Quote of the day—Josh Sugarmann

First the NRA’s leadership murdered its parents. Now it’s eating its children. The extremist positions staked out by the NRA’s leadership are taking their toll in dollars and cents. It is clear that even the NRA’s own members can’t stomach the leadership’s extremist anti-public safety, anti-law enforcement rhetoric and actions.

Josh Sugarmann
Executive Director of the Violence Policy Center
March 19, 1997
National Rifle Association Has Been “Technically Insolvent For Several Years” New Internal Document Reveals
[And 14 years later how do the balance sheets and membership numbers of the NRA and the VPC look now? I guess Sugarmann was wrong—as is nearly always the case.—Joe]

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3 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Josh Sugarmann

  1. Really, the numbers say it all:

    Violence Policy Center – their lobbying expenditures over the past four years have been precisely zero.

    National Rifle Association – their lobbying expenditures over the past four years have been somewhere around $7,000,000. Seven million dollars.

    The anti-rights lobby is dying, and there is nothing they can do to stop it. At this point, the best its members can do is retire from the field with whatever grace they might have left before the elevator hits the bottom…

  2. Maybe Josh was trying to do some backhanded fund raising for the NRA?

  3. I point out that, since 1997, the NRA has become decidedly more “extreme” (as sugarmann would define it). I recall complaining back then about the NRA doing more articles on single shot rifles, showing expensive double shotguns on their covers but almost never ARs, trying to play the “moderate” in politics, and so on. Since then it’s been a major turn-around, and their numbers have come up accordingly.

    Very, very few ever learn this lesson and do an about face like that, but when they do, they win.

    The Republican Party leadership has yet to learn it. What’s missing, from the people who play the political calculation game, is the understanding and application of principles. More importantly, what is missing is respect for and faith in the American people in general. They think we can’t understand basic truths or the concept of being guided by principle. They (“moderates”) insult us.

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