You are very adept at skipping the meat of what other people are saying and using your hot words and cartoonishly extreme rhetoric to stir up emotion to cloud people's rational judgment. I know that's a powerful political tool, but using it here is not appreciated.
What are the bad effects?
4) We look paranoid and more than a little looney to the (uh...probably about 300 million) folks who aren't ever going to buy the theory that George Soros is hiring killers to incite riots as part of his master plan to take our guns and destroy the USA.
Hmmm, the NRA points out that the same people financing political violence are financing invidiously racist gun control activism.
That's about as as "paranoid" as drawing a connection between NAMBLA and child molestation.
I didn't say there wasn't some grain of potential truth to that. I said it makes us LOOK paranoid and looney to the vast majority of people who aren't going to ever believe or much care about the fact that one guy or one set of guys may be putting money toward two different leftist social issues. We come out as conspiracy kooks, when there's no value to us in getting wrapped up in this.
5) We reinforce beyond a shadow of a doubt that we DO NOT and NEVER will accept anyone who sympathizes with BLM, or more socialist fiscal policies, or gay marriage, or whatever else it is we're railing against. We tell half the country that if they care about gun rights and want to work together to fight for them they have to abandon, ignore, and even pay money to an organization that opposes lots of non-gun-control issues they really care about.
I'm Black and don't have one iota of trust for the police and will NEVER accept anyone who sympathizes with Black Lies Matter. That's precisely because Black Lies Matter is EVERY bit as self-servingly dishonest as any police union. Their support for the LIE that Michael Brown was a victim of anything besides his own malice and stupidity, is every bit as despicable as police unions' support for the cop who assaulted James Blake and the cop who shot Charles Kinsey.
ONCE MORE: Great. YOU don't have to trust anyone or accept anyone who does anything, anywhere, ever. That's your business.
What the NRA should spend money, time, and political capital making public statements about is a whole other matter. It really doesn't matter whether YOU don't make nice with your neighbor who thinks BLM raises some important points and considers justice system reform to be worth voting for. But it DOES matter if the NRA comes out and makes it clear that your neighbor -- who never smashed anybody with anything and who just doesn't think it's right that our demographics relating to incarceration and violent encounters with law enforcement look as they do -- is not welcome in our fight for gun rights.
A Somali jihadi ran over and slashed people at Ohio State not so long ago. What was the response of a member of the "resistance" at Ohio State? A condemnation of the shooting of the wouldbe Nidal Hassan and a declaration that "Black [islamist, terrorist] lives matter!" THAT is to whom you think the NRA should be pandering.
Sigh. Yes, of course. I think the NRA should pander to the extremists who would do that. It would be easier to discuss things with you in a serious manner if you didn't leap to absurd hyperbole about ... well, everything really. It isn't a very honest form of debate, nor very mature.
You really don't get how national issues work. The NRA doesn't need to agree or endorse any of that behavior. But it also has no need to further alienate the millions and millions of Americans who -- while they certainly wouldn't hurt anyone else, and personally believe that people who assault others even at political protests should be punished -- feel these issues need serious consideration.
The NRA needs to be the nation's most eminent GUN RIGHTS organization. It has no business being "Anti-BLM Association." No more than it should be the "Anti-Gay-Marriage Association." Or the "Anti-ObamaCare Association."
I don't need or want the support of idiots, liars and racists (not to mention raving Jew haters), on EITHER side of the political spectrum.
No. Well, not exactly, anyway, but we DO need the support of as many millions of utterly peaceable average citizens on both sides of the political aisle. And the more social issues the NRA picks a side on and makes public statements about -- the more it self-identifies with the "FORs" or "AGAINSTs" in any non-gun-related hot button issue -- the more of those average citizens say, "Nope. That group's not for me."
And that's too bad. Because these issues -- all of them, social justice, gay rights, abortion, science-v-religion as political policy guide, interventionism-vs-isolationism, public healthcare and insurance, etc. -- will eventually find new norms. They'll be sorted out, just as slavery, universal suffrage, the gold standard, imperialism, and many other very vitriolically contested issues have been over the last couple of centuries. The country will move far beyond those fights and the people who struggled (in marches, at the polls, in their own minds trying to decide what was right) on both sides of the issues will move on and live their lives. And if the NRA has set itself as their enemy, then the NRA isn't ever going to be seen as on their side, or a worthy cause to join in the decades that will follow.