For the lawmakers of the Grand Ole Party, particularly those in Washington, there are a number of special interests that hold significant sway over the platform on which the party runs and the votes in which the members cast. The ever popular fossil fuel industry nears the top of this list and can be closely followed up by those who call for financial deregulation. But there is one group in particular that gets the juices flowing through the blood of every Republican lawmaker, the NRA.
To say that the NRA has a stranglehold of the GOP could be considered the understatement of the century. Just recently, Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, stated he couldn’t imagine that Republicans in the Senate would approve of any Supreme Court nominee who was not approved by the NRA.
Just let that sink in, the most powerful member of the United States Senate literally admitting that his party would not move forward on hearings for nominee to the highest court in the land unless the most powerful special interest group in Washington approves of them.
What’s perhaps most remarkable is how out of touch the board of the NRA is with the actual members of the group. As recently as two weeks ago, Politifact backed up the claim that 74% of NRA members are in favor of expanded universal background checks. Listening to the board of the NRA, this is akin to Nazi Germany rounding up the guns of the nations citizens. In fact, the groups website makes direct connections between this and the fact that Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and Stalin all took away guns.
So why does it matter that the NRA holds a stranglehold over an entire political party?
Well, as it turns out, GOP lawmakers may love guns, but they love them a whole lot more when they are far away from where they work and unable to harm them. In the wake of Sandy Hook, 18 states took measures to expand where it was legal to carry a gun. However, only four of those states, Texas, Mississippi, Idaho and Utah, allow guns on state house grounds. If the argument is that more people carrying guns make our society safer, why wouldn’t that apply to the state house at which the lawmakers work?
For example, Georgia passed a bill that was since dubbed the “guns everywhere” law, everywhere except the Georgia state house that is.
But once again, why? How does this amount to anything more than another hypocritical stance worth a nonchalant sigh and eye roll?
Well, because this fight between carrying guns and lawmakers seeking to protect where they work is coming to head on the national scale. Last week, Americans for Responsible Open Carry circulated a petition to allow open carry at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Guns were banned at the 2012 GOP Convention in Florida, but gun rights groups are stepping up the pressure this year to ensure that the party beholden to the NRA keeps its commitment to open carry, even in the presence of lawmakers who oppose those laws when it comes to their workplace. The petition circulated set a goal of 5,000 signatures on the first day. It reached it, easily, and by the second day had more than 20,000.
A major concern the party must be having, even as they typically stand in lockstep with the NRA, is the fact that Republican front-runner Donald Trumps rallies have been among the most violent we’ve seen in the modern political history of this country. Factor in the fact that Trump may be heading into a convention under the delegate threshold with an entire party trying to steal his potential nomination and you have a recipe for a disaster the scale of Chicago 1968. The only difference is, this time everybody may be packing heat.
Featured Image Via Wikipedia, under Creative Commons license
