The rise and fall of the NRA empire?

(Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action)

 

Alec MacGillis of The New Republic has written a provocative – and perhaps prescient – piece about the rapidly changing landscape within the gun control/rights debate in Washington. The new gun control groups, partnering with the longtime activists, have accumulated lots of grassroots support and plenty of cash for TV advertising in the months since the Newtown shootings.

In this effort, they are mirroring NRA tactics of past decades, becoming much more aggressive and making it clear that they will be targeting pro-NRA Democrats for defeat in the 2014 congressional elections.

Because the NRA overplayed its hand in opposing the highly popular Senate bill that would have expanded background checks, MacGillis writes, and because Wayne LaPierre’s army of lobbyists now faces serious political competition from the other side, their days as a Capitol Hill powerhouse may be numbered.

This new united front by the gun control groups is led, of course, by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Mayors Against Gun Violence group, which has grown to nearly 1,000 members. Bloomberg’s new super PAC has already run a series of ads against some senators who voted against the Manchin-Toomey background checks legislation.
At the same time, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords new gun-control PAC has raised an astonishing $11 million from 53,500 donors in the past four months.
And then we have Shannon Watts, a political neophyte who formed a group called “One Million Moms For Gun Control” on Facebook in the wake of the Newtown massacre. Within one day, it had 1,000 “likes”. By week’s end, it had 7,000.  Now known as Moms Demand Action, it has 100,000—with 100 chapters in 40 states.

In addition to the growing realization that the NRA, first and foremost, represents the gun manufacturers, MacGillis notes that old assumptions about the NRA’s political firepower are giving way to shifting realities. The scary aspects among members of Congress of facing NRA opposition are some of the “oldest and least-tested assumptions in Washington,” MacGillis writes.

Here’s an excerpt:

“… For some time now, the NRA’s power has been more a matter of entrenched wisdom than actual fact. Gun ownership is declining -- from half of households in the 1970s to a third today. A slew of senators and governors have won campaigns in red or purple states despite NRA F ratings, including Tim Kaine (Virginia), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), and Bill Nelson (Florida), who has campaigned on gun control but has won majorities even in deeply conservative Panhandle counties. Senator Chris Murphy, a rookie Connecticut Democrat who has taken a lead on the issue since the Newtown massacre, points out that, of the 16 Senate races the NRA participated in last year, 13 of its candidates lost. ‘The NRA is just all mythology,’ he says. ‘The NRA does not win elections anymore.’

“The reason for the gap between perception and reality is that, for many years, the NRA has had no real opposition. This has given the debate a strange quality: For gun-control advocates, the recent challenge has been less about persuading politicians on policy grounds and more about trying to convince them that the conventional wisdom about gun politics is wrong.

“And then came Newtown. We are so resigned to seeing mass shootings come and go without any attempt to fix gun laws, but after Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook, something really did change. At long last and against all expectations, a viable movement for gun regulation is emerging. It is a development that not only bodes ill for the gun lobby and its Republican patrons, but will also complicate matters for elements of the Democratic Party who have been content to accede to the status quo. The narrow defeat of the background-check bill, it turns out, was not the end of hopes for gun reform, but the beginning.”

*****

Meanwhile, the folks over a Third Way, a centrist website, have put together a nice infographic on the impact of the Manchin-Toomey vote. After the Senate defied public opinion and failed to pass background checks, their constituents noticed. This infographic illustrates the consequences on net approval rating: Senators who voted no have seen their ratings plummet, while those who had the courage to vote yes have risen in the eyes of the public (with the minor exception of Sen. Kay Hagan).

View the graphic here.