NRA's Purloined Pamphlet Seeks Support of Big Business

Yesterday's Washington Post offers confirmation of a bizarre, new--and apparently to this point undistributed--27-page National Rifle Association book, Freedom in Peril: Guarding the 2nd Amendment in the 21st Century. News of the heavily illustrated book, which according to the NRA is only a draft and was somehow purloined from the organization, was broken recently by Wonkette. With colorful artwork that straddles the ground between a graphic novel and a New Deal WPA mural, the publication dials the NRA's paranoia level up to 11. The usual villains--billionaire George Soros, pro-gun control celebrities, the United Nations, jack-booted government thugs, animal rights activists, and others--are rolled out and depicted in a manner more likely to be seen on a Drive-By-Truckers CD cover than a lobbyist's handout. They're joined by dark-skinned gangs of illegal immigrants throwing gang signs and the vultures, literally, of the news media. All that stands between the white nuclear family facing the tidal wave, once again, literally, of this "marching axis of adversaries," is, well, the NRA's ability to find its own pro-gun George Soros.

That's because, strangely enough, the book seems to be the NRA's opening entreaty to big business and a hoped-for rendezvous with its own deep-pocketed benefactor.

In detailing the "formidable confrontations" ahead, the NRA warns the presumed business leader, "Whether it's evident or not, these...[pro-gun battles]...are your fights, too. And NRA is the only guaranteed investment for Second Amendment survival, as well as for all the business benefits that come with it. Only the NRA energizes the powerful pro-freedom voting bloc, resulting in election outcomes good for both American gun rights and for American business. Candidates who support the Second Amendment also support you. They're typically pro-business people who fight for free-market issues, from tort and estate tax reform to immigration policy and the global war on terror....The Second Amendment needs freedom-loving financiers on her side, or she will be drowned in the tsunami of cash flowing from freedom's enemies."

The book's epilogue concludes that "victory can no longer be borne solely by the masses"--read NRA members and their annual membership dues of $25 to $35--and hopefully proclaims, "A handful of capable Americans can rise to meet this momentous occasion....Those Americans, we hope, are on the threshold of helping underwrite this mission."

With gun ownership in permanent decline, the NRA's desperate efforts to find its own cadre of deep-pocketed "financiers" who share their disturbed view of America isn't surprising. What would be most troubling would be to see them succeed.