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6 reasons why President Obama will defeat the NRA and win universal background checks

Something is going to happen this session in the US Congress that hasn’t happened in more than a decade: The National Rifle Association (NRA) is going to lose on a top priority issue. Here are six reasons why President Obama will win a victory on universal background checks.

2. NRA isn’t as scary anymore

The narrative of 1994’s Republican takeover of both houses of Congress was accompanied by the loud victory crowing of the NRA. Similarly, in 2000, when Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee, few questioned the NRA’s assertion that gun politics had a lot to do with it. But lately? If there are any scalps on the wall of the NRA lately, they are at the state level or lower. In the 2012 Indiana Republican primary, the NRA supported Richard Mourdock in his race against Sen. Richard Lugar, but analysts aren’t crediting the NRA for Mr. Lugar’s defeat. And Mr. Mourdock then went on to lose to Democrat Joe Donnelly in the November general election.

What about the tons of money the NRA deploys for lobbying? An independent group, Open Secrets, ranked them 176th in lobbying expenditures among Washington players in 2012. And another analysis by the Sunlight Foundation showed that only .83 percent of all the money the NRA spent on federal campaigns went to winning candidates. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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