As you probably already know the NRA made a deal with the devil:
On June 14, 2010, Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives
pledged that H.R. 5175 would be amended to exempt groups like the NRA, that meet
certain criteria, from its onerous restrictions on political speech. As a
result, and as long as that remains the case, the NRA will not be involved in
final consideration of the House bill.
The "certain criteria" are:
- The organization must have more than 1 million members
- The organization must have been in existence for more than 15 years
- The organization must have members in all 50 states
- The organization must raise 15 percent or less of their funds from corporations
Some say this set of criteria can be met by only one organization--the NRA.
There are lots of ways to read this and as good as the NRA is at backroom deals and reading the political winds I still wonder if they got this one right.
If you read things from the NRA point of view in the literal sense it comes out something like this:
The NRA is looking out for the best interests of it's members and the organization. If the proposed law does not apply to the NRA then the NRA has no business spending political capital on it.
If you read things from the point of view of the devil it comes out something like this:
Get what we can now and we'll get the rest later. Once it passes those poor souls in Hell will scream so loudly about the NRA exemption that we will collect the souls of the NRA on our next pass through town without any difficulty.
In this scenario the devil wins and goes home with our souls. It may have been delayed for a few months or a year, but the devil wins.
If the NRA is good, really good, they can play with the devil and win the game for everyone without even trying. That goes something like this:
The NRA gets it's exemption then either with or without some back channel urging by the NRA the exemption stirs up such a storm that the entire bill becomes impossibly toxic with or without the exemption.
I know the NRA is good. But are they good enough to take a 1000 yard shot with the proper windage such that the political winds push the bullet into the X-ring once it has left the barrel?
I hope the NRA knows what they are doing because they are playing a game where (mixing my metaphors because there has been a Charlie Daniels earworm of The Devil Went Down to Georgia going on for the last twenty minutes) the devil deals the cards. And it's more than just a fiddle of gold against a soul at stake.