Doing your part
Bitter has announced a NRA membership drive contest. Do your part, folks!
NRA membership discount
Regular readers (Hi Mom!) know that I am fan of Guntalk. Tom has sent out a new Truth Squad bulletin. In it, he lays out the plan for fighting the incoming Obama gun-ban agenda. I think he lays out the stakes pretty well:
If Chris Cox, head of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, walks into a Congressman’s office backed by three million members, it’s one thing. When he walks in backed by 10 million, the reception is totally different. This is pure representative politics. You are sending someone to Washington to represent you. It is the heart of the democratic process in the United States. Right now, the message needs to be clear, and it needs to be backed with political muscle. This is hard ball. It’s a knife fight in a phone booth. To lose is to die. We lose our gun rights if the gun banners succeed in the coming battle.
I’ve said the same thing here. I can’t make it any more plain. Joining the NRA is the single most effective thing you can do to secure your gun rights. And Tom has backed up his words with action. He has arranged for discounted NRA memberships. If you use the link on my sidebar, you will be able to access the discount.
Once you have joined, buy memberships for your friends and family. Christmas is right around the corner. You can buy a membership for $25 with the discount. $15 for a youth membership. If you don’t want the magazine, a membership is a measley $10. Nowadays, that’s like the cost of a box of ammo.
The most important thing you can do now
The day is here. Obama has won. Guns are flying off the shelf. You can’t buy an Evil Black Rifle to save your life.
Before he took it down, his transition website contained this gem (rescued from the memory hole by Google cache.) The important part:
Address Gun Violence in Cities: As president, Barack Obama would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals who shouldn’t have them. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent, as such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets
So, stripped of the codewords, here is what President-elect Obama is planning to do:
- Allow folks like Mike Bloomberg access to gun trace data to aid his lawsuits
- Shut down private transfers of firearms
- Enforce “smart gun” legislation
- Ban semi-auto firearms
The single most effective thing that you can do to stop him is this: join the NRA. Do it today. Right now, in fact. Click here. I’ll wait.
You are already an NRA member, you say? Great! Reach out to 5 other gunnies, or other freedom loving individuals, and get them to join. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Here’s the deal, folks. We are in the fight of our lives. The NRA is the biggest pro-gun lobbying organization in the nation. If NRA lobbies Congress as a 4 million member organization, it has a certain amount of influence. If NRA lobbies Congress as a 40 million member organization, it has incredible power. There are over 100 million gun owners in the United States. NRA has 4 million members. That means that there are at least 96 million of you who are letting the rest of us carry you. I’m tired of carrying you.
“But George…I don’t like the NRA. I disagree with them on…”
Don’t care. Join anyway.
“But I’m a member of…”
Don’t care. Great…join them all. But you HAVE GOT to be a member of NRA. This is about numbers.
“They keep asking me for money.”
Quit your bitching. Call them and tell them to stop sending mail. They will put you on the list. Join the freaking organization.
“They’ll never take my guns. I’ll bury them, see, and…”
Quit the macho internet fantasies and do something productive. Spend the $35 and join the NRA.
In fact, if you are too cheap to spend the $35, if your gun rights aren’t worth $3 a month to you…email me, and I’ll pay it for you.
If everyone dropping cash on firearms today would join up…there would be no need to hoard. We would have the numbers to stop the ban before it happens.
I’m going to make a prediction. The AWB will be one of the first things on BHO’s agenda. I’d say we have until March or so to stop this train. Take the most effective, easiest step you can…join the NRA today.
The great debate
Caleb and Bonnie have posted a podcast from their weekly internet radio show on the Mike Vanderboegh kerffullfle here.
I thought it was well balanced and very informative.
Gunbloggers getting down…
A small firestorm is raging over at Sebastian’s place, and it has gotten him down.
The core fight seems to be whether or not it makes sense to work within the political system, or if we have lost the battle for our gun rights and should stand around shouting “Shall not be infringed!!!”.
I’m honestly shocked at this kind of talk. I understand people who have been in the fight for years getting down. I’ve thought about gun rights and been aware of the struggle for about 15 years or so. Look at what we have accomplished in that time:
1) RTC in 40 states
2) Sunset of the AWB. More then that, the AR-15 rifle has become the most popular rifle in America.
3) The SCOTUS pronouncing the right to have a firearm to be an individual right.
4) Perhaps even more importantly…SCOTUS specifically calling out self-defense as a legitimate “reason” for firearm usage.
Let’s be honest….the MSM has controlled the “marketing” around gun rights for years and years. This creates problems such as this silliness which creates a completely distorted view of the “dangers of gun ownership.” There is a more subtle problem, however…like the fact that Hollywood would have us believe that you can walk down to the local 7-11 to pick up a machine gun. The MSM doesn’t control the message anymore.
