NRA: the 'growing storm' challenging group's legendary clout and power | US news
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After the National Rifle Association spent a record $30m plus to help elect Donald Trump president it had high hopes for its gun rights agenda, but Trump’s victory has been a mixed blessing, with the NRA currently facing a bevy of political, regulatory and financial headaches, say gun analysts and NRA[1] veterans.
The problems for the 5 million member NRA range from an emboldened pro-gun control Democrat-controlled House to state and federal regulatory fights, and from better financed groups seeking to curb gun deaths to internal criticism of NRA leadership.
Gun issue lobbyists, both pro and con, and firearms experts say the group’s legendary clout is being challenged on multiple fronts and its longstanding image of invulnerability and power is encountering tougher opposition
“I think it’s a very serious confluence of issues that the NRA is facing,” said Richard Feldman the president of the Independent Gunowners of America, and a long time NRA member. “They’re facing a growing storm.”
Robert Spitzer, the author of five books on guns and a politics professor at Cortland SUNY, added: “The NRA is facing some pretty hard times these days with a heavy legal, political and financial cloud over them.”
“Their reputation has suffered in the public mind – especially in the outrage cycle following Parkland,” the Florida school where last February 17 people died in a mass shooting.
In the year since Parkland there were almost 350 mass shootings including one this month at an Illinois factory where an employee with a criminal record owned an illegal gun that killed five people. Overall, the death toll from such mass shootings has been rising for almost two decades.
Which helps explain why the NRA’s big stable of lobbyists and lawyers is – yet again – battling new gun control measures in Congress and state legislatures, plus regulatory legal skirmishes.
One key example:
