The NRA's 'Shadow Convention' Reveals the Group's True Purpose
On the third floor of Houston’s massive convention center, far above the noise and rabble of the gun show at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, a luxury hospitality suite was closed to normal NRA members. It was reserved instead for the gun lobby’s biggest donors, who belong to its “Ring of Freedom.” Here, grandees could escape from the masses, sink into plush leather couches, belly up to the refreshment tables, and marvel at a surreal pair of massive taxidermy installations, including one of a grizzly bear felling a moose.
The NRA loves to bash “the elites” — in Hollywood and the media — whom they blame for whipping the nation into what they describe as gun-grabbing hysteria after a mass shooting like the one that left 19 elementary school children dead in Uvalde, Texas. The organization holds itself out as a stalwart defender of the everyman against “the world’s most powerful, deceitful and ruthless opponents,” as NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre put it in a Saturday address to NRA members.
But at its annual meeting in Houston, the NRA hosted a high-end shadow convention for its own elite members and backers — many of them executives of gun manufacturers and sellers. These “Ring of Freedom” events underscore how the NRA has transformed itself from a pro-second amendment organization, focused on the liberty interests of its members, into a front group for gun industry itself.
The NRA today is best understood as a stalwart defender of gun commerce. The NRA doesn’t sell weapons, but it sells the fear that sells the guns — always warning its members against a rising tide of violence, from which they must be prepared to defend themselves with deadly force. Meanwhile, its lobbyist go to the mat in Washington and state capitals across the country to block restrictions on the kinds of weapons that dealers can sell, and to open up new markets — including by passing conceal-carry laws, so that Americans gun consumers don’t just purchase a gun for the home, but plunk down on another to take to town. When school massacres occur, the NRA predictably pushes to expand guns into another new market — the classroom — a move that could turn the nation’s more than 3 million teachers into gun buyers.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-nra-s-shadow-convention-reveals-the-group-s-true-purpose/ar-AAXTmqQ
= new reply since forum marked as read
