Since Friday’s mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 27 dead—20 children, six women who tried to protect them, the principal, the psychologist, the teachers, as well as the shooter’s mother, and seven adults—the National Rifle Association has been silent. Its Facebook page has gone dark. The NRA has refused to give interviews. On Monday, more than 150 gun control advocates marched to the NRA’s Capitol Hill headquarters to call on the group to support enacting laws they say could save lives.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA spent more than $2.2 million lobbying Congress this year alone. By comparison, the gun control lobby spent just $180,000.
Lisa Graves talking:
I’m not surprised to see the NRA duck in the face of this horrific massacre in Connecticut. But the fact is, is that the NRA has been working with ALEC for decades. And ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s an organization that describes itself as the largest membership organization for state legislators in the country, a voluntary membership organization. And really, it’s bankrolled by some of the largest corporations in the world. The NRA and ALEC were partners for decades on numerous gun laws, gun laws—bills, basically, that were voted on in secret through ALEC meetings, where the NRA lobbyist would cast a vote as an equal to a legislator at some posh resort event that ALEC would host.
And those bills are quite extreme. They include not just the bill ratifying Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law that was in controversy earlier this year after being cited in the Trayvon Martin shooting incident in Florida, but also laws on the books and bills that would say—most recently, last December, ALEC passed a model resolution that they wanted to be passed in the states that said that cities could not bar machine guns. That’s how extreme their agenda is.
And earlier this year, in the wake of the controversy, the public outcry over Florida and Trayvon Martin and that law, nearly 42 corporations have left ALEC, but ALEC also announced that the NRA’s task force, the gun task force, was no longer going to be in business. And yet, this summer, at ALEC’s annual convention after this PR announcement, there was the NRA with the biggest booth at the ALEC convention and hosting yet another shooting event for legislators.
And I point this out because what ALEC is is a way to inculcate and train these legislators, thousands of legislators in the statehouses across the country, that it’s legitimate to give an equal vote to an organization like the NRA. Many of these legislators go on to serve as governors, like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio. Many of them go on to Congress. The two most powerful men in the United States House of Representatives, John Boehner and Eric Cantor, are ALEC alums. They’ve been steeped in the notion that entities like the NRA are entitled to an equal vote on model legislation to change our rights.
I was on the gun task force during the Clinton administration after the Columbine shootings in 1999. I worked on it with a team of attorneys from across the department, from the ATF, FBI, U.S. attorney’s office and other offices within the department, that was spearheaded by the deputy attorney general’s office.
And so, when the Clinton administration ended and Bush became president and Ashcroft came in with his team, the gun meeting continued. My job was to help them with the orderly transition of government on gun policy. And immediately, it was a room of 12 white guys and me. Suddenly, they were—there were a lot of political appointees, people who had worked very hard on political activities for the Bush administration.
And one of the first things that that gun task force did was go on a shooting event, a secret shooting outing with the NRA. They didn’t invite me. They didn’t invite the career staff who were part of the Justice Department. This was a political maneuver to basically tell the NRA at the beginning of the Bush administration that things had changed, that they were partners, and that they were going to spend time with the gun task force actually going off to a secret event at a shooting range with their NRA buddies. At that same time, Ashcroft, the attorney general, had hidden his schedule from the staff within the Department of Justice, from the senior staff, who were the career staff, and he was secretly meeting with the NRA and working with them basically to advance their agenda in the Bush administration. So, it’s no surprise that ultimately the Assault Weapons Ban that was passed in 1994, weak as it was, was allowed to expire under the watch of John Ashcroft and the Bush administration.
we know that one of the things that happened last week was not just that the lame-duck Legislature in Michigan pushed through union-busting legislation, but also they pushed through part of the ALEC wish list, which was to expand the availability of concealed firearms in Michigan. And that’s part of the ALEC agenda, the NRA agenda, for many years, is to allow people to carry concealed weapons. And in the face of shootings, what they do is play offense. The NRA plays offense and says more people need guns. After the Virginia Tech shootings, they tried to remove the laws prohibiting guns on campus. They want people to be more armed rather than to deal with the real heart of this tragedy, these tragedies.
– source democracynow.org