By Chris Cronin
Staff Columnist
In October, after the Aurora shootings, I wrote in an editorial that mass murder had become a grim routine in this country (See “Gunned Down Again: Why Our Gun Laws Aren’t Working” from the Oct. 21, 2012 edition of the Elm). Gun violence and mass shootings were perpetually plastered on the headlines of newspapers, with pictures of grieving mothers and traumatized schoolmates standing around at the scene of the crime and holding candles at the wakes of the victims, people of all ages, plucked cruelly from their lives by madmen.
Now, the routine has changed, and it makes me physically sick that it took the summary execution of 20 elementary schoolers, some shot multiple times, to pull the people of this country out of their apathy. But even as the window for sensible measures to stop the violence—call it gun control, call it gun safety, call it the only rational response to the incessant spasms of insanity that have wracked this country for decades—forces of greed and paranoia are arraying to protect the status quo by any means necessary.
I’ve spoken to many people about the problems with our gun laws, and I’ve heard a great deal of responses. There are some people who are simply going to reject everything that I am about to put forward, or even that our laws need to change at all. When my last article on gun control was published on the Elm’s website, it swiftly became the most commented-on of all my editorials. Many of the comments sought to marginalize my viewpoints, repeat-edly referring to the lack of public support for any sort of change in our gun laws, as well as the vast, grassroots power of the National Rifle Association.
It’s time to dispel one of the great myths of American politics: the NRA is not a grassroots organization. The numbers simply don’t add up. The NRA claims to have a little over 4 million members, who would pay in around $100 million if they each paid the standard $25/year dues. Records, freely available from the Online Data Services section on the West Virginia Secretary of State’s website, show that the organization had $149 million in assets at the end of 2011, not counting expenditures. Member dues did in fact bring in $102 million that year, but total revenue was reported at $226 million. Revenue raised from gun safety programs and member donations did bring in an additional $52 million, but that leaves $72 million unaccounted for. Where did this money come from? More than half of it came from advertising ($20 million) and member sales ($19 million).
That’s right: almost a fifth of the NRA’s total revenue in 2011 came from gun sales and advertising. And that does not account for the NRA’s sister organizations like NRA-PAC and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, on which I was unable to find any information on donors. According to the non-partisan financial transparency site OpenSecrets.org, those organizations spent $16.5 million and $7.4 million, respectively, on lobbying during the 2011-2012 electoral season alone. The NRA itself spent $59 million on political advocacy during the 2011-2012 cycle, a large proportion ($18 million) of it on the type of negative ads that supporters of both parties decry.
And least there is any question of the NRA being anything but a partisan institution, the organization spent a little more than 1 percent of their total outside spending during that electoral cycle to support Democratic candidates.
Regardless of what you think of my political views, the numbers don’t lie. They are from official federal and state records required by law, and backed up by internal audits. Yes, four million is a lot of people. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the vast majority of Americans who have made up their minds and decided that it’s time to reform our gun laws.