America’s invincible gun lobby

The hue and cry that has greeted President Obama’s proposals to impose commonsense limits on his country’s multi-billion dollar firearms industry is a reminder of how entrenched the gun lobby has become in American politics. To foreign eyes the President’s 23 executive actions − based on proposals from Vice-President Biden’s task force − barely scratch the surface of the gun culture, or the industry that fuels it, yet there has been widespread alarm at Obama’s efforts to improve background checks for gun sales and his call for a law to limit magazine capacities and the sale of assault weapons. One Republican legislator has even threatened to file articles of impeachment if the President pursues these mild initiatives towards gun control.

The story of how the National Rifle Association has managed to make gun control anathema to America’s legislators is well told by Tim Dickinson in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. One of the chief architects of the organization’s remarkable political ascendancy is its current executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, the man who recently proposed arming guards at every one of America’s 100,000 schools in the wake of the Newtown killings. Despite that misjudgment of the national mood, LaPierre has consistently gauged the climate in Washington perfectly and he and his colleagues have been instrumental in either gutting previous efforts at gun control or in procuring legislation that shields gun manufacturers from the legal consequences product liability laws would usually entail.

One key to the NRA’s success has been the way the association – traditionally a voice for gun owners – has annexed itself to an “$11.7 billion industry [that] has fed tens of millions of dollars into [its] coffers” enabling it to “string together victories that would have seemed fantastic just 15 years ago.” Importantly, the manufacturers’ largesse has allowed NRA management to lobby Congress for positions that few NRA members actually hold. In May 2012, for instance, a respected GOP pollster found that three-quarters of the NRA’s 4 million members approve of background checks and almost as many believe gun owners should be obliged to report lost or stolen weapons to the police — measures the group’s lobbyists and allies vociferously oppose in Washington.

The few groups who lobby for gun control are totally outmatched by the NRA’s political spending. During the last election the group spent more than $20 million in “regulated and dark money” compared to just $3,000 by the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign. Beyond this disparity, Dickinson notes, no other group has anything like the NRA’s capacity for “organizing activists at the level of every congressional district in the country.”

One of the most palpable forms of the political pressure the NRA has exercised over Washington has been the “grades” it awards to politicians for their stance on gun control “rewarding allies with campaign cash and subjecting foes to the backlash of millions of rabid, single-issue gun-owning voters.” Faced with this scrutiny both parties have caved. This has produced extraordinary distortions in the political process. For example when the NRA became concerned at a list the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms published − a list that provided data on America’s ten most lethal firearms − it used political connections to make the data disappear. In 2003 a congressman from Kansas added a clause to an appropriations bill that forbade the ATF “from spending any money to share the data it collects with the public – or even with Congress.”

Newly empowered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision − which defines money used for political advertising as a form of free speech − the NRA and its allies are more powerful than ever, and fully prepared to warp the political process in their favour. For, as Dickinson writes: “The NRA wins because Americans lose focus. Because our outrage fades after each new heartbreak. Because by November 2014, most of us won’t be thinking about the victims of Newtown. Most of us won’t be thinking about guns at all …” The unwholesome charade currently underway in Washington should fool no one, however sincere the President’s words and gestures may be, for in the end well-funded and tightly focused special interest groups like the NRA nearly always prevail.