The list of candidates for the Republican candidacy for the presidency who attended the annual convention of the National Rifle Association (NRAacronym in English) reflects the political power of defenders of the right to possess weapons, despite declining income for the group and an increasingly vocal opposition movement as they continue to occur mass shootings in the United States.
Even amid internal turmoil and legal problems, gun culture and the movement that NRA (the association’s acronym in English) helped build are still formidable. And the landmark Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment last summer has given new strength to gun rights activists seeking to overturn restrictions on gun use across the country.
“For one thing, the gun rights movement has never been stronger,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote the book “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America” (“Shooting: the battle for the right to bear arms in the United States”). But “one of the interesting things about this moment is that the NRA, in some ways, has never faced more organizational incoherence and disorder.”
This year’s convention was held April 14-16, just days after shootings at a school in Nashville, Tennessee, and a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, the latter the 15th mass shooting in the United States in which four or more people were killed in addition to the shooter, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and the USA Today newspaper in association with Northeastern University. That has been the most during the first 100 days of a calendar year in the country since 2009, when 16 had already occurred. shootings of this type for April 10.
“Nobody wants to see the violence seen in schools and other places today,” Randy Corner, a gun and rifle instructor for the NRA based in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, told The Associated Press during the event. “But I don’t think taking away guns from citizens ordinary will change none of that at all.”
The event in Indianapolis drew a large number of Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, potential rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. second amendment constitutional law and rejected the idea that gun restrictions are the solution to end violence in the streets.
It also came as the NRA grapples with the fallout from infighting and lawsuits.
Last year, a judge ruled that New York Attorney General Letitita James’ lawsuit accusing NRA executives of financial improprieties can proceed, even though the judge also rejected James’s attempt to make disappear to the association. It filed for government bankruptcy protection in 2021, but a judge dismissed that case, ruling that it had not been filed in good faith.
Five years ago, the NRA was running a $36 million deficit due to lavish spending, followed by demands filed by its own members, as well as by the attorneys general of New York and Washington, DC
In the years since, the group appears to have climbed out of a financial hole, but not because of the influx of cash, said Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at Ohio State University who has studied the finances of the cluster. Revenue fell 4% in 2020, and 18% the following year, he found. The NRA cut spending on longstanding programs including education and training, shooting sports and police initiatives, Mittendorf added.
Its primary source of income has always been membership dues, but that base has also declined in recent years, and cuts to programs could make it harder to attract new members, Mittendorf said.
“Despite the fact that they have reduced their scope of operations, they are still not earning enough revenue to cover their expenses. So, that suggests that something has to change in this organization.”
Still, a very important part of the NRA’s influence has been its ability to mobilize people to oppose the gun control creating a social identity around gun ownership, said Matt Lacombe, professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University and author of “Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force.” Guns: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners Into a Political Force”). And people are motivated to resist attempts that they feel threaten part of their identity, he noted.
“The NRA was responsible for creating that identity, but now it’s something that exists in the world to some degree independent of the National Rifle Association as an organization,” he said. “So, if the NRA were to admit defeat in the future or go bankrupt, it doesn’t mean that this group of people who own guns and who largely view politics through this lens of gun ownership is going to go away, at least not overnight.
An NRA spokesman said the organization is “financially strong and as effective as ever in its mission to protect the Second Amendment, despite the effects of the pandemic, the weak economy and other factors that have affected so many.” corporations and organizations.
“The ‘demise of the NRA’ is a desperate and false narrative, one we have heard about year after year for decades,” spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said in an emailed statement. “And yet, the strength of this organization was fully palpable…as nearly 80,000 people gathered in Indianapolis to celebrate the Association and hear from nearly every pro-Second Amendment presidential candidate.”
Gun sales in the United States rose to record levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Florida became the latest state to remove requirements for people to obtain a concealed-carry permit.
Meanwhile, the so-called Bruen decision of the Supreme Court in June — over a case brought by an NRA affiliate — has prompted gun rights activists to file a flurry of challenges to gun restrictions across the country. Judges have already upheld the ruling — which modified the test that lower courts have long used to assess challenges to gun laws — to declare unconstitutional measures designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and felony defendants, among other laws.
However, in the last decade the movement for gun control it has become a growing counterbalance.
“Kissing the NRA ring could help Republican presidential hopefuls win a primary, but it will be the kiss of death in a general election where a clear majority of voters favor common-sense security measures regarding to guns,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, said in an emailed statement.
Last summer, Congress passed its first major gun law in decades, increasing background checks on fbi for buyers under the age of 21 and sending millions of new dollars to mental health services for children and schools.
The President’s Government Joe Biden it has also tightened provisions on so-called ghost weapons — which have no serial number and are untraceable — and stabilizer clamps, an accessory used in at least two mass shootings. Biden has also signed executive orders expanding background checks on people who want to buy a gun, and has called for reapplying the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” or certain semi-automatic rifles.
In any case, the political perspectives for that step to materialize are weak at best. And NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre made it clear during his speech at the convention that the group will mobilize his supporters to combat such initiatives.
“Politicians who hate guns should never go to bed without fear of what this association, and all of our millions of members, can do to their political careers,” he said.
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