The N.Y. Times Thinks It’s Been A Tough Year For The NRA. I’m Not So Sure.
“Politically, financially and legally,
the gun-rights cause and, more specifically, the lobbying juggernaut that is
the National Rifle Association have not fared well in the Trump era.”
Thus
speaketh this morning’s New York Times, and if The Times says it, then it
must be true. Except, it happens not to be true. Or it’s certainly not as true
as The New York Times Editorial Board would like you to believe.
And the reason it happens not to be
true is because the gun-control community, of which The New York Times
considers itself to be a leading media voice, knows as much about the gun
industry as I know about the structure of the atom. And I didn’t take physics
or nuclear physics in college, so I don’t know anything about the structure of
the atom, okay?
The reason I can’t get on board
with the judgement of the gun industry’s impending doom is because the
gun-control community invariably defines the ‘power’ and ‘influence’ of the ‘gun
lobby’ as based on the activities of America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’
a.k.a., the NRA. And anyone who believes
that the health and welfare of the gun ‘lobby’ should be measured simply by the
bottom line of the NRA’s balance sheet, doesn’t know anything about the gun
lobby or anything else connected to guns.
The NYT editorial board cites as
its proof that the NRA is on the ropes the fact that, for the first time,
election spending by gun-control groups (read: Bloomberg) was higher
than the dough spent by the pro-gun gang. But before our friends in Gun-control
Nation jump for joy over this unique turn of events, the reportage by our
friends at The Gray Lady needs to be nuanced a bit.
To begin, even when the NRA was
priming the electoral pump by giving pro-gun candidates as much campaign money
as they could, the average federal office-holder, at best, could only count on
the boys from Fairfax to provide 6% of what the candidate had to spend. So for
all the talk about the financial ‘power’ of the NRA, after a candidate picked
up the check from Wayne-o or Chris Cox, he still had to raise almost all the
dough necessary to fund his campaign. What does an average House
campaign cost today? Try around $1.5 million or more. How much money did
the average pro-gun House member receive in each of the last two Congressional
campaigns? Try less than $5,000 bucks.
Where the financial imbalance
between the NRA and its competitors really shows up, however, is in the amount
spent on lobbying activities once a candidate takes his or her Congressional
seat. Except the imbalance is so much in favor of the NRA that the notion that
Gun-control Nation is beginning to pull abreast of Gun-nut Nation in the halls
of Congress is a joke.
During the 115th
Congress, 2017 – 2018, Bloomberg’s Everytown PAC spent
just short of $2.5 million on lobbying activities. In those same two years, the NRA spent more
than $9.5 million bucks. In the 8 previous years when Obama was in office, the
highest yearly
lobbying amount spent by the NRA was $3.5 million. And The New York Times
is telling us that the fortunes of Gun-nut Nation have suffered under Trump?
Finally, when we look at FBI-NICS
background checks on gun transfers to gauge how gun sales stack up, the news
isn’t all that bad. Handgun-long gun transfers for December, 2007 were 925,000,
for December, 2016 they were 1,700,00, for December, 2017 they were just under
a million and a half. That’s a month-to-month drop of slightly more than 10%
from the last year of Obama to the first year of Trump, but it’s still nearly a
40% increase over the final month’s figure for another pro-gun President named
George Bush.
I’m not saying that it’s been smooth sailing for my friends in Fairfax this past year. But if anyone is thinking that the Gun-nut patient is on its way to life-support, think again.
