I see the NRA adopting something more akin to pro-choice advocacy - a zero compromise scorched earth policy, where any attempt to discuss banning the most extreme products (late term abortions, unlicensed fully automatic weapons) results in arguing uphill against a slippery slope.
(disclaimer: I am an NRA member)
If by "modern NRA" you mean the post-"assault weapons" ban NRA, extremely notable because it was the first Federal gun control measure they didn't support, you need a better analogy, one I can't think of. We've already given up so much I can't think of any "extreme product" that would fit the bill.
You're correct, and I am aware because it comes up all the time.
My off-the-cuff comment was more about the membership I've encountered than the official organization.
Pro-choice advocacy has been on the rope for decades and with recent state laws many abortion access difficult or impossible for poorer women. For example, not is really fighting to overturn the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. NARAL's website concedes with this language, "NARAL Pro-Choice America does not oppose restrictions on abortion after a certain point in the pregnancy as long as there is an exception to protect the woman’s health." I think society is always going to have a discussion on what kinds of abortions are allowed and at what week. NARAL seems to be part of this conversation and doesn't oppose it.
I don't think either group is special and both work with the status quo of advocacy and lobbying.
The latter turns out not to be the case. Yep, they allowed it for full auto weapons, and AP ammo, but for the first time ever refused to sign off on any and all "assault weapons" bills when that mess started in the late '80s.
Otherwise, yeah, the "compromise" a lot, so much that I'm not a current member and have an alert set for 10 years having passed since they last tried to sell us out. Still has a few years left.
That said, the NRA has also let a lot of things slide. There pro armor piercing bullets, but not anti-tank rounds. Even if the lack of anti-military hardware makes the second amendment almost pointless.
Assuming you mean "They're", nope, they signed off on the ban of AP ammo that can be shot from a handgun, which means all AP ammo short of, say, .50 BMG, which I'm pretty sure would pulverize anyone's hand, wrist and arm.
As for "the lack of anti-military hardware makes the second amendment almost pointless.", you suffer from a lack of imagination:
The small arms we're all allowed to own everywhere but NYC and D.C. are quite sufficient to procure the heavier stuff.
Being able to reach out and touch someone from 800 yards and more means something serious.
The US has never fought a war without a secure rear area.
There are many, many other things small arms make more achievable. Like making it too expensive to do a lot of things en masse; as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in The GULAG Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
The point is the bitter shame at having gone quietly and meekly to the camps. The regret at having not fought to defend oneself.
The counter example would be the Warsaw ghetto.
Actually, that's been done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNZgzMtIM7s
Millions of like minded American citizens could certainly make things difficult for the US military in a guerrilla war.
It's just the incidences of slaughter they - perhaps optimistically given the US status quo - believe may be reduced through gun controls are actually happening on a not infrequent basis, whereas the Second Civil War scenarios are wildly unlikely fantasy.
People believe social media campaigns might work precisely because they don't think that the only thing keeping the US from turning into a fascist police state is consumer weaponry.
That's a reasonable opinion, but one I disagree with. A second secession movement and full-blown Civil War will probably never happen, but martial law ordered in response to protest or active resistance of a law is not unthinkable. The risk of death by gun violence in the United States is dwarfed by the risk of death by automobile accident, heart disease, and so on. I would absolutely rather live in a country of ~320 million with a few thousand deaths per year due to gun violence, than in one with no weapons to deter martial law. I'll take a small (blown out of proportion by the media) threat over an existential threat any day.
And that's even assuming that you could make gun violence disappear entirely overnight. Revoking access to registered firearms could very well reduce the number of spree shootings, but would do little to affect the black market supply used by criminals in robberies and turf wars, and probably increase the amount of gun violence used in robberies (as criminals would then be sure that no one would be able to resist them).
I wouldn't hold my breath expecting, say, MSNBC to give extensive sympathetic coverage to domestic "insurgents" who don't share their political views. The vast majority of the Tea Party did nothing more than yell at congressmen and hold rallies where they got all the official permits and cleaned up after themselves, and yet they were uniformly regarded in the news media as the second coming of Timothy McVeigh. Imagine how the media would treat them if they did anything more with their guns than the occasional dumb open carry stunt in Texas.
