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Old June 14, 2010, 09:14 AM   #5
Uncle Billy
Senior Member
 
Join Date: June 10, 2009
Location: Small city in New York
Posts: 482
Quote:
Originally Posted by sakeneko:
The NRA has the habit of looking at second-amendment issues alone. They are not interested in how conservative or how liberal a politician is otherwise. IMHO that's smart; it avoids entangling them in issues that they are not qualified to judge and creates a "big tent" for second amendment supporters who might not all be in agreement on other political issues.
On the other hand, the NRA's choices for speakers and activities at our convention in Charlotte strongly and clearly identified the NRA only with strident Conservative commentary and evangelical Christian religion in the public's perception. The presence of Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and an Evangelical prayer breakfast publicly welds the NRA and thus its gun rights advocacy to the manners, the perspectives, and what many see to be the strident, thoughtless, disrespectful distortion and mendacity and latent racism of far right commentary. Whether that's a fair assessment of it or not is irrelevant; attaching the voices of the far right to the NRA and thereby its gun rights advocacy begets an unnecessary burden for that advocacy. It creates a situation of "you can't have one without the other" which is a "poison pill" on gun rights to those who would otherwise be supportive of them without commentary and politics they reject as odious attached.

The fate of the NRA's impact on gun rights now rises and falls with the fate of Conservative evangelical Christian politics which is an unnecessary, risky, limiting and imprudent alliance in the realm of gun rights advocacy: It's impossible for a legislator to support Second Amendment rights without also being seen to support the commentary, perspectives and politics of the far right as well, which may not be his politics or the politics of his constituency. Thus he's kept silent on gun rights issues he would support were they free of such taint.

Unfortunately the NRA's marriage of gun rights to the perspectives and manners of the far right has permanently burdened gun rights issues with unrelated, contentious politics and that hurts all of us and unnecessarily limits membership and political support for our Second Amendment rights- not just the NRA, but gun rights themselves.
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