The NRA Is Losing Its Grip on Power
No sooner had the toll from the latest mass shooting been tallied than came the world-weary predictions that the carnage would have zero political effect. "Why the Gun Debate Won’t Change After the Oregon Shooting," read the headline at The Fix, the Washington Post's political blog.
Without doubt, the gun rights lobby is a formidable force. It is backed by a truly grassroots network of committed and well-organized supporters who are willing to make calls to legislators and turn out in even low-turnout elections to back pro-gun candidates. This "intensity gap" bedevils gun control groups, which, however well some of their proposals poll, have trouble getting voters to agitate and to prioritize the gun issue the way gun rights defenders do.
But the invincibility of the gun lobby is being overstated. For one thing, gun ownership is becoming more concentrated in a smaller share of the population, one that is increasingly clustered in certain regions, thus limiting the lobby's political reach.
For another thing, the big recent defeat for the gun control movement, the 2013 failure to pass universal background checks for gun purchases, was a close call. Six senators with A-ratings from the NRA voted for the bill; it fell just five short of the filibuster-proof 60. Had it passed the Senate, there would have been great pressure from the Sandy Hook families to bring it up for a vote in the House, and it would have needed only about 20 Republicans to pass.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/propublica-gun-lobby-nra-losing-power
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