Tag: NRA

Rep. Phillips Slams the NRA for Influencing Votes on the VioIence Against Women Act Reauthorization

Phillips: “That’s exactly why we need to get special interests and big money out of politics.”

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03) co-sponsored and voted in support of reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The historically bipartisan effort split along party lines when the NRA announced it would be recommending a “No” vote and scoring members of Congress based on their vote this week.

“The House stood up for women and reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act today,” said Phillips. “But this year the NRA is keeping score. That was enough to take what should be an easy, commonsense, bipartisan bill to protect women and strongarm Republicans into opposing it. That’s inexcusable, and that’s exactly why we need to get special interests and big money out of politics.”

The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization passed the house largely along party lines and included provisions to keep guns out of the hands of convicted domestic abusers for the first time.

In more than half of mass shootings between 2009 and 2016, the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member, according to a report by Everytown for Gun Safety. Rep. Phillips is a gun owner who supports keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers.

Here are all the Russian interference efforts that didn’t make it into Barr’s letter

Secessionists, fundamentalists, the NRA, and the far-left all played their role, but they didn’t make it into Barr’s summary report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller may not have found the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but plenty of Americans — wittingly or otherwise — have helped Moscow’s election meddling efforts in recent years. Secessionists, Jill Stein and her campaign, and members of groups organized around gun rights and far-right Christian movements have spent the past few years cultivating ties with those close to the Kremlin and using their platforms to promote Russia-friendly ideas.

None of these groups were mentioned by Attorney General William Barr, who issued a letter on Sunday confirming that Russia conducted coordinated campaigns to interfere in America’s elections.

According to Barr, Mueller’s report found that Russian operatives reached out to Trump’s campaign, but that no member of the campaign actively colluded with the Russian government. However, Barr wrote that Mueller also “determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.” Both of these efforts — social media interference, and stealing and disseminating internal Democratic documents and emails — were widely known before the report’s conclusion.

View the complete March 27 article by Casey Michel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Incendiary N.R.A. Videos Find New Critics: N.R.A. Leaders

The flash point was Thomas the Tank Engine.

Last September, the National Rifle Association’s famously combative spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, provoked widespread outrage when she took to the gun group’s streaming service to mock ethnic diversity on the popular children’s program “Thomas & Friends,” portraying the show’s talking trains in Ku Klux Klan hoods. Now, growing unease over the site’s inflammatory rhetoric, and whether it has strayed too far from the N.R.A.’s core gun-rights mission, has put its future in doubt.

The site, NRATV, is a central part of the organization’s messaging apparatus. Since its creation in 2016, it has adopted an increasingly apocalyptic, hard-right tone, warning of race wars, describing Barack Obama as a “fresh-faced flower-child president,” calling for a march on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and comparing journalists to rodents.

View the complete March 11 article by Danny Hakim on The New York Times website here.

‘Target practice’: Critics slam NRA’s headline next to Pelosi, Giffords photo in magazine

Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) escorts former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the U.S. Capitol. Credit: Ricky Carioti, The Washington Post

Next to a photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former Arizona lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords were the words “Target Practice.”

It was the headline of a story in the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman magazine, where the author, chief NRA lobbyist Chris W. Cox, criticized newly introduced bipartisan universal background-check legislation. But in the eyes of others, the headline and accompanying photo of Pelosi and Giffords, who was shot in the head in Tucson in 2011, said more than the article did.

Some claimed the headline was an intentional attempt to incite violence against the politicians.

View the complete February 25 article by Meagan Flynn on The Washington Post website here.

How gun control activists learned from the NRA

Democrats this week used the one-year anniversary of the deadly Parkland, Fla., high school shooting to advance legislation cracking down on access to firearms in states across the country.

Bills moved not in blue states, but in purple states like Nevada and New Mexico where Democrats hold newfound political power.

And on Capitol Hill the day before Thursday’s anniversary, a House committee approved a measure that would require background checks on firearm sales. Rep. Lucy McBath (D), the mother of a teenager killed by gun violence who represents a suburban swing district in deep-red Georgia, cast an emotional vote for the legislation.

