How Has the US Gun Lobby Been so Successful?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2016
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When President Obama wept at a recent press conference to announce action on gun control, his tears might have been born of frustration as well as sadness. Despite frequent mass-shootings, events which some might think would strengthen the case for tighter gun laws, it is difficult for any politician or party to change the rules on gun ownership in the US. One organisation is often credited with, or blamed for that - the National Rifle Association, or NRA.
This programme is not about the arguments over gun control but about the NRA itself. Few could dispute its success. Even if one allows for the possibility that it reflects the public mood, rather than shapes it, it has unquestionably changed the gun debate in Washington DC. So how has it done it? Former NRA insiders recall how the NRA was transformed from a hunting and marksmanship club into a political lobbying group in the 1970s, and the tactics it used from then on to influence Washington lawmakers by organising its huge grass roots base.
(Photo: US-Politics-Guns-NRA, Credit: Karen Bleier/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC World Service. I'm Michael Blasland with The Inquiry. |
| 0:07.0 | This week, how has the US gun lobby been so successful. A short story of two men and what they did when |
| 0:18.2 | terrorists shot dead 14 people in San Bernardino, California. |
| 0:24.0 | One is Barack Obama, President of the United States, |
| 0:28.0 | the other, Trevor Hughes, |
| 0:30.0 | Denver-based correspondent of USA Today. |
| 0:34.4 | Barack Obama wept on TV. |
| 0:37.0 | He listed mass shootings in his time as president, |
| 0:40.5 | committed himself to better gun control. |
| 0:43.0 | Trevor Hughes, a veteran reporter of many such atrocities, |
| 0:47.0 | also wrote of horror at San Bernardino, |
| 0:49.0 | and for the first time in his life, he said, bought a gun. The thriving gun culture in America strikes some as defying the logic of terrible events, but clearly not its supporters. They have their reasons too. They are no less passionate and they have |
| 1:05.6 | huge influence. This program is about that influence seeking neither to attack nor defend but |
| 1:12.4 | understand. |
| 1:13.3 | Hence this week's question, |
| 1:15.3 | when so many see it as the problem, |
| 1:17.4 | how has the US gun lobby been so successful? successful. Revolution in Cincinnati. |
| 1:35.0 | When I was five or six or seven, my mother for Christmas bought me a little cap distal and a cowboy hat and a pair of pretend cowboy boots. And my neighbor boyfriend, the guys around had the same thing and we'd get cap pistols where you'd put in and shoot. |
| 1:50.0 | Warren Cassidy is the retired executive vice president and chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, the NRA, the most influential voice in American gun culture founded in 1871. |
| 2:06.5 | He gave up a morning's trap shooting to tell us how it evolved from a club for marksman to what |
| 2:11.5 | is often called the most powerful lobby in Washington. |
| 2:15.2 | Up through the early, I'd say even the first half of the 20th century, NRA was known as a marksmanship organization also home for hunters and collectors and that I guess you would call that a benign organization. |
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