At Saturday’s March For Our Lives, Parkland, Fla., shooting survivor David Hogg began his speech by fixing a price tag on the stage podium. “First off, I’m gonna start off by putting this price tag right here as a reminder for you guys to know how much Marco Rubio took for every student’s life in Florida,” the teenage activist said. “One dollar and five cents.”
The price tag was distributed to every Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student at the rally and was calculated by dividing the amount of money the Florida Republican has received from the National Rifle Association for his campaigns by the number of students in Florida. This implication, that lawmakers don’t have any sincerely held beliefs but rather just follow the money, is one of the laziest tropes in politics on both sides of the aisle.
Sorry, kids, that’s not how politics works.
Hogg made this conspiratorial connection between politicians and the gun lobby even more directly (and rather graphically) in a profanity-laced interview with the Outline last weekend:
The comments led Tucker Carlson to describe Hogg as an “extremist” for his apparent belief that anyone who disagrees with him on gun control “is evil and wants to kill the innocent.” Indeed, political extremists on both the Left and Right have been blaming specific people and groups for society’s woes for generations now — from George Soros to Charles Koch to the Illuminati. The NRA is simply the bogeyman de jour.
While there are plenty of special interests out there, the world is way too complex to truly have one man behind the curtains. In the case of the NRA, the group’s financial influence over politicians is remarkably overstated. The group has spent $203 million on political spending since 1998. That sure sounds like a chunk of change, but spread over 20 years and hundreds of candidates and lobbying efforts, it’s relatively small.
Take Hogg’s favorite target, Rubio, for example. Since 2009, the Florida politician has raised $91 million for his campaigns, of which a mere $3 million came from the NRA. That is to say, if the senator did not receive NRA funding, his campaign coffers would be a mere 3.3 percent smaller.
So, if the NRA’s political spending is relatively small, why are Republican politicians like Rubio such staunch defenders of the Second Amendment? The answer is simple: Guns are popular, and thus politicians who defend guns are popular.
There are an estimated 265 million to 310 million guns in the U.S. — a figure that’s not far off from that of the country’s entire population. The right to bear arms is ingrained in the psyche of millions of American voters, and no amount of NRA money changes this.
If the organizers of the March For Our Lives truly wish to make an impact, they should leave their naive disrespect of pro-Second Amendment lawmakers and the gun owners who elect them behind. Policy is not made by vampires thirsty for children’s blood, as Hogg would suggest. Perhaps reasoning with them could lead to some progress.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.
