Focusing Gun Owners’ Political Strength – All PACs Are Local

We are constantly told that it is only big money that counts in politics. Perhaps this is so. But what if that’s merely an intimidation tactic? By convincing your enemy that you have the invincible weapon, your enemy will shrink from the fight.

The gun controllers have long complained that the big money of the evil gun industry controlled Congress-critters with lavish contributions. We know this is nonsense. The NRA didn’t buy a Congressman with a couple thousand bucks. It welded it’s influence by publishing letter-grades to its members who numbered no more than five million.

Today, the NRA has been reduced to a tottering shell of what it once was. It will take decades for it to be rehabilitated into something approaching its youthful vigor. Still, there is something to learn here.

...

Concentrating our political clout in one iron fist at the national level might have proven to be a strategic mistake. We gave the gun-controllers a singular target to demonize and take all the flack. Perhaps that was actually an un-forced error.

As a thought experiment, imagine an entirely different tactic. Suppose, instead, that the NRA never gave a dime to any candidate. Suppose it never published a letter grade for a single politician.

What if, instead, it merely accepted the invitation to take a seat at the table in Washington. Suppose it evaluated the Congress-critters’ responsiveness to the support of gun rights and quietly fed its observations back to its 50 state affiliates.

The state affiliates might then have contributed to local candidates in their own states and in neighboring states where their members hunted and competed. The state affiliates might have sent their own letter-grades to their members. Would the Buckeye Firearms Association (or any of it’s 49 sister organizations) have taken a fraction of the Alinskyite fire suffered by NRA?

Click here to read the entire article at TheTruthAboutGuns.com.