This article was reported in collaboration with the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, which has also supportedCity Limits’s coverage of policing in New York.
A freckled boy with tousled hair looks into the camera and says, “I am NRA Country.” A black guy with dreadlocks echoes him, as do two pretty young women suppressing giggles, saying in unison, “We are NRA Country.” Then there’s country music star Justin Moore, leaning against a farm fence in worn jeans and a cowboy hat, strumming a guitar as scenes of Americana flash by. “You don’t have to look far—all you gotta do is look around,” he sings. “This is NRA Country.”
A freckled boy with tousled hair looks into the camera and says, “I am NRA Country.” A black guy with dreadlocks echoes him, as do two pretty young women suppressing giggles, saying in unison, “We are NRA Country.” Then there’s country music star Justin Moore, leaning against a farm fence in worn jeans and a cowboy hat, strumming a guitar as scenes of Americana flash by. “You don’t have to look far—all you gotta do is look around,” he sings. “This is NRA Country.”
In Moore’s video, NRA Country looks like a wonderful place. The girls are pretty, the skies are blue, and people seem to spend a lot of time outdoors. But appearances aside, all is not well in NRA Country: according to the National Rifle Association, it faces existential peril in the form of Barack Obama’s possible second term.
Well before the Aurora theater shooting and the Sikh temple massacre returned guns to the political radar, the NRA adopted the poker-table slogan “All In!” for the 2012 election season. The NRA’s long-serving executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, has dubbed the looming vote “the most dangerous election in our lifetime.” In mailings this summer, the NRA’s Political Victory Fund proclaimed that donations “could mean the difference between the survival or destruction of our Second Amendment freedoms.”The NRA’s beef with Obama could be bad news for the president. The gun group, which grades candidates on their fidelity to the cause on a scale from A+ to F, claims an instrumental role in defeating John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000 and the Democrats’ Congressional majority in 1994. (“The NRA is the reason Republicans control the House,” Bill Clinton famously said after that election.) While some analysts believe its political power is overstated, the NRA is chiefly feared because it speaks to those voters who will cast their ballot based on the gun issue alone—a unity of purpose that gun control supporters lack.
so clinging to their guns and unread Bibles was insulting, but looks pretty much a reality. they can buy our politicians while you support them by clinging to your gun. wonder how many hunters vs. potential killers standing their ground or just outright murders?
But like the view through the scope of a high-powered rifle, that cultural lens magnifies one aspect of America’s gun politics to the exclusion of all else. Among other things, it obscures the fact that Obama has done little to nothing on gun policy. It glosses over the plain truth that the gun control battles of the 1990s are over and that the NRA has largely won. And most important, it ignores the fact that the gun issue is very much about money—money that the NRA banks with each new member, that the gunmakers earn with each new gun.
it also totally obscures the fact that people are dying and will die mostly ethnics. i still believe they are sewing the seeds of civil war and arming their crazies. laugh if you want to but take a serious look around, then take a stroll through your mind, you might be surprised at what you might find.
