The Economist: The NRA Shouldn’t Be So Powerful

By Tom Knighton

The Economist has been described as a classically liberal publication. In other words, it’s supposedly fairly libertarian in its focus. It’s supposed to be an intelligent magazine for those who ascribe to free-market economics.

But their intelligence abandoned them when they decided to publish a post on Friday questioning why the NRA has the pull it does.

Mass shootings, if they provoke any reaction at all, produce piddling proposals which still cannot be passed. A modest initiative after the Las Vegas shooting to ban bump stocks has stalled. Jeff Flake, a Republican senator, has introduced a bill which would prevent those convicted of domestic abuse in military courts from acquiring guns. It is likely to go nowhere: even after the massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, the Senate rejected a bill to expand background checks.

America’s powerful gun lobby, of which the National Rifle Association (NRA) is the most prominent group, is able to cow Republican legislators into inaction. Yet the organisation largely represents the extreme views of a minority of gunowners: the NRA claims 5m members, compared with the 17m Americans who hunt or the third of adults who own guns. NRA members are twice as …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms