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Rolling Stone on how to defeat the NRA
It's good for some amusement. The only good points are ones that have been used for decades... never let a good crisis, or victim, go to waste, and exploit them quickly. The rest shows a profound misunderstanding of the gun rights movement. NRA (by which they mean the gun rights movement) is only big "inside the beltway," so organize local groups. The gun rights movement went there years ago: CalGuns, United Sportsmen of Florida, etc., etc.. The gun rights movement has money, now Bloomberg will match it. Buying TV ads -- that is SO twentieth century! It isn't millions of dollars, but millions of committed supporters that make the difference, especially today, when thanks to the internet the mass media no longer have a choke hold on communicating with supporters.
Check out the 700+ comments: looks like Rolling Stone can't even convince its own audience. "I hope you got paid quite a bit for selling out, because this is disgusting." "stick with your laughable "100 Greatest Guitarists" lists. You don't even know music." Dude....seriously, voting will do. Signed, A Liberal Democrat that supports all rights, including gun rights" "Hunter S. Thompson would be SO ashamed of what has become of the Rolling Stone."
· NRA
2 Comments | Leave a comment
"As a Democrat member of the NRA, where do I fall into this whole scheme of things?"
I believe the phrase is, "Useful Idiot".
If you're pro-gun, but continually vote for a party that makes banning all guns a part of its official political platform, you're just a dupe.
In the comments section, Don Dillards asks
"As a Democrat member of the NRA, where do I fall into this whole scheme of things?"
Since my response was not published ("your comment is waiting approval"), I'll post it here:
Don,
I feel your pain.
I'm not a Democrat, but I'm extremely concerned about corporate power and extreme wealth/income inequality turning us into a "Game of Thrones" type feudal society, but with iPhones and big screen TVs. Unfortunately, most of my fellow gun-owners have drunk the Ayn Rand brand of Kool-Aid, so I have no home in the Republican Party (which has a strange obsession with who is buggering whom up what orifice).
Unfortunately, after 2013, that's all on the back-burner because, unlike a lot of other issues, gun-owner rights are immediate and very tangible. As a resident of Colorado, I am demonstrably less free than I was a13 months ago; e.g., I no longer can trade guns with my friends in the privacy of my own home. This is not trivial to me.
It's sad, because by 2010 - 2011, there was an observable "lessening of paranoia" -- for lack of a better phrase -- among a growing segment of gun owners. Oh, we were well aware that Democrats wanted to disarm us, but thought that they had given up on the issue as a practical matter. With crime rates low, there was also a realization that statistically, losing 10 - 20 pounds would do more to extend our life expectancy than carrying a gun for protection (at least among us middle-class middle-age white males). We no longer had to be "single issue" voters.
But the Democrats' mask came off shortly after the 2012 election. It's not just that the laws proposed (and passed in some states) were bad. It's that we could see the hatred, the hypocrisy, the ignorance, and the stupidity that went into them. Maybe the same was true during the Clinton era -- I don't know -- but the 21st century tools of the information age made the Democrats' bigotry and motive impossible to hide. Here in Colorado, there were Democrats who actually told a rape victim (Amanda Collins) to **** off and die to her face because she wanted to carry a gun for protection -- and this was while Todd Aikin's idiocy about "legitimate rape" was relatively recent.
It took me a generation to trust Democrats. At my age, I won't live long enough to make that mistake again.
Women and blacks and Hispanics and gays feel like they're not being treated nicely? Call somebody who cares. "Occupy" protesters being beaten by the police? So what? Want me to do something about global warming? **** off, I've got my own problems to worry about now.