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The NRA Isn’t that Powerful. Its Creed Is.

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Please see the original story at Politico.

Opinion by FRANK SMYTH

Updated: 

Frank Smyth is the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History.

The National Rifle Association will put on a show at its annual leadership forum in Houston on Friday. Senior Republicans will parade through the event. Gun industry executives will fill the VIP seats wearing the coveted gold jackets of the NRA Golden Ring of Freedom. The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas will put a damper on some of the festivities — Don McLean, who sang the 1970s-anthem “American Pie,” withdrew from the event — but other lesser-known acts will perform.

It’s a remarkable show of force, particularly for an organization that has been battered in recent years by litigation, plummeting revenue and a failed coup. Indeed, Friday will be the first time that Republican leaders have spoken at an NRA annual meeting since 2019 in Indianapolis, after a struggle for power broke out within the NRA leadership. The still-hot civil war started after Oliver North, the Reagan-era conservative hero and then-NRA president, accused longtime CEO Wayne LaPierre of embezzlement.

A lot has changed since then. Understanding this metamorphosis may help explain the nation’s failure to act in the face of so many recent heartbreaking gun tragedies. The unspeakable loss, this time of 19 young children in Uvalde, following soon after the 10 adults killed in a racist attack in Buffalo, and shootings in Chicago and Laguna Woods over just the past few weeks, underscores the frightening level of gun violence that is the new American norm. Meaningful gun reform, meanwhile, despite nationwide pleas for change, is not even on the horizon.

Ultimately, the NRA is a profoundly weaker and more divided organization than it once was. But its legacy, even if it fails to survive, will be the culture and ideology of gun rights it helped cultivate, and that is a potent thing for many conservative voters and the Republican politicians who chase them.

Apart from McLean, who said it would now be “disrespectful and hurtful” to perform for the NRA, few appear to be fleeing. Former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), along with LaPierre and other NRA officials, remain scheduled to speak. (Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shifted course and plans to send videotaped remarks instead, while holding a press conference in Uvalde.)

NRA members comprise a thick part of the base of what could be called the American gun rights movement. The speakers, in response to these tragedies, are certain not to concede to fresh demands for gun reform; they’ve long vowed to protect gun owners from being penalized for the actions of criminals or the mentally ill. In fact, they’re just as likely to point to the corresponding calls for reform as evidence that gun rights are squarely under siege.

The man on the stage with arguably the weakest credentials on gun rights but who might get the biggest applause will be Trump. He is still the leader of the Republican Party, which has long entwined itself with the NRA. Cruz will no doubt flag that last month he introduced a resolution with 21 other Republican senators opposing the Biden administration’s proposed crackdown on homemade or “ghost guns,” saying registration of gun parts would be the start of national firearms registry. Abbott can boast that he recently allowed Texans to carry handguns with neither training nor a permit.

The gun lobby’s celebration of its ongoing clout comes at a time when the nation’s polarization over gun rights mirrors our divides over abortion as well as the rule of law and the future of our own constitutional republic. But another divide could end up on display in Houston, and it could reveal more fissures.

The fight to oust LaPierre isn’t over.

NRA board director, Phil Journey, who is a Kansas state district judge, is leading the effort to, in his words, “Restore the NRA.” He said in a video that LaPierre is “plundering” the organization. He and his allies have chosen Allen West as their torchbearer to replace him.

West, of course, is the fiery former Republican congressman from Florida who later moved to Texas and for a year was chair of the state party. He made the QAnon phrase, “We are the storm,” the mantra of the Texas GOP and put it on fundraising mailings as well as on T-shirts and hats. Then he ran for governor of Texas, trying to outflank Abbott from the right in the GOP primary. He lost. West, who also writes for the Christian News Service, now seems focused on usurping LaPierre.
West joined the NRA board of directors in 2016, and, within three years, he joined North in accusing LaPierre of the massive embezzlement scheme.

A former NRA president, David A. Keene, defended LaPierre in Ammoland.com, while calling West all talk and no action and “a show horse” as opposed to a “work horse” like LaPierre.

LaPierre’s recent tenure has been characterized by a series of scandals, and New York Attorney General Tish James has sought to dissolve the organization. But LaPierre still has the support of most of the NRA board.

In Indianapolis in 2019, two prior NRA presidents spoke out in his defense: Marion P. Hammer, the first woman president, and the daughter of a soldier who died in Okinawa during World War II, and Jim Porter, the son of a prior president who held the gavel during the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977 that turned the NRA into the gun lobby.

These NRA elders pointed out how LaPierre was the first leader in decades to finally deliver an American president, Trump, to speak at an NRA convention (Ronald Reagan was the first). So whatever LaPierre did or didn’t do doesn’t matter. Trump’s tenure advanced gun rights — along with some of the country’s darkest forces. He opened the door to the rise of white nationalism within the Republican Party, where it merged with an “absolutist” vision of gun rights. The rise of racial tension combined with fear surrounding the pandemic further contributed to ongoing, record sales of firearms since 2020, and an unprecedented ammunition shortage that is expected to last at least until 2023.

No one should forget that the first time an NRA official was given the stage at a political party’s national convention came at the 2016 Republican National Convention that nominated Trump. In 2020, after the NRA began to implode under the embezzlement accusations, the GOP chose the McCloskeys to speak to gun rights. They’re the St. Louis couple who pointed their semi-automatic pistol and rifle, respectively, at passing Black Lives Matter protesters.

