NRA: Hey weirdos, quit bringing guns to Chipotle

I rarely get gobsmacked but my gob is indeed smacked.

http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2014/5/good-citizens-and-good-neighbors-the-gun-owners-role.aspx

The italics were their emphasis, not mine.

The I can't wait for the NRA to blast the NRA for their anti-gun stance ...

 

This here is indeed some damn fine entertainment.

The logical response based on recent displays will be for the Open Carry nuts to call NRA leaders and leave threatening messages, and to stalk them at their homes and workplaces. Because the NRA obviously has forgotten about that little thing called the United States Constitution.

 

The Open Carry Texas response is LOL-worthy.

The NRA has lost its relevance and sided with #guncontrolextremists and their lapdog media. No one in NRA leadership has ever been to an OCT event, but feels competent to speak out against them. Keep in mind, the NRA has done nothing in Texas to get open carry passed to this point and continues to fight it in our state. After all, they make money through licensing schemes of our rights, so unlicensed open carry hurts their bottom line.

 

The whole NRA letter is the organization in a nutshell -- a fight against anything that might stop people from buying guns. The first part of it deals with the so-called "smart" guns that only can be fired by their registered owners. They're against that. Then they get into, as softly as possible (complementing Texans for being such awesome patriots), the open-carry backlash. The NRA is right to worry that otherwise Second Amendment-supporting people are going to look at these whack jobs and think regulation isn't so bad after all. At the least, all these chains are having to come out and say no guns in their stores, which is not a result the NRA wants, either.

The NRA response and the open-carry folks are reflective of one big gun trend in the U.S. -- that fewer people own guns, but those that do own more of them. The NRA is trying to fight what is in actuality a declining market (in potential customers).

 

Just another offshoot of the widespread hysteria sweeping the far right. The loony-toon fringe is so far out there and so vocal that they're pulling the whole right wing off the road. Try being a reasonable conservative and you're a "lapdog."

Open carry is one thing, but showing up in restaurants with magazines locked and loaded and a bullet in the chamber is asking for an accidental discharge and a sad event. Range safety is just a bad rumor for these whackos.

 

Someone storified the tweets of a guy who, not surprisingly, spends a lot of his time tweeting about gun violence, but it makes an interesting point about "brand hijacking." Basically, that they are trying to get explicit or implicit support from well-known corporate names for the concept of walking around with a rifle on your back in public. "They don't need pics of their guns. Facebook is full of them. They want photos that imply your brand's endorsement."

https://storify.com/ShipLives/brand-hijacking-seizing-brands-at-gunpoint

What the NRA is rightly afraid of is that national chains might decide, before the open-carry people come over, to ban guns on their premises, open-carry or concealed. Thus, while governments are being more friendly to the idea of carry a gun wherever you want (except where the legislators themselves are, naturally), private businesses and the blessed, no-do-wrong marketplace get more hostile.

 

NRA lobbyist goes on an NRA radio show and calls the op/ed a mistake and blamed it on a staffer who expressed his personal opinions.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/06/03/nra-apologizes-for-calling-open-carry-protests/199577

Of course, the op/ed is still online - which is odd if management didn't approve it.

 

Stephen Colbert did a segment on it last night as well.

The open carry people are weirdos and the NRA is right.

 

I've worked in associations, very large and very small, for the past 15 years, and the idea that an organization as prominent and well-run as the NRA would let a mere "staffer" go rogue and put out a statement like this is highly, highly preposterous. There isn't anything that goes out the door that DOESN'T get multiple levels of review. In fact, given how associations tend to clench their anuses when it appears anyone is against them, I will bet you anything that there have been numerous meetings, that Wayne LaPierre and other leadership were aware of assuming they did not sit in, discussing how to respond to Open Carry Texas, Moms Demand Action and possibility that even Second Amendment supporters would turn away from the NRA agenda because of some numbnuts bringing AR-15s and/or waving guns around just because they could.

So what I'm say is, the NRA is lying its ass off. I mean, look at the statement in question -- it begins first as a screed against "smart gun" laws, THEN gets into Open Carry Texas, while first taking great pains to talk about what great, patriotic gun lovers its members are. This wasn't a spur of the moment piece.

What IS happening is that the NRA, after putting out that statement, heard from everyone at Open Carry Texas and everyone sympathetic to them who are angrily demanding why the NRA is going soft and liberal. It's like the IRA and the Provisional IRA. The NRA, after 35 years stoking the paranoid flames of freedom through gun-toting, is finding now it's lost control of its most extreme members, who actually believed the NRA believed what it was spewing in the service of selling more guns.

To be fair, this happens at associations all the time -- the organization puts out a statement, and certain members go ballistic, even if the association is trying to say it's about tactics. When the American Medical Association came out in favor of Obamacare early on, it was a tactical move to ensure doctors had a voice in the negotiations of what it could become, not because it was thrilled at more government oversight. But the Tea Party docs frothed at the mouth at the AMA's sellout. As a tactical move, the AMA was proven right, just as the NRA is right (or was) to try to distance itself from Open Carry Texas and its ilk for the greater goal of making sure people didn't associate looser gun laws with loose screws.

I'm wondering if the threat the NRA is facing from Open Carry Texas is from a similar base as the threat it faces overall -- that fewer people are buying guns, but those who do are purchasing more of them. That's going to make for an even more radical membership base, and the NRA knows that if non- or few gun owners don't view it, and its goals, as a legitimate defense of the Second Amendment, but instead as a bunch of crazies trying to allow us all to have nuclear missiles in our back yard, its power could wane. Not immediately, and not disastrously, but these drips always start slowly.

 

One more thing -- it appears NRA membership, while still relatively strong for an association, is declining. The only way right now you can figure its membership is looking at its magazine subscription numbers, because every member gets one. Like many associations, the NRA doesn't officially release membership totals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/does-the-nra-really-have-more-than-45-million-members/2013/02/07/06047c10-7164-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_blog.html

This is a pretty interesting read and thread that gets into the issues of why people leave the NRA -- and who is left behind.

http://chimes.biola.edu/story/2014/feb/03/why-i-let-my-nra-membership-expire/

Here's the NRA editorial in question, still online, as Jay said:

http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2014/5/good-citizens-and-good-neighbors-the-gun-owners-role.aspx

 

Some of the comments are golden

 

Yeah, and those are the ones that prove the writer's point. Yay Internet!