You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries only. This is episode 122. I'm your host Thomas Smith and well, you've

seen the title of this episode so I suppose there's no sense in hiding it. Yes, I want to take away your guns. I have a lot of thoughts on this. I have a ton of thoughts that I think have already been expressed and I'm not going to bother with most of those want to take the time and waste your time and saying things that everyone's

already saying and in this case I think that was largely pointing out how absurd

thoughts and prayers are I mean we all that. Nobody here is seriously under the illusion that thoughts and prayers are the key, and everybody who sends thoughts and prayers every time and thinks that's the solution is most likely in the pocket of the NRA or they're just naive and

completely wrong but you know there I did I just said in the pocket of the NRA and

I actually just fell into a common misconception I believe because I'm looking at a

Washington Post article and there's other sources for this as well. Turns out the

NRA is not all that powerful. Well I should say it's not all that powerful.

Well, I should say it's not all that powerful money-wise.

It's not as though they are an open checkbook

for anyone who will defend their policies and anyone who won't defend their policies at least on the Republican side.

It's not as though they're just screwed.

I'm looking at the numbers here and according to the Washington Post since 1998, the NRA has donated 4.1 million to current members of Congress.

That's not a whole lot. Since 1998, 4.1 million. And that's all of Congress so you know if you figure

roughly on average half of Congress has been Republicans since that time that's

that's that's not much money to go around.

Say something like 300 people and 4.1 million dollars in almost 20 years?

It's not very much.

I've got another source here that puts it a bit of a humorous way which is the

NRA's lobbying budget is around three million dollars annually which is about a

15th of what say the National Association of Realtors spends and nobody really

talked that I know of talks about big National Association of Realtors and how much

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