The National Rifle Association is in a lose-lose situation with CNN’s Wednesday evening town hall on guns.
This isn’t to criticize the NRA for wanting to engage on policy. This isn’t to say the NRA should shy away from publicly defending Second Amendment rights.
Rather, this is to say the NRA is setting itself up for failure by participating in this specific debate, which will include survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
The very makeup of the CNN town hall, titled “Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action,” puts the NRA at a disadvantage. If the NRA hopes to debunk anti-Second Amendment myths and persuade the viewing public, there’s not a lot of room to do either effectively when one side of the debate includes a handful of teens who just buried their murdered friends.
Indeed, NRA national spokeswoman Dana Loesch is coming into this event with a deficit; the voice of a major political organization versus the few, and memorable, faces of a recent tragedy.
Persuasion is presumably Loesch’s goal. If so, it will take an enormous amount of tact and skill to win over the town hall participants. Is that attainable? The wounds and pain are too fresh. Winning the persuasion game will be extremely difficult here, especially when there has been no cool off period for the survivors. Then there’s the public relations aspect, where the viewing audience will watch as the NRA spokeswoman attempts to juggle logic and compassion as the counterpoint to grieving teens. That’s no small order.
Loesch will no doubt embolden those who already agree with her, but I’m not so sure the same can be said for those who are genuinely torn or those who already disagree with her. It won’t be impossible, just damn near so.
That said, the optics of acting as the opposition to mass shooting survivors isn’t the biggest problem for the NRA. The problem here is that participating at all suggests a lot about them that simply isn’t so.
By appearing in CNN’s town hall (and good on the network for inviting them!), the NRA is suggesting it has some sort of culpability in the Parkland shooting. It doesn’t. It is an advocacy group whose power comes from its millions of dues-paying members. The NRA doesn’t manufacture firearms. It doesn’t sell firearms. It certainly doesn’t promote unsafe gun habits (anyone who has been to the NRA range in Northern Virginia can tell you this).
Then again, if the NRA declined CNN’s invitation, critics would accuse the organization of being cowardly, dodging the debate, etc. This is why the NRA’s decision, either way, is a lose/lose. They’re damned if they don’t, and almost certainly damned if they do.
The best course here would have been for the NRA to decline the Wednesday event with a promise to host or participate in a separate town hall with pro- and anti-Second Amendment policy experts.
But who asked me?
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Full disclosure: This author is a paid contributor with CNN/HLN.
