"Old and dirty and evil."

NRA headquarters

Guns and the gun lobby have once again been in the news.  On one hand we’ve had another (deadliest ever) mass shooting – I’ll let you find your own reference for that.  On the other hand Donald Trump has garnered the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) endorsement for president.  Both of these items of course feed into the ongoing debate about guns and gun rights. 

Now I don’t want to pick sides in this post – libertarians have their coherent views as do gun law reformers.  What I do want to look at is a hidden (perhaps in plain sight) aspect of the NRA that doesn’t seem to get mentioned whenever the group pops up in public.  If people knew about this aspect then perhaps people could better understand the world and therefore make better informed decisions when it came time to vote or donate money, etc.

Founded in 1871, “the group has informed its members about firearm-related bills since 1934, and it has directly lobbied for and against legislation since 1975”.  In 2015, the NRA spent $3.6 million for lobbying.  This is out of a “war chest” of $350 million of overall revenue.  By law, the gun industry cannot donate to the NRA’s political action committee.  This is no problem since the $22 million individual donors give is more than enough to cover the $3.6 million mentioned above.  The reason behind people’s contributions may perhaps be summarized one of the individual donors: “It is a good percentage of my income [5-10%], but I want to do everything I can easily do to preserve my freedoms”.

The above quote from the individual donor comes from a CNN story that highlights the increase in donations from individual donors.  While this is interesting to note we must still understand that the vast majority of donations to the NRA overall come from the gun industry.  As Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center says, “Today’s NRA is a virtual subsidiary of the gun industry.  While the NRA portrays itself as protecting the ‘freedom’ of individual gun owners, it’s actually working to protect the freedom of the gun industry to manufacture and sell virtually any weapon or accessory”. 

So this is the NRA’s hidden aspect.  While the early NRA apparently prided itself on “independence from corporate influence”, today it effectively a PR wing of the industry as a whole:

There are two reasons for the industry support of the NRA.  The first is that the organization develops and maintains a market for their products.  The second, less direct function is to absorb criticism in the event of PR crises for the gun industry.

So what is this analysis worth?  Another dimension is revealed, another useless layer of understanding.  Corporations want to make money, fine.  Initially I wanted to clarify the idea I had that there is a link between our domestic love of guns and the sale of weapons internationally.  This would require finding a link between those US/domestic gun manufacturers and the big, big US companies that sell weapons abroad. 

I want to back engineer the connection between the United States’ international role as the number one weapon supplier and us a country that can’t figure out its mass shooter problem.  The NRA is definitely a link in this chain.  But understanding the dollars and cents of the industry and its ties to government makes the false assumption that the blame for mass shootings can be placed on a single entity like the NRA.

We have a culture of violence.  Perhaps you’ve heard this phrase used in relation to movies and video games, television shows and toys.  Again the idea that the problem can be fixed by further regulating violence portrayed in video games, to get the idea of violence out the heads of those that play them.  Amorphous, a problem of the psyche, solvable with curtailing the prevalence of the media, in whatever form it takes.

More understanding is the solution, a constant questioning.  Solving gun violence should be linked to the need to question making money perhaps instead.  It should be linked to the need for people to think for themselves and decouple from US culture as a whole.  It may need us to question the narrative of progress.  W.W. sums it up nicely:

This question moves us into the frustrating domain of vague cultural explanations. It all has something to do with the violent rebellion of the American founding, with the anarchy of the American frontier, with the threat of hostile natives and the fear of slave revolts. We don't know why the will to gun-up persists so strongly in America, but it does. We don't know why gun-ownership seems more like a precious, basic right to Americans than it does to the citizens of other developed countries, but it does. We don't know why Americans are so obsessed with movies, television and games about the glamour of killing people (and animals and monsters and aliens and robot) en masse with guns, but we are. And we don't know why every year or so a young white American male grabs some guns and slaughters a roomful of completely innocent people, but it just keeps on happening.

As William S. Burroughs wrote, “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil.  Before the settlers, before the Indians . . . the evil was there . . . waiting”.

Billy Burroughs