If the NRA got back to being what it was when it started: being all about gun safety, responsible gun ownership and promoting the shooting sports; Id be all for it but Im not going to support a radical, right-wing lobby.
I just wish that gun rights were treated as constitutional rights and not republican rights.
Seems to me that if you think the NRA is radical right wing and gun rights are only for republicans, you have already drunk the radical left Kool-Aid to a point.
It may LOOK like the NRA only supports Republicans, but that is a situation CREATED by the Democrats!!!!!
When one party makes gun control (registration, confiscation, and even outright prohibition) one of their political party "planks" and the other doesn't, it kind of doesn't leave us many options about whom to support.
There are Democrats who believe in gun rights the same way "we" do, but they are thin on the ground, and have not been allowed to make party policy for a long time now. There are Republicans who are gun control advocates too. So far, they have not been in a position to lead the Republican party, either. So far.
No, the NRA was not created to be a political force opposing gun control. For nearly a hundred years, they weren't. They became one (and created the ILA to do it legally) because NO ONE ELSE was there to fight gun control in anything even remotely resembling effective numbers. And there still isn't, really.
For those of you who decline to support the NRA's work against gun control (which I admit has been flawed on occasion), because the "didn't do enough" or "didn't stop" this or that specific law, tell me, who would you support??
What did YOU do, gunowning NRA basher??
If you're a sports guy, do you stop supporting your team because they don't win every single game???
IF you're in a war, and you don't support your "army" with supplies because they didn't win every single battle, you won't be winning many more battles, nor will you win the war. If the Generals directing things lead to defeat more often than victory, you replace THEM, you don't cut off the flow of beans & bullets needed.
oh, and FYI, about the GCA 68, yes the NRA didn't fight much against that one, partly because the people at the time didn't foresee ALL the unintended consequences accurately. Even the gun industry supported the GCA 68, BECAUSE it was sold to them as a trade protection law.
The US gun industry, at the time, was struggling, losing a lot of business to foreign imports. The GCA 68 promised to curb the imports. All they had to give up was mail order guns (and after all, it was a "foreign mail order gun that killed JFK"..) and a "few other little regulations"....
Like a lot of other laws, what we were told it would do (to get our support, or at least not actively oppose) and what it actually did were somewhat ...different things.