Personal Opinion
California – -(AmmoLand.com)- Wayne Lapierre has left the NRA impotent and broke. We are on our own.
It’s not about money, its about focus and pulling gun owners together. When the NRA/ILA is laying off staff because all of the NRA”s resources are going to lawyers to fight with ex-vendors, then the NRA lacks the internal resources to rally gun owns to defend the 2nd.
We cannot cry over spilled milk, but the NRA’s inability to back pro-gun candidates in 2018 and the loss in Virginia is costing us our rights. Certainly, gun owners in Virginia (Or Eastern California as they will now be known) will feel the pinch.
Over the next three months, we will ask each of you to step up. There will be articles on how to form a local program. What groups we like for local political support. I know in my heart we can turn this around. In order to do that, however, we need to reach out to other gun owners, explain to them what is at risk.
So why does outreach matter, and what are the numbers that make it important.
There are 120,000,000 gun owners in the U.S., So the 1st question is, how do we know that? Well, some States register gun owners, and from that registration, we can see the expansive growth in the number of gun owners over the past 20 years. You cannot trust the poling on this as many gun owners will lie when poled. The number is between 100 million and 140 million if you ever want to do the math. We use 120,000,000 gun owners as a most likely estimate. It may be a bit higher.
No Democrat running for President has ever won an election if they ran on gun confiscation.
Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee when he called for a ban on handguns. Hillary lost because she called for a gun buyback. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ran as either pro-gun or neutral on guns. This is why Joe Biden has backtracked on his call for a gun ban.
At a fund-raiser in Atlanta Bill Clinton said “,Now, you know, I once had a lifetime membership in the NRA. I’ve even got my jacket there. I’m sure they revoked it somewhere…”
Gun owners come from all races and political boundaries.
There are more gun owners than there are Republicans, if we get just 3% more to show up for elections, we’ll have the votes to protect our rights. The fastest-growing groups of gun owners are women and minorities.
So organizing gun owners to get out ad vote is NOT a partisan thing. It is not about Democrat or Republican. What it is about is protecting our rights.
So stand up and get active. In coming articles, we will help show you how to organize and how to fight. AmmoLand News and others like them will provide you the information to protect the 2nd Amendment for you and for generations to come. Stay connected, subscribe, and follow. Stay in the fight.
About Don McDougall
Don McDougall is an NRA instructor and member of the Los Padres “Friends of the NRA” committee. If he’s not at the range, you will find him setting the record straight with on gun issues and gun safety on AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.