Prospects for gun reform anytime soon are nil. While no doubt many Americans clamor for greater gun safety regulations, the ideology of gun rights pulses stronger today than ever. What many Democrats and reformers still don’t realize is that what is stopping them from achieving even one gun reform law is not the NRA’s money, but its ideology. The creed of gun rights.

From this view, even the most heartbreaking losses of either children or adults are “the price of freedom.” Or so the disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly said in 2017, after nearly 60 people were killed in the Las Vegas shooting. It’s a viewpoint that only seems to have grown.

Swamp Things: Texas Governor Abbott’s Debt to the Gun Lobby

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See the original article here: http://progressive.org/dispatches/swamp-things-texas-governor-abbott{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-debt-to-the-gun-lobby/

Texas Governor Greg Abbott made no mention of guns at his press conference in Sutherland Springs about five hours after a man opened fire during a Sunday morning church service there, killing twenty-six people and wounding twenty. Instead, he spoke of the family members killed or injured, and asked for God’s comfort and guidance for the survivors and loved ones.

Later, after the shooter’s military conviction for domestic violence came to light, Abbott told CNN that David Kelley’s request for a permit to carry a concealed handgun had been rejected in Texas, and that, because of his prior record of domestic abuse, he should not have been allowed to buy rifles.

But ever since he ran for his first Texas legislative seat more than twenty years ago, Abbott has been a steady advocate for expanding Texans’ access to guns. He has earned a 100 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association, and is proud of it.

“I supported #gun rights BEFORE the campaign began & have an A rating by @NRA,” Abbott tweeted during his last race. “I’ll keep Texas free.

What Abbott has not mentioned is that he owes part of his rise in Texas politics to the gun lobby.

Back in 2002, twelve years before the NRA publicly endorsed him for governor, the gun lobby used a law enforcement front group to quietly help elect Abbott as Texas attorney general. Back then, Democrats still held a majority in the Texas state house and in the Texas delegation to Congress. It was a time when the gun lobby was learning how to reach out to other right-leaning groups, forging alliances that predated both the Tea Party and the Trump campaign. It was the beginning of a redistricting or “gerrymandering” process that has since helped bring the Republican party in Texas and other states to unprecedented political power.

Abbott faced a tight race for attorney general against Austin’s popular mayor Kirk Watson. Shortly before the election, television ads appeared, attacking Watson for allegedly being soft on crime, and favoring Abbott, who was then a Texas Supreme Court justice, for supporting “the swift and aggressive prosecution of sexual predators and child pornographers.”

The ads were signed by the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Mayor Watson said he had never before heard of this group. As I later reported in The Texas Observer in 2004, it was established in 1991 with a grant from the National Rifle Association, and opened offices just eleven miles away from NRA headquarters in Virginia. The Law Enforcement Alliance had a budget of $5 million in 2001. The Alliance’s attack ads often favored the same candidates as Texans for a Republican Majority, a group founded by then-Texas state house representative and later-U.S. House Leader Tom Delay.

Justice Abbott won the 2002 election by fifteen points—the same year that Texas Republicans gained control of the Texas House for the first time since Reconstruction. Attorney General Abbott later approved a Republican-led redistricting plan that soon helped give Texas Republicans a majority in the Senate as well. House Leader Delay was later tried and convicted of violating election laws, though this was overturned on appeal. But politicians like Attorney General Abbott continued to rise and he was elected Texas governor in 2014.

No one should doubt that the Law Enforcement Alliance was a front, one with a small office just off the Washington Beltway, rooted in the so-called “swamp.” Today its website still boasts color photos and topics like “2nd Amendment” and “Support Your Local Police.” But most of the text is just gibberish oddly in Latin, with the same lines and paragraphs repasted throughout the site.

The Alliance’s executive director for 23 years was James J. Fotis, now president of the National Center for Police Defense. Mr. Fotis recently wrote an op-ed for FoxNews.com in support of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, initially failing to disclose that his new charity had paid for Arpaio’s legal defense.

Until it become inert, the Alliance quietly influenced elections around the nation. The group succeeded in helping defeat twelve state-level candidates in fourteen years, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. It choose tight races, running attack ads often accusing candidates of being soft on crime. The candidates it targeted were in states including Kansas, Nevada, Mississippi, Illinois, Michigan and Arkansas.

These are classic gun lobby tactics. Last month, in response to the Las Vegas country music shooting, legal scholar David Kopel, the highest paid employee of the Independence Institute, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. He noted, correctly, that mass shootings are not as common as Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, had just claimed, but did not disclose that his Institute has received more than $2 million since 2004 from NRA foundations.

After the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, Mr. Kopel and another legal scholar who has received NRA grants, David T. Hardy, testified in Congress about gun violence without disclosing their NRA funding.

No wonder no one is talking about gun reform—even as mass shootings go on devastating communities. Instead, bolstered by the Trump Administration and Republican control of both the House and Senate, the NRA has publicly gone on the offensive for the first time in decades, seeking either a Supreme Court ruling or new federal legislation that would allow a permit to carry a concealed handgun issued in any one state like Texas valid across the country.

Governor Abbott recently signed one bill dropping the fee for a concealed carry permit in Texas to among the lowest in the country, joking about shooting reporters at the same time. After Hurricane Harvey, he promptly announced that concealed carry permits lost or damaged in the storm would be replaced at no charge. Governor Abbott is hardly the only elected official to benefit from the gun lobby, but his story reveals how they hide in the swamp.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer, MSNBC.com and The Progressive. He won a Society of Professional Journalists national investigative award for his Mother Jones story, “Unmasking NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook massacre.