from "guns are tools that we sometimes need for protection" to "GUNS ARE THE ONLY THING PROTECTING YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR FREEDOM!!!1!!!".
They can rot in hell.
You just know there's so many Americans with guns who can't wait to kill someone for the right reason in the most violent way, it's like their fantasy.
I was listening to an American at a work outing once who got inspected at the Canadian border, and she was ranting about how they thought she had a gun and were checking everywhere. I'm sympathizing cause that sucks, then she's like "but they never checked my purse where I kept my gun!" and it's like fuck sakes woman, you certainly made your point...
It can't die fast enough.
If only there were a quick and effective means of killing something.
Sadly, those are only to be used on kindergartners.
If conservatives were susceptible to irony they’d have all been gunned down by now
Hmmm, did the spigot of Russian money flowing into their coffers dry up?
That’s the real answer. “We’re no longer a foreign asset funnelling Russian money to republicans so we’re broke”
Yep if you look at all stuff across the world, the dirty money is drying up. The game is catching up
I guess that whole war with Ukraine thing has some side effects!
😡
Can I help? How can I help speed this up?
But the damage it has done to the political landscape by pushing right wing agendas, fearmongering of every sort to get people to buy guns, and tying identity to gun ownership will live on far beyond the useful life of the NRA.
The organization may be dead but the propaganda they created lives on in the heart of every gun owner.
Good news: NRA (maybe, hopefully) dying.
Absolutely horrible news: The void being filled by even more extreme and harmful groups within the same overall ideology, Islamic State style.
A dozen other groups have far less power than one huge lobbying organization.
Not when they're working together and have taken over most of the billionaire donors
And many of the dozen groups are run by the same family of douchbags. The Dorr brothers.
Yeah the No Compromise podcast is a really good primer for what the NRA is done.
Scary listen, especially with the new speaker of the house’s religious statements.
Can they speed it up a bit?
Do something to put it out of its misery, perhaps?
Maybe it should hurry the fuck up.
Good, even if you are supportive of gun rights there has to be a better option than contributing to a Russian fascist propaganda outlet.
The lack of Russian money probably helped here, too. Good riddance.
Yo how can we speed shit up? Fuck the nra, fuck russia, fuck the republican traitor filth.
... and nothing of value was lost.
I'm sure Daddy Putin will have a replacement ready in no time.
Good, but slowly isn’t good enough.
Too slowly, unfortunately
If ever an organisation needed a bullet...
Meh. The "gun groups" of the future are discord servers about 3d printing
That doesn't sound like an organized group with lobbying and government presence. I'm fine with that.
If they start going after 3D printers I might join them. I've got an unregistered gun maker sitting in the corner of my office, even though I mostly use it for printing figurines.
The NRA had lost a lot of financial backing because when the main thing you endorse is being used to murder schoolchildren on a borderline industrial scale, of course sponsors and advertisers will want nothing to do with it.
They also got busted for money laundering and being a front for foreign oligarchs to fund US politicians... I'm guessing all those rubles drying up hits the bittom line, too.
Why did you put an apostrophe in rights
Ask the writer, since the blurb was auto-pulled from it.
Because they are the gun right. You know, like alt-right, Christian right, gun right.
Oh shit! I saw the gold and purple and the old white man and misread the title as NBA! How did I not see the guns?!
Also fuck the NRA for fucking ever! I wish we could start prying some guns from some of those cold dead hands already. Die.
Pity the number of victims of gun violence continues to rise, rather quickly.
Democrats going after people stealing MY MONEY is COMMUNISM!
I'm critical of the nra and I didn't think that's bleak, it's fucking awesome
This is the best summary I could come up with:
From 2003 to 2013, the organization scored 230 legislative victories, according to an Insider tally from the time, including passing six state laws that forbid municipalities from limiting gun rights.
Since then its membership has declined to 4.3 million, CEO and executive vice president LaPierre revealed in a January board meeting, according to a report by The Trace, a nonprofit covering gun violence.
Since 2020, it has faced an ongoing lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James, which alleges that its top officials, including LaPierre himself, diverted donations for their personal use, violating numerous state and federal laws, and even the NRA's own bylaws and policies.
James alleged that the funds were used for family trips to the Bahamas and private jets, which contributed to a $64 million reduction in the balance sheet in three years, turning a surplus into a deficit.
"The NRA's influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets," James said at a press conference at the time.
Forty-five percent of U.S. households owned at least one firearm in 2022, according to research compiled by Statista, the highest figure since 2011—and 8 percentage points higher than in 2013, the year LaPierre said the NRA was on track for "unprecedented" growth.
The original article contains 1,305 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good!
I've heard this one before. As long as the GOP can keep using them as a wedge issue, they'll never die. Maybe just mutate into something even worse.
Need to replace them with the SRA stat.
Not slowly enough
🎶 They ain't gonna jump no more 🎶
I feel like one of the 7 pro gun people on all of Lemmy, I'd like to share some perspective about the NRA being a boogieman. They absolutely are not the boogiman that leftists and anti gunners think they are. They are a ridiculously bloated, corrupt, beuracracy, no different than our federal government. They are all optics. In fact I'd say their only job is to be the boogieman and absorb negative attention, to allow the real gun rights groups to get some work done.
They keep a public list of approved politicians and downgrade anyone who even mentions gun reform. That feels like more than just a bureaucracy; since they're largely funded by weapons manufacturers, it seems more like an extremely influential lobby. And since what they're lobbying for is "keep pretending that there's no way to solve the deadly problem that kills more humans than any other thing you don't do to yourself and literally every other developed nation has solved," it seems like their job is to enforce the prioritization of gun manufacturers' profits over lives.