Whom Does the NRA Really Speak For?

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/whom-does-the-nra-really-speak-for/266373/

Whom Does the NRA Really Speak For?
By Jordan Weissmann

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IT SPEAKS FOR GUN MAKERS

But membership fees don't pay the NRA's bills alone. In recent years, the group has become more aggressive about seeking donations, both from individuals and corporations, and that in turn has led it to become more deeply entwined with the gun industry. In 2010, it received $71 million in contributions, up from $46.3 million in 2004. Some of that money came from small-time donors, who've received a barrage of fundraising appeals warning of President Obama's imminent plot to gut the Second Amendment and confiscate Americans' firearms. But around 2005, the group began systematically reaching out to its richest members for bigger checks through its "Ring of Freedom" program, which also sought to corral corporate donors. Between then and 2011, the Violence Policy Center estimates that the firearms industry donated as much as $38.9 million to the NRA's coffers. The givers include 22 different gun makers, including famous names like Smith & Wesson, Beretta USA, SIGARMS, and Sturm, Ruger & Co. that also manufacture so-called assault weapons.

Some of that funding has given the NRA a direct stake in gun and ammo sales. As Bloomberg noted in its January article, Sturm, Ruger & Co. launched a campaign to sell one million guns, and promised to donate $1 of each purchase to the group. Since 1992, MidWay USA, which retails gun supplies including ammo and controversial high-capacity magazines, has allowed its customers to round up each of their online and mail orders to the nearest dollar, and automatically donate the extra to the NRA. Together with other companies that have joined the effort, MidWay has helped collect more than $9 million for NRA. MidWay's owner, Larry Pottfield, also happens to be the the group's largest individual donor.

These connections have fueled the theory among some gun-control advocates that the NRA is just another corporate front. That might theoretically explain why the group has opposed politically popular measures such as requiring background checks at gun shows and banning sales to people on the terrorist watch list, proposals that even its own members have been found to support. For gun makers, the fewer rules, the better.

"They translate the industry's needs into less crass, less economically interested language -- into defending the home, into defending the country," Tom Diaz, the Violence Policy Center's senior policy analyst, told me in an interview. One example, he said, was concealed carry laws, which the NRA promotes as self-defense measures. As Diaz explained, letting private citizens carry their handguns in public also just happened to allow firearms manufacturers to make and market new, smaller weapons with higher calibers.

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IT SPEAKS FOR RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGUES

Or is it to keep them frightened? In his tell-all memoir, Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, former NRA operative and consultant Richard Feldman argued that the group had degenerated into "a cynical, mercenary political cult," that was "obsessed with wielding power while relentlessly squeezing contributions from its members." Manipulating the fears of impassioned gun owners helped keep their wallets open, and helped to fund the rich pay packages for executives like LaPierre, who pocketed nearly $1 million in 2010.

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