As I posted yesterday, I think that the most important theing we can do as a culture is to change hearts and minds. The ultimate goal is to make gun ownership unremarkable. We do that by letting people see that gun owners are normal, everyday people. The “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!!!” crowd thwarts that. Folks like Tam, Breda, Tracy, Squeaky & Ahab, Sebastian, and Bitter help.
Here is why we will win: the truth is on our side. We don’t have to lie about statistics. The anti-gunners do. We don’t have to control the medium to convince people. The antis do.
Oldie but a goodie
Marko had a comment about his simply excellent essay “Why the Gun is Civilization”, and that reminded me that there might be lots of newbies who haven’t read his essay. Go, take a look.
I want to write like Marko when I grow up.
Changing Hearts and Minds
Sebastian has a great post discussing the need for balance in advocating for gun rights. And Ahab has another post about how not to do it.
Both of these posts have gotten me thinking about how to win hearts and minds. I’ve believed for a long time that the secret to winning the war for gun rights is to change public opinion. I think that people can fall into the categories I’ve outlined in this picture. (Click to embiggen. Sorry for the pic…I have the all the art skills of a scat flinging monkey)
People fall somewhere along these two poles. They are somewhere between hostile to guns and gun rights and friendly. This is largely an emotional axis. They are also somewhere between knowledgeable and ignorant. This is largely an intellectual axis. BTW, I choose the word ignorant intentionally. I know that this work usually has a negative connotation, but I believe it is appropriate here. People who are ignorant about something don’t know what they don’t know.
When we consider how we talk to people, we need to think about what quadrant they are in, and where we want to move them. For example, someone who is in the lower left box are ignorant and hostile. They don’t know too much about firearms, and they don’t like them. We have the opportunity to move them along both axises. We can bring facts and figures and try to move them from ignorant to knowledgeable, or appeal to them emotionally and move them from hostile to friendly.
Folks in the top right are very tough to crack. They are knowledgeable but hostile. Josh Sugarman is probably the best example of this type of person. He knows about firearms, holds an FFL, knows the true statistics, but doesn’t care. We can’t reach them by telling the truth about firearms. We can’t do a lot with these people….they need to be refuted and isolated.
Folks in the bottom right are the folks we need to reach out to. They are neutral or even friendly to us. They don’t know much about the gun culture, or shooting. They are the next generation of gunnies. Our goal is make them educated activists. These are the folks we run this risk of turning off with silly letters like this.
Folks in the upper right are solid gunnies. We need to encourage them to become active, and to reach out to others to keep the cycle going.
I believe that most Americans are to the left and slightly down. Most people don’t know much about guns. And they are slightly hostile do to the long standing messaging by the MSM. Guns are bad. Guns are evil. You are 40 times more likely to shoot a family member then an intruder. That’s how Clear Channel can donate billboards to an anti-gun group and honestly not think they were doing anything wrong. Who is in favor of gun violence? It’s only when you think about the problem and understand the true numbers that it becomes obvious.
Consider the common refrain: “I just don’t like guns!” That is a classic lower left statement. Bringing an argument invoving facts and figures, or even worse, a “from my cold dead hands” screed runs the risk of pushing someone up into upper right. You address the intellectual arguments, but not the emotional component. You run the risk of turning them off permanently. I believe the best way to bring a new shooter is to slowly move them upper right. If you can’t do that, moving them right is better then moving them up.
I believe that this is why taking a new shooter out to the range, if done properly, is so effective. It addresses the up/down axis…the new shooter has learned some very important things:
- Shooters are normal people
- Shooters take safety seriously
- Guns don’t go off unless you pull the trigger
More importantly…they learn that shooting is fun! That moves them along the left/right axis. Even if they don’t take up shooting as a hobby, they have been inoculated against anti-gun propaganda.
On open carry
Via Uncle.
There are two basic modes of carrying a pistol. Concealed carry, as the name implies, requires that your pistol be concealed. In most states it requires a license, the notable exceptions being Vermont and Alaska. The NRA Institute for Legislative Action has a fact sheet here that has a state-by-state comparison of carry laws.
What lots of folks don’t realize is that in many states, open carry is also legal and and frequently doesn’t require a license. The folks at OpenCarry.org have a state-by-state info sheet on their site.
Open carry is somewhat controversial in the gun culture. On the one hand, I firmly believe that the most important thing that we can do to secure gun rights in the long term is to make gun ownership unremarkable. Open carry serves the positive purpose of letting people see what a gun owner looks like…and specifically that they look like everyone else. Outings like this one go a long way toward desensitizing people to firearms.
This is the kind of attitude we need to change:
Lt. Alan Cavener of the Boise Police Department said reason must play a part in the open carrying of guns.
“We support peoples’ constitutional rights, but we also want to ensure public safety. People need to use common sense about where they choose to bring a firearm,” Cavener said.
Why, Lieutenant? Why is a zoo any different from any other place?
Do your part!
-
-