View the complete February 16 article by Reid Wilson on The Hill website here.

NRA shows signs of decline, even in Trump’s America

<,em>Members of the Patriot Prayer Group sing the National Anthem during an “open carry” rally in Seattle on May 20. Credit: Karen Ducey, Getty Images)

But the group isn’t letting up on its adversarial and sometimes snarky tone

The influence of the National Rifle Association, the nation’s highest-profile Second Amendment-rights organization and a longtime powerhouse against gun-control laws, is showing signs of potential decline.

The NRA’s own tax forms show a dip in revenue. And even as the group, now under the leadership of new president Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, continues to spend big money on federal lobbying and political campaigns, its opponents in the gun-control movement, after decades of ever more deadly mass shootings and seemingly random incidents of gun violence, have been on the rise.

During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, gun-rights groups spent some $9.9 million on outside political efforts, nearly all of that from the NRA, while gun-control groups invested a record high of $11.9 million, according to a tabulation from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics

View the complete February 1 article by Kate Ackley on The Roll Call website here.

NRA Applauds Trump’s School Safety Report

Yesterday, the National Rifle Association praised Trump’s school safety report released in response to the Parkland school shooting. That’s all you really need to know.

The NRA applauded Trump’s school safety report.

New York Times: “Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the N.R.A.’s lobbying arm, applauded the report, in particular the commission’s conclusion on age limits on weapons purchases.”

Trump’s report played down the role of guns in school shootings.

New York Times: “Trump Administration Report on School Safety Plays Down Role of Guns”

Trump’s report doubled down on arming school personnel.

McClatchy: “President Donald Trump doubled down on recommendations to arm school personnel to stop mass shootings as students and parents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., site of a Valentine’s Day shooting, called for Americans to focus on steps they can agree on instead of political differences.” Continue reading “NRA Applauds Trump’s School Safety Report”

Admitted Russian spy bragged about connecting Trump campaign to Putin

Maria Butina, Credit: Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, PA-EFE, Shutterstock

Maria Butina pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent years after she openly bragged about it.

Admitted agent of the Russian government Maria Butina previously bragged about connecting Trump’s presidential campaign to Russia.

Butina pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to act as a foreign agent on behalf of the Russian government.

In her plea the Russian admitted she was part of a conspiracy against the United States.

View the complete December 13 article by Oliver Willis on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Russian agent’s guilty plea intensifies spotlight on relationship with NRA

Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina developed bonds with conservative leaders during the 2016 campaign – culminating in outreach to then-candidate Trump. (Bastien Inzaurralde, Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

The guilty plea Thursday of a woman accused of infiltrating the National Rifle Association on behalf of the Russian government has thrust the powerful conservative group into an uncomfortable spotlight as the organization appears to be facing declining donations and signs its fearsome political influence may be waning.

Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of Russia, admitting that she worked for more than two years to forge relationships with conservative activists and leading Republicans in the United States.

One of Butina’s main targets was the NRA — a group she identified in a 2015 memo as an organization that “had influence over” the Republican Party, according to court filings. Her relationships with the group, she wrote, could be used as the groundwork for an unofficial channel of communication to the next presidential administration.

View the complete December 13 article by Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Mchelle Ye Hee Lee on The Washington Post website here.

Alleged Russian agent Butina pleads guilty to engaging in conspiracy against US

Maria Butina, the 30-year-old Russian woman arrested and charged earlier this year with acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government in the U.S., pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court after previously entering a plea of not guilty.

Butina admitted in the District Court for the District of Columbia that she and an American, known in court documents as “U.S. Person 1,” conspired with and acted under the direction of a Russian government official to establish unofficial lines of communications with people able to influence U.S. politics leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik Kenerson said Butina sought to use those unofficial lines of communication for the benefit of the Russian Federation.

View the complete December 13 article by Lydia Wheeler on The Hill website here.