The NRA did something that the incompetent Republican Party could not do. They took on and defeated OFA’s vaunted machine. Progressives are still bitter over this defeat and are now plotting how to take down the NRA. The New Republic delusional claims the NRA will soon collapse. They beleive a group started by Mayor Bloomberg will be able to destroy the NRA.
The de facto headquarters for post-Newtown gun-control activism is New York City Hall, where the effort overlaps relatively seamlessly with the business of running a metropolis of eight million people. Bloomberg and his lieutenants were disappointed by the background-check vote, but not discouraged. After all, they now knew which senators to target in 2014. “The mayor has a long view,” says Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s political point person on the issue. “He is well aware that the NRA had the field to themselves for decades, and you don’t overcome those advantages overnight.”
The modern gun-control movement emerged in the early ’70s in reaction to the urban crime wave and the assassinations of 1968; it was led by the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (now the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence) and the National Council to Control Handguns (now the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence).4 From the outset, its weaknesses were multiple and self-reinforcing. There were disagreements over whether to pursue incremental reforms or more ambitious proposals like handgun registration. And the movement has always been woefully outmatched financially. Gun-rights groups, funded by gun manufacturers, have given more than $30 million to federal candidates since 1989, compared with just under $2 million by their opponents.
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That serious opponent has finally emerged. In 2006, Bloomberg formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns with 14 of his counterparts. One of the group’s first moves was to dispatch undercover investigators to Virginia gun shops—the source of many guns on the streets of northern cities—where they recorded footage showing how easy it was to make illegal purchases.10 In 2010, Bloomberg hired Wolfson, a hard-bitten veteran of three Hillary Clinton campaigns. Listening to the mayor’s team discuss gun control is very different from talking to longtime advocates—the conversations are an odd mash-up of the ruthlessness of campaign hacks and a moral crusade. For an administration that has made its share of ethical compromises—disregarding term limits, pulverizing opponents with the mayor’s personal fortune—gun control has become the ultimate validation.
What Bloomberg has embarked upon now is nothing less than the construction of a mirror image to the NRA. There is plenty of latent public support for gun control, his logic goes, but politicians only see a risk in voting for it. He wants to reverse that calculation.
Progressives are dreaming if they think Bloomberg’s new group can defeat the NRA. Unlike the AstroTurf Mayors against illegal guns, the NRA is a true grassroots organization. The NRA is not the Republican Party and Progressives underestimate the organization at its peril.
(Hat Tip: eaglesoars)
Tags: gun control, Mayor Micke Bloomberg, NRA
