Gun owners look beyond the NRA for representation

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Gun owners look beyond the NRA for representation

By LISA MARIE PANE
September 1, 2019

Bob Mokos is a passionate gun owner who on the surface would seem like a card-carrying National Rifle Association member.

The retired airline pilot has been shooting guns since he was a child. The Vietnam veteran got more serious about firearms as a civilian after one of his sisters was fatally shot during a mugging in Chicago. After the 9/11 terror attacks, he became qualified to carry a gun in the cockpit.

But Mokos has grown so disillusioned with the NRA over the years that he has joined forces with a rival organization — the gun control group founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

“The more gun owners I contacted, the more I found out that everybody is thinking the same thing: The NRA does not speak for us,” said Mokos, who was a founder of the Minnesota Gun Owners for Safety.

As the 2020 presidential campaign draws closer, gun control groups are seizing on the turmoil engulfing the NRA — as well as recent high profile shootings in Gilroy, California; El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio, and this weekend’s in Odessa and Midland, Texas — to court firearms owners in hopes of persuading them that there can be bipartisan solutions to gun violence that don’t infringe on their Second Amendment rights.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/8fa7060adaef4eae9c0a4dcb7f6782d6

[keithbvadu2]

1. NRAsolicitations

NRAsolicitations
comment from a blog (DU I think)

I had a coworker who was a big time gun owner who kept a gun in every room in the house just in case someone broke in (lots of problems with that idea, may be worth a blog article someday, but that’s what he did). He even went so far as to start buying more guns for each room after a school shooting, like home invasion and mass shooting are correlated somehow. He had let his NRA membership lapse and refused to renew it because he got tired of nonstop requests for donations. To him all the membership did was give the NRA to badger him for more money with phone calls, and direct mailings. If the
organization is as strapped for cash as it appears, those solicitations may have gone way over the top and people are simply tired of being badgered for money and are choosing to let their membership to lapse.