NRA’s influence slips, even in Trump’s America
WASHINGTON — The influence of the National Rifle Association, the nation’s highest-profile organization dedicated to Second Amendment rights and a longtime powerhouse against gun control laws, is showing signs of potential decline.
The NRA’s own tax forms show a dip in revenue. And even as the group, now under the leadership of new President Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, continues to spend big money on federal lobbying and political campaigns, its opponents in the gun control movement, after decades of ever more deadly mass shootings and seemingly random incidents of gun violence, have been on the rise.
During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, gun rights groups spent some $9.9 million on outside political efforts, nearly all of that from the NRA, while gun control groups invested a record high of $11.9 million, according to a tabulation from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the NRA, calls the decline in revenue between 2016 and 2017 temporary.
“Right now, we are at the highest levels of membership,” he said, with 5.5 million dues-paying members, the most in its 150year history. “More people identify with the NRA and believe in what the NRA stands for than ever before.”
The NRA has found itself ensnared in controversy in recent months, some of it stemming from the special counsel probe into foreign interference in the 2016 elections. The group had ties to Maria Butina, a Russian who pleaded guilty late last year to charges of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent. Whether the gun group has allowed foreign money to infiltrate its campaign coffers also may be under investigation, according to news reports. And it’s on the hot seat for possible campaign finance violations of improperly coordinating its independent campaign expenditures with candidates, after a report by the liberal magazine Mother Jones.
On the policy front, the situation isn’t much better.
Even though the NRA’s favored candidates, including Donald Trump, won big in the 2016 elections, the group didn’t have any landmark successes in the 115th Congress and still will be pushing some of its key legislative priorities in the 116th Congress, including a bill from Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn that would allow people with concealed carry permits from one state to use them in other states.
But such a measure is unlikely to get traction in the House. With Democrats now in control, the NRA will be on defense in the chamber, although any new gun control measures passed there are unlikely to move in the Senate.
Although Democrats aren’t going to be able to get their own laws adopted, “the NRA will be stymied in watering down federal gun laws,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law who specializes in the Second Amendment and gun control as well as a campaign finance law.
“It’s surprising that they’re stumbling just two years after an incredible amount of glory for them — the election of Donald Trump and an all-Republican Congress seemed like a boon to them,” Winkler added.
Winkler noted, however, that Trump’s presidency has resulted in two new Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who are widely viewed as champions of the Second Amendment, which gives Americans the right to keep and bear arms.
“The truth is, the NRA is still extremely powerful especially in the Republican Party,” Winkler said. “While Democrats did win the House, the Republicans that were elected tended to be very conservative and very pro-NRA.”
The NRA still has its loyal base of Second Amendment supporters, but the growing list of deadly mass shootings has galvanized voters who disagree with the gun lobby’s point of view. Amid the devastation to families who have lost loved ones to mass shootings, a growing number of gun control activists have become a political force.
“Now what we’re finding is it’s not just moms or grandmothers, it’s dads, it’s kids, it’s people of every stripe who are walking around saying, ‘I don’t feel safe at movie theaters, at school, synagogue and church,’ ” Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said.