Is NRA convention a gift for Dems?
Activists say Dallas event could push a ‘blue wave,’ but experts disagree
AUSTIN — Derek Robledo can’t wait until the National Rifle Association’s annual convention opens in Dallas on Friday.
He won’t be inside listening to President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Gov. Greg Abbott and most all of the state’s Republican officials cheering the Second Amendment.
Instead, the 20-year-old University of Texas student will be outside railing against the NRA’s outsize political influence, which he blames for the continued mass shootings in schools.
“This convention is a huge gift to Democrats, because it represents the need for significant change in our political process — and why the blue wave is coming to Texas this year,” he said. “Having all these Republicans on stage at the NRA convention for photo ops will motivate Democrats to turn out this fall like never before.” Or not. While Robledo, a selfprofessed “Latino activist” who has been working for months to increase turnout among young millennial voters to break the GOP domination of Texas politics, political
“Large, angry protests demanding we surrender our rights won’t sell in Texas.” Paul Chu, NRA member
consultants from both parties say the value of any gift from the weekend may be short-lived.
“The guest list at the convention just shows the political power the NRA continues to exert in the United States and in Texas,” said Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist who has been following the state’s so-called gun politics for years.
“Trump and Pence with Abbott and (U.S. Sens. Ted) Cruz and (John) Cornyn won’t hurt them in Texas. If it was in the Northeast, those two would be like a 50-pound weight around the necks of state Republicans. They’d go straight to the bottom and drown. But this is Texas.”
Thousands of protesters and gun control activists are expected outside the Dallas convention hall where where the NRA convention opens Friday, an austere downtown landmark named for former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Republican who preceded Cruz.
In some ways, both Democratic activists and Republican insiders insist the protests will help their causes. Democrats hope that large crowds outside will bolster the optic that large numbers of Texans are fed up with Republican rule. And Republicans believe it will boost GOP turnout and help stave off a political invasion by liberals.
‘It’s just a show’
“Large angry protests demanding we surrender our rights won’t sell in Texas,” Paul Chu, a process engineer and NRA member, said Wednesday as he left an Austin gun store with several boxes of ammunition for a weekend shooting competition at a private range.
“The timing of the convention may be bad, right after the Parkland school shooting in Florida, but the NRA will put on their show and make their point and go home. It’s just a show, just politics.”
After all, a friend standing nearby noted, “The NRA met in Denver just after Columbine, in 1999. Life went on.”
That scaled-back convention, where an estimated 8,000 protesters outnumbered NRA members 4-to-1, ended with the organization exuberantly defiant and uncompromising in its defense of the Second Amendment.
“Each horrible act can’t become an ax for opportunists to cleave the very Bill of Rights that binds us,” then-NRA President Charlton Heston told the cheering overflow crowd at the Denver meeting, many wearing blue-and-silver Columbine memorial ribbons fastened with NRA buttons.
This year in Dallas, both the president and vice president will appear, in support of an organization that was credited with helping pump more than $30 million in contributions into their successful 2016 campaign.
“The NRA has weathered the storm after the (Parkland) shooting, and I think they’re looking for this convention in Dallas, not to lick their wounds, but to get their war hoop back up about the Second Amendment,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University.
“Even though there may be some over-the-top celebration of gun culture that Democrats might use, there’s probably not a lot of downside for Republican leaders in Texas in the fall.”
‘We’ll see’
Ed Espinoza, executive director of Progress Texas, a progressive grassroots group generally aligned with Democrats, thinks that Republican leaders are in for a surprise.
Such a national display of support by the Republican leadership for an organization that has fought against gun control “is tone deaf,” even in Texas, which in recent years has coped with mass shootings at Fort Hood and SutherlandSprings, as well as having schools routinely go on lockdown across the state over gun threats.
“What this event shows is that Texas Republicans are so confident they think they can do anything they want without any consequences,” he said. “We’ll see.”
In recent months, Democratic candidates in various statewide and legislative races have called for tougher gun laws: universal background checks, closing the “gun show” loophole on sales, raising the age for purchase to 21, prohibiting domestic abusers from possessing guns and outlawing so-called bump stocks that allow rifles to become rapid-fire weapons among others.
“This convention allows us an opportunity to talk about common-sense solutions Democrats are proposing, that most Texans agree with, while the Republicans just want to hold hands with the NRA and Donald Trump,” said Manny Garcia, deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party.
“Texans should be rightly concerned that Washington and Austin have not addressed these issues.”
At a political town hall of Democratic candidates on Sunday in Austin, Miguel Suazo, an Austin energy and natural resources attorney running for land commissioner, said although he is a gun owner who supports the Second Amendment, new laws are needed to better protect the public.
“That blue wave is coming and we need it to hit the shore hard in November because we need change in Texas,” he told the crowd.