Mike Irwin
Staff
"Holy Moses, don't you ever read the magazine?"
Who, me?
Who, me?
If you're gonna make a "gun-rights scoresheet," obviously an A+ means a guy who wants the good ol' days where you can buy a rifle in your montgomery wards catalogue, or a snubbie at the gas station. 99% of politicians aren't like that. The inevitability is that you're gonna give all your enemies - and pretty much all your friends - really, really bad grades. That's not very wise. If you have no friends, then the size of your massive lobby won't count for much.
I do like that GOA rates the vast majority as either A or F. No messing around, they are either with us or against us!
I read that as a strawman
In the sense that, were the NRA were to give a report card to politicians, how many NRA backers are going to get an "A" review? Imagine if Delagate John Smith from the state of ____ has been a long-time NRA member and supporter, gets a grade of "C-" from this lobby because there was this one time when Johnny voted for the NFA, or background checks, or against rifles with 10-inch barrels?
I thought the NRA was for all gun owners and enthusiasts. Introducing a scorecare inevitably creates polarization, "with us or against us," where only the most hard-core, no-compromises politician will come out on top. The rest are alienated.
Quite a few "friends" of the NRA were downgraded following the machinations surrounding the 1994 'assault weapons' ban.
In his recently released book "My Life," Bill Clinton adds further evidence.
"Just before the House vote (on the crime bill), Speaker Tom Foley and majority leader Dick Gephardt had made a last-ditch appeal to me to remove the assault weapons ban from the bill. They argued that many Democrats who represented closely divided districts had already...defied the NRA once on the Brady bill vote. They said that if we made them walk the plank again on the assault weapons ban, the overall bill might not pass, and that if it did, many Democrats who voted for it would not survive the election in November. Jack Brooks, the House Judiciary Committee chairman from Texas, told me the same thing...Jack was convinced that if we didn`t drop the ban, the NRA would beat a lot of Democrats by terrifying gun owners....Foley, Gephardt, and Brooks were right and I was wrong. The price...would be heavy casualties among its defenders." (Pages 611-612)
"On November 8, we got the living daylights beat out of us, losing eight Senate races and fifty-four House seats, the largest defeat for our party since 1946....The NRA had a great night. They beat both Speaker Tom Foley and Jack Brooks, two of the ablest members of Congress, who had warned me this would happen. Foley was the first Speaker to be defeated in more than a century. Jack Brooks had supported the NRA for years and had led the fight against the assault weapons ban in the House, but as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had voted for the overall crime bill even after the ban was put into it. The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you`re out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated nineteen of the twenty-four members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage...." (Pages 629-630)
"One Saturday morning, I went to a diner in Manchester full of men who were deer hunters and NRA members. In impromptu remarks, I told them that I knew they had defeated their Democratic congressman, Dick Swett, in 1994 because he voted for the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. Several of them nodded in agreement." (Page 699)
Al Gore apparently forgot that less in six short years when he campaigned for the Presidency.