The Secret Fears Of The Gun Lobby And What They're Planning Next

[highplainsdem]

From Media Matters:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/10/08/the-secret-fears-of-the-gun-lobby-and-what-they/196335

The Secret Fears Of The Gun Lobby And What They're Planning Next
Inside the 2013 Gun Rights Policy Conference
Blog ››› 36 minutes ago ››› ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK


"Take a look to your left," said the Hon. Philip Journey. "Now take a look to your right. What do you see?"

It was Saturday morning inside a hotel ballroom at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. We, the several hundred congregants of the twenty-eighth annual Guns Rights Policy Conference, did as instructed. Looking to my left, I saw the pundit and National Review columnist John Fund struggling to attach a new credit card reader to his smart phone. Looking to my right, I exchanged nods with an older gentleman wearing suspenders and a VFW hat. He looked like he could have served in the Navy with the airport's nearly nonagenarian namesake.

"You'll notice there's a lot of grey in this room," said Judge Journey, who when not sitting on a Kansas district court bench serves as an officer for the Kansas State Rifle Association. "That's the problem with our movement. We've got to get children into the shooting sports and develop an appreciation by them in the right to keep and bear arms. Because in 20 years, where will we be?"

This question -- "In 20 years, where will we be?" -- is one of gnawing urgency for the gun-rights movement. At the National Rifle Association convention last summer, I heard gun industry veterans joke that NRA now stood for "Normal Retirement Age." At this smaller but no less influential meeting of leading pro-gun minds, most speakers circled back to their fear that those in the room represented the end of a proud line. Even as the movement's leading activists boasted of recent victories at the federal and state level -- and there are many, from successful recall elections in Colorado to a carry law in Illinois -- they warned of a deadly demographic drop-off, that the energy and the youth was all in the gun-reform corner. "The people on the other side, like (the Stimson Center's) Rachel Stohl, they are very young and they are motivated," said Julianne Versnel, of the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights. "They know how to Tweet and Facebook, and they are doing a very good job."

If only winning the battle for young hearts and minds was as simple as opening a Twitter account. Like the GOP it overwhelming supports, the pro-gun movement does not sound like a modern army positioned to win a culture war for the allegiance of young Americans. Beverly Zaslow, a protégé of Andrew Breitbart who produces right-wing documentaries, used to the GRPC podium to slam the television program Glee for not having "normal kinds of relationships in it." Another speaker advised the pro-gun movement to "accept the gays, if they're with us." This kind of outreach is unlikely to draw the required levels of new blood needed to replace the men in suspenders and VFW hats. The severity of the crisis was put most bluntly by Andrew Sypien, content manager for the online retail gun giant CheaperThanDirt.com. "It's the 25 to 35 year-olds who are going to replace you in ten years," he said. "If you don't get them, it's going to die here with you."

-snip-

The entire article is well worth reading, from those opening paragraphs to quotes like this

"Going from zero to one gun is the biggest change. Going from one to 34 is not a big deal. If we could just get them to a Ruger Mark II, or a Browning Buck Mark, or a Smith & Wesson 422, it would be a tremendous leap forward. It would be the footprint on the moon. That's what it would be."

to a description, in the final paragraph, of a panel moderator cutting off a conference attendee's attempt to ask a gun industry executive about his "company's decision to treble prices on certain items on the night of president Obama's Newtown speech."

Sly digs at the NRA are one thing. Getting into the economic interests and incentives of the gun industry, that remains a collapsible stock too far.

[tosh]

1. K&R.

Thanks - good read!

edited to add: I really like that "Normal Retirement Age".

[highplainsdem]

6. Thanks! And I really like that joke about what NRA stands for, too.

[rrneck]

2. They won't have too much of a problem.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023789824

[NYC_SKP]

7. As they figure out that the government does not really support their dreams and aspirations...

...and that there aren't a whole lot of options to fix the corrupt system, and as things get more and more desperate for more and more people,

I think many of them will find a renewed appreciation and/or need for the Second Amendment.

[rrneck]

8. I am currently listening to

Steven Pinker's "The Angels of Our Better Nature" and Pinker is talking about how repressive regimes don't generally use the military for repression, at least not at first. They use unemployed angry young men. And of course that same population is actively recruited by all sorts and kinds of violent, reactionary, racist, extreme groups.

[flamin lib]

3. Please cross post to Gun Reform group. nt

[highplainsdem]

5. Just did:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12625039

[Aristus]

4. Their biggest fear seems to be centered around the fact that the young people they want to recruit

include lots of gamers, who get the vicarious thrill of shooting and killing digitally, with the upside that no one gets hurt, and no one goes to jail.

A fascination for shooting and killing gets a whole lot creepier, not to mention more dangerous, when real guns are added into the mix...

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Go is to know they finally realized this problem

They share it with the GOP.