The National Rifle Association is the consummate boogeyman of the Left, a sort of all-powerful specter hovering over every political and societal nook and cranny. There is probably no organization in society so consistently reviled and so publicly slandered as the NRA. Actors Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman, for instance, both recently told the NRA to “fuck off” and “eat shit,” respectively. It is difficult to imagine the response if a couple of conservative public figures hurled such invective at Planned Parenthood. But it’s the NRA, so everyone giggled about it.
Liberals tend to credit the NRA with far more influence over our electoral process than it actually has. It is highly popular to accuse Republicans of being “in the pocket” of the gun lobby — but the NRA is, all things considered, a relatively unremarkable campaign contributor.
In the last election cycle, for instance, the group donated about 0.03 percent of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s total campaign funds. What the Left pictures as Scrooge McDuck’s money bin looks instead like a perfunctory campaign donation to an establishment candidate.
Progressives really, really don’t like the NRA, and they are not afraid to say so, even if they have to make up lies about it. But ultimately, the uncomfortable truth of the matter is this: The Left doesn’t hate the NRA so much as it positively can’t stand the Americans that the NRA represents.
That much at least is self-evident: The sole reason the NRA is such an effective lobbying force is that it represents the political will of millions upon millions of pro-gun Americans. Without that kind of support, the NRA would be little more than an irrelevant fringe interest group wailing over an issue nobody cares about. Progressive talk show hosts like to complain bitterly that politicians are “afraid of the NRA,” but the reality is an order of magnitude larger: Politicians are afraid, and properly so, of the countless constituents who care a great deal about their gun rights and who will not hesitate to vote out of office anyone who threatens those rights.
You can understand why liberals are so reluctant to voice the simple truth about who it is they’re really mad at. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre is a useful target on which to project progressive anger about guns; it’s much less politically tenable, and much more unseemly, to inveigh against millions of your countrymen. And so the NRA — a single-interest lobbying group whose 2016 lobbying expenditures were about 5 percent of that of the National Association of Retailers — must be painted as the Hitler-iest group of Hitlerite Hitlers, a group of old white men who cackle at the thought of children being gunned down in elementary schools and who literally own conservative politicians.
The reality is plainly more anodyne, less frightening, and utterly unremarkable by the standards of Washington lobbying and political engagement. The Left’s real problem isn’t with the NRA — it’s with you, the American who values and cherishes their Second Amendment freedoms.
Remember that when election time comes around again.
Daniel Payne is a writer based in Virginia. He is an assistant editor for the College Fix, the news magazine of the Student Free Press Association. He blogs at Trial of the Century.
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