A lot of people have no problem rounding up a mob, maybe beating them up, and tossing them in jail; a lot of those same people will think twice before saying "We can't go in on the ground... I want to be a part of clearing that mob by bombing it to pulp".
Or else an exodus of the leadership and rank-and-file soldiery on par with the Southerners that resigned in '61.
As such there is no cognitive dissonance as propping up a country is different from crushing all opposition.
Mind you, last time I ran the numbers, it was safer to be in Belfast during the troubles than in Detroit over the same period.
Better for the world would just be splitting up the US, like AT&T was. Perhaps 3 or 4 ways? Then you'd have much smaller countries to deal with, easier to make changes and reflect citizens' desires. Plus it'd create some competition, for trade and so on.
That's highly optimistic. I would say that history does not generally support the idea that militaries in general, or the US military in particular, are more reserved when dealing with a perceived internal existential threat than they are fighting overseas.
> Gonna be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends (taking a looser, FB-ish value of friendship).
That's one view. Another view is that its a lot easier to see the enemy as an intolerable foe against whom any means are justified when you don't see them as "loyally fighting for their country" the same as you, just on a different side, but instead as potentially fatally betraying your country.
I'd say the history of domestic armed conflicts (including the US Civil War) suggests that the latter effect is often at least as strong as the former.
That's... Not exactly true. History has actually shown the contrary, WASP are usually very soft on other WASP while bloody on everybody else. Examples:
-The US civil war is a perfect sample. I don't think you could find another battle in history but Gettysburg were opposing armies of many tens of thousands fought with just one civil casualty (and an accident, this one). Usually, after a battle is won there is this period of pillaging, raping and general dead and destruction. If you want to see how a real after-civil-war-repression looks like, look at what Cromwell did in Ireland, it's the stuff of nightmares. (Which also supports my argument, because he was very soft on his British opponents).
-There is also the anglo-american war of 1812. The British "sacked" Washington, with, again, only 1 (ONE!) casualty. I mean, come on, it's like they weren't even trying. For contrast, look at what a real British occupation looked like at the time with the suppression of the rebellion of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka in 1818.
My point: If the US start killing each other seriously, that would be a new in history.
If this were the case, the US wouldn't be notorious for high numbers of police shootings. It's far more likely that if there is some kind of US civil war it would be race-based, like the previous civil war and the Indian wars.
In fact, there tend to be two different types of militaries, the expeditionary type, which is ours, and the internally focused type, which our increasingly paramilitarized police seem to be becoming. The latter suck when they're asked to fight a "real war", and one advantage we in the US have right now is that their numbers are quite small compared to the size of the nation or our formal military, something less than a million total.
Estimates are a million Vietnamese died between 1950 and 1975.
And you understand that the entire plot of "Apocolypse Now" ( which was fiction ) was that Kurtz was prepared to use any means to win, and that this is why he was targeted for assassination? "His methods were... unsound."
This led to the Powell Doctrine. In the early-90s Gulf War I, the objective was actually met, although the resulting equilibrium was not stable.
Open-ended foreign entanglements are generally bad practice.
Case in point: they had a policy of regularly making battalion strength night attacks on our fixed positions, deliberately sacrificing about a company's worth of men. It worked because it made our commanders unreasonably afraid of venturing outside at night.
We had similar difficulties in the Pacific in WWII with the Bushido Code. The reaction there was, shall we say, less restrained. Grim business, founded in a vehement racism as a central operating principle.
The British military thought the same about a bunch of hicks with a few rifles living on the east coast of America. America's military thought the same thing about a bunch of tribal shepherds in Afghanistan. The point is, you don't need to match a military on hardware to defeat them.
The 'US' revolution was losing the war prior to significant aid from France. And this was vs. an oversea enemy using 1700's era weapons and armaments. Vietnam involved some direct military engagements vs. jets and other modern weaponry.
There are a few successful uprising in modern history, and lots of crushed attempts vs. far worse military's than the modern US war machine.
The most famous of these guns, the Spencer carbine, could fire seven shots in 30 seconds.
Like many other Civil War technologies, these weapons were available to Northern troops but not Southern ones: Southern factories had neither the equipment nor the know-how to produce them.
http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-t...
I am sure that propaganda tropes would be highly common between the Wayne Wheeler continuum and the NRA - there are not that many forms of propaganda.