Hacker News Reader

Under the same general umbrella of "not for all gun owners", I think it's much less of a stretch to point out that the NRA has repeatedly thrown people with mental illness under the bus, unapologetically using terms like "monsters", "lunatics", and "homicidal maniacs", and advocating for such people to be tracked in a national registry [1] [2]. I don't consider that behavior becoming of a civil liberties organization.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Health/nra-takes-fire-stance-mental-il...

[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/09/22/nra-h...

Ex-NRA member here.

NRA supported Jeff Sessions for the attorney general, on the grounds that he "has a proven track record of going after the real criminals". Jeff Sessions was involved in prosecution of civil rights activists in Alabama, and is known for his hard anti-drug stance. Both of those are pertinent to civil rights, yet NRA ignored it.

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20170106/the-battle-to-confi...

NRA also consistently pushes the "tough on crime" narrative, including outright false claims that crime is on the rise in US, to justify both RKBA (for self-defense against said non-existent rising crime), and to redirect any accusations regarding too lax gun control. They are literally saying that the government should be jailing more people and dishing out harder punishments.

https://www.thetrace.org/2016/06/nra-mandatory-minimum-sente...

(It should be noted that this last one isn't even a new thing - NRA explicitly endorsed "tough on crime" politics since early 90s.)

At the same time, while NRA is presumably pushing back against federal gun laws, there's one on which they're completely silent: the prohibition of gun ownership for any users of illegal substances (i.e. drugs). Note that this applies even to those in states that legalized marijuana, and even to medical marijuana users with prescriptions. This is a very real problem, especially given the feds have been raiding dispensaries for lists of patients, and demanding lists of medical card holders from the states that maintain registries. NRA's stance on it is literally non-existent - they simply don't talk about it, and refuse to answer any questions from members regarding it.

So, as far as I'm concerned, NRA is not in any meaningful way a civil rights organization. It's a "just let me keep my guns, and I don't care about others" organization.

> Jeff Sessions was involved in prosecution of civil rights activists in Alabama, and is known for his hard anti-drug stance. Both of those are pertinent to civil rights, yet NRA ignored it.

Those are good points. They also concern me. Is there a better organization which fights for second amendment rights that you recommend?

To keep from repeating myself, I'm going to link to another comment I just made -- but I prefer the SAF to the NRA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13634802

https://www.saf.org/

I would not recommend SAF anymore. The reason is that their (effectively) lobbying wing, CCRKBA, had also endorsed Sessions, using even stronger wording than NRA.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ccrkba-urges-members...

"Instead of promoting or defending schemes that impact law-abiding Americans, his track record shows that he will go after genuine criminals."

Note that the man who said this is Alan Gottlieb, who's also effectively the head of SAF.

The non existence of other orgs fighting for second ammendment rights, even if it were true, is a pretty weak argument for supporting this particular one, especially given that you agree there are good reasons not too do so.

I'm afraid I don't have a good (as in, satisfying) answer to this question. I do have a more broad answer, however:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13536435

The central conceit of this article is that gun control as implemented in the US is racist (the NRA is discussed as an advocacy group that is hypocritical and ultimately supports many of these racist laws), which I agree with. That anecdote is not about the NRA, but there are others that are damning in my opinion.

> The NRA, funded (to a significant but unclear degree) by an industry that depends on a huge market for illegal guns to ensure profitability, has called for putting those very same black-market (and, not incidentally often black) customers in prison for extremely long periods of time.

> At the NRA’s May convention, Donald Trump, accepting the group’s endorsement, complained that “President Obama tried to take the guns from law-abiding Americans but has reduced prosecutions of violent criminals who use guns.” Trump, as usual, knew his audience well, and his speech was in line with a recent push by the NRA to double down on foreboding law-and-order talk, warning that liberals, in the name of reform, want to flood the streets with criminals and disarm the citizenry.

> But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction. And it has relentlessly warned that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The notion is not only vigilante but profoundly carceral, grounding the right of certain people to own guns in the criminality of others.

> When a Minnesota police officer shot Philando Castile dead by in his car, he was carrying a legal gun that his girlfriend has said he told the officer he possessed. His bloodied body, viewed by millions online, called the gun rights movement’s bluff: is a black man carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry a “good guy” when he is shot dead by the police? The NRA was criticized, seemingly even by its own members, for, like the officer who shot him, failing to acknowledge Castile’s right to carry.

