Is the NRA deliberately a provocateur?

I leveled this charge in this thread discussing the recently revealed NRA enemies list. I said the NRA is doing and saying utterly outrageous things to make itself a lightning rod. In doing so, it provides cover for the arms industry that provides the bulk of the NRA’s funding, and for whom the NRA really works. The organization may have had a goal of representing the interests of hunters and shooting enthusiasts at one time, but times have changed.

Can you even imagine Congressional hearings where the CEOs of the nation’s major arms industries are called to testify? It’s always Wayne LaPierre there to take the heat—indeed to draw heat and fire by constantly talking more crazy. In doing so, he serves as a heat shield for the industry the NRA acts as a trade lobbying group for.

A crazy, paranoid NRA also helps the industry’s marketing efforts. In the past, the number of homes with a gun was slowly on the rise in the USA. Industry expansion and profit growth just required that the gun industry paint a compelling picture that safety requires that every home owner have a gun. But statistics show just the opposite. People living in households with a gun are far more likely to die in their homes in gun violence than those without a gun are to die at home due to all kinds of violence combined. Having a gun does not make you safer, it makes you more vulnerable, and more and more people are catching on to that.

So today, the number of US households with a gun is slowly decreasing. But the total number of guns in America is rising dramatically. Industry expansion is increasingly driven by selling more and more guns to an ever shrinking number of extremely paranoid, frightened people. It is driven by convincing such paranoids that their own government is there worst enemy, that the UN has a secret army and magical black helicopters swarm from its New York headquarters nightly, using beyond state-of-the-art sensors to sweep the land for the gun owners. That FEMA is building a nationwide network of reeducation camps to turn us all into communist minions of the New World Order that the Illuminati or the Builderburgers or some such are behind. If the International terrorists don’t get you, then the “Jack Booted Thugs” you thought were going to protect you from terrorists will. Or perhaps global warming is real, and any day we will descend into a gang-ruled dystopia that is a bad blend of Mad Max and Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. The only hope is to amass a mountain of guns and ammo, and build a secret underground bunker fully stocked with MREs, weapons, ammo and a tin foil shield to render the sensors on the black helicopters useless.

Read La Pierre and tell me if you think I’m wrong.