It just amazes me that they go into court unprepared, lay observers say, "They're going to lose," a bunch of cheerleaders say, "They have a Secret Plan(tm)," they lose, and then the cheerleaders say, "But it's a Double Secret Probationary Plan(tm)! You'll see! Wink."
madmike, if you are referring to the DC lawsuit, then I am surprised that even you would expect the NRA to win at that level - especially given the judge they drew for the case. This same judge has made several favorable anti-gun rulings in the past.
The whole point behind a DC venue is that it gives you a shorter path to the Supreme Court. I think that it is premature to declare this a loss on the basis of a single lower court decision.
To put it another way, Silveria wasn't looked at as a loss by anybody in the RKBA community after it was denied several times prior to its appeal to the Supreme Court, which was also ultimately denied. If we are going to have a set of criteria to judge an organization's usefulness to the RKBA, don't you think that those should be applied evenly to all groups?
I'm looking at what it took to buy a gun last month, compared to when I was 18, which was only 1985, and it doesn't look to me as if we'll have guns at ALL in another 20 years.
And this is the NRAs fault how? As I recall, the NRA defeated the bill every session until 1994 when they were faced with a Democratic House, Senate and Executive. An executive who made gun control a priority along with a Democratic party that enforced party discipline on the vote. Blaming the NRA for the Brady Bill is like giving a gladiator a willow switch and then complaining when the guy with the shield and sword cuts him down.
Given the scenario they faced, where do you feel they failed? People commonly accuse the NRA of compromising our rights away without ever acknowledging the fact that the only time you can refuse compromise is when you are in a position of strength.
If one NRA member in a hundred filed a suit against Brady for defamation of character, libel or slander, or being ugly without a license, every case would lose, and it would cost them more budget than they have and they'd go away.
madmike, if such a strategy is a viable way to attack gun control, why do you think nobody has ever done it? It just never occured to them? Or maybe it isn't as viable a strategy as you think it is? I mean look how well it is working for the Brady Campaign... they've poured millions of donor dollars into unsuccessful lawsuits with no result other than to successfully pass laws making their efforts illegal.
I'm not asking you to "do my research for me." I'm asking you to give me a reason to believe these people are competent at anything except whining for $$$. Because they are not "Defending my rights." They aren't even in the building.
I can cite case after case and example after example of where the NRA defended your rights. Even on the narrow subject of JUST judicial activism (and not legislative, public awareness, etc.) I can think of four lawsuits of the top of my head that the NRA has sponsored - the FEC lawsuit (which does affect your gun rights), the DC lawsuit, the lawsuit repealing portions of the Brady Bill and the Halbrook lawsuit that killed the first Gun-Free School Zones bill.
Now I can accept that you don't feel they are doing ENOUGH to satisfy your apparently demanding standards. However when you claim that they are not doing anything, you have crossed the line from statement of opinion to a statement that is provably wrong.
However, rather than bash on you for the way you feel about the NRA, why don't we try this - you give me the OBJECTIVE criteria that you want from the RKBA group that deserves your money and we will sit down and research ALL the groups together to see which group best meets that criteria?
Point two: The Nazi Party went into court and demanded the right to march and protest. They won. I can't believe that the majority of judges involved were "biased" in favor of the Nazis. So when some whiner (and there's a lot of them) says that any judge who rules against us (and there's a lot of them) is "biased," it makes me laugh so hard I cry.
How many cases did they lose before they won? Also, what is the difference in extending to Nazis the right to march and air their minority views and invalidating most of the current laws controlling the sale and manufacture of firearms? Do you really feel this is an apt comparison to make?
We lose the cases because our presentation is incompetent. See Miller.
Who is the "we" in that sentence? Fellow bootleggers? The NRA was not involved in the Miller case at all, neither was any other RKBA group. Miller didn't even have counsel representing him at the appeal of that case and was personally on the lam in Arkansas when it was heard. So who is the "we" you refer to?