I think you're kidding yourself if you think the NRA exists to support anyone except for white gun owners and cops.

> But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction

I don't mean to defend the NRA here -- as you'll see from my other comments while I recognize and appreciate the stated role they perform, I'm not their biggest fan. Regardless, that particular allegation doesn't carry much water for me.

Speaking in broad strokes, every time there is a shooting, it seems incumbent on every gun owner to bear the responsibility for the bad action. Because we support the right to keep and bear arms, we are often cast by the media as the very reason that whomever was able to effect whatever recent spate of gun violence occurred, and must all be held accountable. Whenever politicians hold session, they urge to DO SOMETHING, and rarely care what that something is so long as they can show that they have been responsive in passing legislation that may positively affect this situation in a future outcome, even when it's unlikely to have any effect.

If you're incapable or unwilling to cede to things like increased background checks, or unable to sign on to a blanket ban of muzzle shrouds (as our politicians so often request), there aren't a lot of politically viable options for "doing something", which casts the second amendment lot as obstructionist. What's left? Well, increased sentencing for gun felons. These increased sentences are regrettably more constitutional, because they at least are the result of due process, and do not infringe the rights of law abiding citizens.

Are they good policy? I would argue not, but if you're faced with the nefariously binary options of removing rights from the law abiding vs. removing rights from proven criminals, it is easy to see how they routinely choose the latter.

As others have pointed out, there are other 2A advocacy groups that are single issue focused. I have a hard time believing that the NRA has accidentally become involved in mass incarceration.

That being said, if the dilemma is gun violence, you've presented a false dichotomy for options. Harsher criminalization likely doesn't do anything, it may just make recidivism worse and temporarily relocate violence into prisons. Economic violence and inequality is the root cause for much of the gun violence in the US (along with some cultural psychological heritage related to frontier life and individualism, but this is a more difficult issue to solve). Deep poverty, racist and invasive police, lack of access to nutritious food, lack of access to childcare and quality education, etc. Not just for people of color (although they disproportionately suffer from inequality), but for white poor people as well. Economic violence is the backdrop for violent crime, and if the NRA actually cared about solving their image of being an advocacy group for middle income whites and cops, they would spend time lobbying to solve these issues, not locking up poor people.

I don't disagree with much that you've said at all. That said, when has "let's fix socio-economic disparity" been seriously considered by our legislature for anything? It doesn't fit into a soundbite, and is both too nuanced and locality-centric to be easily cottoned to in a federal bill. It's far too pragmatic to fit into the necessity of a 'do something' response.

Aside from the infeasibility of it in today's political climate, great points all around.

I just don't subscribe to that kind of realpolitik. There's nothing infeasible about presenting these kinds of solutions, there's only people unwilling to present them or those who do a bad job of it. Plus what's the proof that this is even the case?

Even aside from the ethical coherency of viewing civil rights as a comprehensive struggle for ordinary people, there are political advantages as well given you can widely expand your coalition across racial and income barriers. People of color own guns and enjoy using them, but will back a candidate supporting background checks, assault weapon bans, etc. if their alternative is pro-gun law & order racist.

Sure. There are plenty of white gun owners who do the same. The NRA doesn't have a lock on any particular demographic other than the obvious one, which is anyone who is willing to prioritize gun rights as their #1 issue. This includes people of all political and ethical stripe, and including minorities, though they aren't terribly well represented by the NRA.

That said, if the goal is to just get the NRA to do more outreach to minorities, they're making inroads (though slowly). They've got minority presenters, such as Colion Noir, who echoes many of your sentiments.

> "It's not a gun problem, it's not even a violence problem. It's a culture problem, it's a poverty problem, it's a history problem"

I don't disagree that they've been painfully bad at it, but as they get savvier with their shifting demographics and older, whiter board members get replaced with others, I have little doubt that they'll become more effective at representing a broader swath of the American populace.

That still doesn't make fixing socio-economic disparity fall particularly well under their single-issue umbrella (IMO).

> discrimination does exist: prescription drug use is an illegal-yet-ignored marketplace of predominately White, upper-middle-class-on-up users who are not targeted by DEA enforcement the way street drugs are

Are you implying that the reason those drugs are not targeted, is because they are used by middle class whites? It's just as likely the other way round.