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Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
You want clout then here's the way that you would have to do this, and its the only way this works.
You find all of the richest gun control advocates that you can find. You have them reach out of as many victims as you can and get them to sign off on the idea of a gun control lobby group.
You then have to go out and lobby for support in every city in every state and fund raise like crazy to show that this is a serious movement.
Supposedly the NRA only spends about 3 to 4 million bucks a year on lobbying and campaign support. Who knows if that's true, or what happens behind the scenes.
Anyways, you get the what I call ANRA (Anti National Riflemens association), to spend 10 times that amount of public advertising, campaign contributions, lobbying.
You reach out to every senator or congressmen that's in any kind of danger of losing a election, and you flat out give them money, and campaign expertise.
The wheels of change is always going to be based around money.
Basically if you want to get gun control, you have to buy as many people on both sides of the aisle as popular, and you have to spend a bunch of money on public education and advertising as possible to ensure that the president realizes that if he veto's any passed gun control bill that he'll be facing the wrath of the ANRA and the voters.
In other words, you have to buy Congress and the Senate, oh and the State Legislatures.
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People confuse the idea that lobbying groups in washington are the only way to influence politicians.
its not.
so while the sums batted about for direct NRA lobbying in washington are low compared to other lobby groups, the fact of the matter is that many of these candidate are "dyed in the campaign" NRA supporters.
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The gun rights organization spent a stupendous $54.4 million in the 2016 election cycle, almost all of it in "independent expenditures," meaning spending for or against a candidate but not a direct contribution to a campaign.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...003-story.html
simply put, the elections do not restrict Political Action Groups (CPAC) from putting out whatever kind of ads they want to, without restriction... so even though they might not be directly supporting Senator X with contributions, they can easily spend through the roof
against Senator Y because, for example, of a pro-gun control stance.
the legislators are not exactly "portraits in courage"... they toe the line because 1) the believe in the 2nd Amendment, even when it gravitates to nonsensical interpretations (Constitutional Carry) or 2) they know that they will be targeted the next election cycle with all the money that the NRA and their supporters can muster to ouster them from office.
So morons like Bret Stephens can try twisting the facts (FU NYTimes), but to borrow from Matt Taibbi, the NRA is "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of the US government, relentlessly jamming the butt end of their bump stock into the face of anyone that dares combine the word "Gun" and "Control""