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The Most Successful Organization in America

Guns are in the news, again. There is a way to put that to constructive use, while avoiding the stuff that has been talked to death already. This is easier to do if you have no real interest in the issue of guns or their control, and that is the case with me.

Think of how alien gun culture is to the average soccer mom in the big city. Think of how out-of-date gun culture is to modern, city-centered culture, where all the money and votes are. And yet gun ownership is still alive! How do you explain the success of the gun lobby in defending their hobby?

There has got to be a lesson in their success for anybody in any organization which wants to succeed. Somebody should write a book on this. 

I do not want to talk about 'gun control.' I want to talk about how a lobby can succeed when everything seems stacked against it.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Out here in the hinterlands where there's not a cop on every corner and there are critters of the four legged and two legged variety wandering around getting into mischief, one had better have the ability to protect one's self and family. I am twenty miles from a law enforcement person and my closest neighbor is 5 miles away. So we take a real dim view of folks in the big cities trying to take our means of defense. It won't happen!! That is why we need a lobby to voice our concerns and protect our second amendment rights.
I remember going to junior high and high school and seeing students pickups in the parking lot with rifles in the gun racks. Never had a school shooting back then. I lay it onto these parents letting violent video games be their kids' baby sitter. And the kids don't know real from video game any more.
Just my two cents worth.
Ed said…
"Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it." - John Naisbitt

The NRA was not formed as a lobby in 1871. The purpose was to educate people how to shoot. That has been the focus of the organization from the time it was formed. I think they became a lobby because they saw that the Second Amendment was becoming a target for the anti-gun activists/lobbyist. There was a parade forming to support the Second Amendment and they got in front of it.
That's fine, but you didn't reveal the secret of success. How can mere deplorables in Flyover Country (grin)win legal battles against people (in the metropolis) who have the votes, the money, and virtually all of the Establishment on their side.
The NRA are successful because of their outreach to women.

It is women their children and old people who benefit the most from an armed population.

The NRA's key to success is education and outreach to women.

We do not have much education today, we have indoctrination and propaganda by hard core communist who have taken over the schools, media and Politicians who currently have no real term limits.

Hitler, Mao, Stalin, all Communist/Socialist/Marxist, disarmed first the folks they killed.

In China, 33 were killed and 130 were injured in what is being called a China Knife-Wielding Spree. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/33-dead-130-injured-china-knife-wielding-spree-n41966

My solution is to keep my children out of public schools. The public schools have become cest pools of pediphiles and mentally disturbed people, like Nikolas Cruz, who need to be in institutions the government used to do a good job running, but they closed them to make prisons for profit that public school raised adults fill.
Ed said…
The NRA succeeds because they have adopted the Cheney Doctrine which tells us that if you can keep the fools scared, they will vote Republican . The Black Guy that was
president recently, is going to take your guns. Send us lots of money and we will stop him. We’ll simply buy some more politicians. The NRA turned Obama into the biggest gun salesperson in history.
Hillary Clinton has a secret plan to take your guns. Fear her!! Send us some $$$ and we will stop her.
One poster fears that the public schools are full of ‘pedophiles and mentally disturbed people’. Send the NRA some money and they will protect you.

Trump is president because he identified this fear and capitalized on it. Fear Browns, fear Blacks, fear Muslims, etc. Be afraid. Vote for me and I will protect you.

Keep the fools scared and they will vote Republican. And support the NRA. A very simple and effective strategy.

This comment wasn't written by H.L. Mencken? (grin) Recall his quote about how "practical politics" works on fear about hobgoblins.

Some people even try to scare Americans about Boris & Natasha stealing the election. Or global warming drowning New York and Los Angeles.
Sondra said…
Money is the answer to your question. People who can afford to waste money on useless metal such as guns and ammo can also afford to pay DUES to an organization that promises them the future if only they will arm themselves, not just with one gun for protection but multiple guns one to shoot and 20 to show off with. So this Organization has more money than they know what to do with it so they use it to control the so called Democracy we supposedly have, (the majority does not want guns)They turned an instrument of death into a weapon of policy. How's that?
kerry said…
I can't imagine how dark, unhappy and paranoid it must feel to be functioning on a level where you believe that our American culture is controlled by Communists, and you must home school you spawn to save them from imaginary boogie-men? Saddest part is that it poisons the minds of the next generation, and as ED noted, results in fools electing a narcissistic Psychopath, who succeeds by telling the right lies to these paranoid dolts.
Anonymous said…
Fear, political intimidation and money.

Chris
Ed said…
Ebola was weaponized to keep the fear going.
Fearbooollla!!

Keep the fools scared scared and they will vote Republican.
Ed said…
Fear and the NRA.
In the one-minute ad, which has been viewed more than 4 million times since it was posted in June, conservative television host Dana Loesch talks passionately while black and white footage of protests in the United States is displayed.

“They use their media to assassinate real news,” Loesch says, referring presumably to America’s anti-gun, anti-Donald Trump population. “They use their schools to teach children that their President is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”



“The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth. I am the National Rifle Association of America and I am freedom’s safest place,” her speech concludes.

Keep the fools scared and they will support the NRA. And Trump.
Fear is a terrible place to make life choices.

I am certain that the majority of Trump voters voted for him because he was not a politician.

This November will be a repeat, and, like the Pressidential race, the corrupt Dems and Reps are already claiming victory. The last laugh will be on them as the Dems lose even more seats, and the Reps lose to more people like Trump, non politicians. Maybe then we can get real Term Limits that will stem this trend of corrution.

Sadly, the peak in this corrupt immoral government will not come until sometime at the end of soloar cycle 25, which is 2032.

Like I said before, you cannot fix stupid.

On Sparta. https://mises.org/library/ancient-spartan-communism

For the modern communist in search of examples there are, on wider grounds, grave stumbling blocks. In the first place, the Spartan state was not so much a state as a military machine. Its sole interest was in training men to suffer and endure, and it pursued this by methods which stand unique in their revolting barbarity. They may have attained equality and community in education, but not much is thereby gained if education is directed to an unholy end. And secondly, to revert to a point which cannot be overemphasized, if only because the worshippers of Sparta have so frequently forgotten it, there is the horrible obverse of Spartan communism presented by the hunted and harried Helot. It is not merely that communism in Sparta was a communism in use, others having produced. It was a communism of an idle and boastful people, whose government and whose existence demanded an army of Helots, who suffered at their hands a ruthless tyranny without parallel in history. It has too often been forgotten that the Helots also were men.
Fit Forlife said…
A large reason for their success is summed up in two words: Second Amendment
Isn't the Constitution just a starting point for the gun lobby's success? The Supreme Court could re-interpret the Constitution to mean anything they want.
Fit Forlife said…
Absolutely but it's one heck of a starting point that's why I mention it. It's like giving a marathon runner a ten mile head start, they will be very successful even against superior opposition.
The Supreme Court could re-interpret it and therein lies the struggle but since they would have to re-interpret it, it's like that ten mile head start, it won't be easily done if at all.