Is The NRA Going Bye-Bye?

[Rev. Rye]

Ever were the NRA cease to exist, there are others like them (Gun Owners of America) for instance, who would continue, assuming that they aren't crooked, too. I don't know the ins and outs of the problems with what the management there are doing or have done. The NRA in the dim and misty used to be all about shooting skills and hunting safety. Now they're massively political, and I believe needlessly so. If their officers violated the law, they should be held accountable. Does that mean imploding the whole thing? Idunno.

If you're at all curious, here's the story of how the NRA became the guns rights absolutists we know and despise today. Until 1977, the group was actually fairly reasonable, advocating for both gun rights and gun control, hoping to find a happy medium. But by the Vietnam era, the absolutists became more vocal, and during the Revolt at Cincinnatti, they took power and haven't let go since. And now, they're doing shit like:

• Responding to Smith and Wesson announcing new safety measures after Columbine by doxxing their CEO.
  
• Exploiting hurricanes and fear of black looters to sell guns.
  
• Refusing to allow the government to properly digitise their records of who owns what firearm. And, for the record, the reason this is desirable isn't because the New World Order is chomping at the bit to confiscate your guns, but because if a gun is shot during the commission of a crime and Ballistics can prove a match, it's only a matter of looking up who in the area has that model of gun and the suspects get narrowed considerably. It's basically the same thing cops can do for a car, but because of the NRA's paranoia, this has to be done the hard way because they convinced Congress to make it a federal crime to properly digitise it. They were recently allowed to physically scan the files, but they may not be searchable.
  
• Trying to get silencers legalised by framing the issue as one of hearing safety.
  
• Helping a particularly dangerous conspiracy theorist (and by particularly dangerous, I mean "doxxing the families of children who died in school shootings" dangerous) to fabricate conspiracy theories within a day of the Parkland shooting.
  

I really hope this works, though, of course, even if it does, I suspect that there's still going to be more where they came from, but, hopefully, they'll be less powerful and maybe the powerful ones will be less awful (though this may not be a high bar to clear).