Whereas individual gun owners, 5 million, a million more than before Newton, are the ones who belong to the NRA, and who, along with the gun owners who listen to us, are the ones who give it such political heft. Hatred towards "the NRA" is hatred towards the most politically active 1/20th of the nation's gun owners .
ADDED: Such as me, my father, my brothers, my oldest nephew, etc. You'll have to pardon us if we take this a bit personally.
Anyway, confusion over something so basic as who are the major players on the pro-RKBA side is one reason we don't pay much attention to ... negative sentiments such as you express.
The sole purpose of the NRA is to protect corporate profit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/open-letter-to-wa...
OK, it was a bit complicated when there were large stocks of military surplus still to be liquidated, the NRA supported both the GCA of '68 but also the later relaxation of imports of military surplus. On the other hand, do you really think the members of the NRA find it damning that one of the Nominating Committee members is "a timber company executive in Alabama" like Mother Jones does??? You think we're a hot bed of hatred towards free enterprise?
Very curious that the NRA put George Kollitides on the Nominating Committee because of his history, but it's hardly out of whack to have one manufacturer and one dealer member each; in fact, that sounds about right.
Your claim that it having 2 out of 9 members from the industry means they "dominate" the NRA leadership does not stand up to examination. Heck, even the Atlantic article you cite says "the corporate-front theory is still probably too simplistic" and "It's very hard to disentagle the interests of the gun industry from the views of gun rights purists."
Indeed: no gun or ammo manufactures rather obviously means no guns and ammo for us to shoot. We've very interested in their health, we're in the same boat, attack them, you attack us. And the NSSF does quite a bit for gun owners in a whole range of areas including the political, although their focus is of course on the industry.
As for "sole purpose", I didn't bother to read the cited article, but do you mean the NRA's gun safety efforts, largely credited with decreasing the absolute number of fatal gun accidents by 1/4 at the same time the population and number of guns owned has increased by 1/2, was solely done to protect "corporate profit"? Sorry, I'm not that cynical.
Unlike say blue jeans commercials where manly men hang out on their pickup trucks which most people realize is purely for marketing, people really think the NRA and associated marketing is real.
All the purchase of a firearm represents is a very slight decrease in the probability that you and the civilians around you will survive tomorrow. Widespread availability of firearms also enables and promotes the terrorism we regularly see carried out in the US, but of course the probability of being personally victimized by terrorism is exceedingly low.
So no, gun owners and gun industry interests are not "aligned". Gun industry makes enormous profit on the sale of its image. Gun owners get the benefit of believing they are rugged individuals protecting liberty, at the cost of a couple hundred/thousand bucks and living in a modestly more dangerous society.
http://www.smith-wesson.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Produc...
But most people just use Duracoat: http://www.lauerweaponry.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.d...
As in the famous, and very real and functioning California legal Hello Kitty AR-15: https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+kitty+ar-15&tbm=is...
Or see this curated list: http://www.kittyhell.com/category/hello-kitty-guns/
To my eyes, most of these guns look to be real.
If your mind isn't completely closed, you might take a gander at: http://women.nra.org/
As for your more general point, since the members of the NRA don't agree with your positions on the consequences of an armed polity, we are indeed very much in alignment with the firearms industry.
Granted, we might be wrong, but you can't blithely substitute your opinion for the opinions of NRA members and then legitimately come to your overall opinion. Ah, it also goes without saying that we don't believe in the concept of false consciousness. We don't think anything is wrong with Kansas (especially now that it's under conservative state government for the first time ever and going even more pro-gun).
While you're taking a utilitarian vs. moral approach to this, its reminiscent of this definition which continues the theme of my last reply:
"Gun Control: the theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound."
Or in mirror this variant I like on an old saying, "God created men and women, and Samuel Colt made them equal."
And it should go without saying that no friend of mine would call me a "dim bulb." Patronizing, I'd say, which continues the theme, per Wiktionary, the etymology is: "Old English patron (reborrowed from Latin patronus, derived from Latin pater (“father”)) + -ize (“(verb ending)”)."
Haha, strangled with her own panty hose huh? Listen, I don't know what gun people get off to, but alley-way rape occurs about as frequently as mass shootings. Almost all sexual assaults are perpetrated by known acquaintances of the victim. Adding a gun to the mix is only going to make things worse.
And you are being a bit disingenuous. The overwhelming majority of gun owners are males. It is 100% an image thing, just like driving a big truck or getting a "badass" tattoo.
All I'm saying is, if you don't think corporations are above profiting hugely off of hysteria and fear, you've never watched the nightly news.
According to Wikipedia according to the Department of Justice, 26% of rapes are by strangers, which doesn't fit my definition of the inverse of "almost all".
And while most guns may be technically owned by men, that hardly matters if they're available for the women in the household to use in self-defense.
And again with the profit; can you not understand that the vast majority of us just don't give a damn that the firearms industry makes a healthy profit? This is an argument that has weight with gun grabbers, not gun owners.
As ... Massad Ayoob, I think, put it, we're talking about the equivalent of visiting the hospital, noticing a complete stranger who needs a lot of money for treatment, and writing a check for $250,000 plus or minus and putting it in his pocket. I'm only willing to do it for "me and mine", i.e. my friends and blood relatives, especially since I don't have the sort of money that's required for a competent defense against a serious felony charge, no matter how bogus it might be.
And you might want to re-read the above, an ideal, if it comes to it, is "a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound" (better if the attacker is not killed), not a Good Samaritan explaining. We're all ultimately responsible for our own self-protection.