Republicans are scared of the NRA. They're scared of the Tea Party.
It's the reckless ideas put forward by the NRA's leadership, and pushed through by fearful legislators, that have allowed systemic gun violence to expand, wreaking havoc on communities of color for decades.
The spectacle of insensitivity that is the gun lobby and its outspoken, out-of-their-mind apparatchiks, is the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has allowed itself to become.
When the NRA is funding your campaign and giving you, you know, millions of dollars, are you likely to pass gun legislation or support it? No, and I think that's the reason why we see members of Congress refusing to do anything.
To have the National Rifle Association rule the United States of America is pathetic.
You can have 90% of the people for gun control, but the National Rifle Association will still prevailed. They go out and work harder.
Congress is in the grasp of the National Rifle Association and the religious right.
Why can't we get real, sane, sensible gun legislation? Because the NRA, funded by Mossberg, Smith & Wesson, Glock and all the rest of the big dogs in the weapons industry, you know, spread around donations and won't let it move through.
My belief is that guns are too easy to get in America. My belief is that the NRA has bought much of our congress, to the point that guns are actually the only unregulated consumer product in America. Think about that. It's stunning.
In Washington, officials from the National Rifle Association met with a group of high school students. There were no survivors.
It's just unbelievable to me that the National Rifle Association has so much power.
When politicians say your voice does not matter because the NRA owns them, we say, 'No more.'
By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences -- and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower.
The NRA has led the way in the mainstreaming of a demented gun ideology.
You never see a teaser for a film on television that doesn't have someone running around a corner with a gun. Have you noticed that?... I think Hollywood has as much responsibility for gun violence as the National Rifle Association.
I can't influence or impact where the NRA goes and spends money.
The Constitution has become a convenient tool and talking point for politicians that get paid by the NRA. The same goes for Americans who just love their guns, so suddenly they're Constitutional scholars who care about what our founding fathers allegedly wanted.
You almost have to be of a certain age to understand how hard it was to disseminate the truth before the Internet. After the formation of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action in 1975, we did it, and we did it well.
The fights I fought... cost a lot --the fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress. The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.
We do a lot of "capital I" important stories, but one I'd highlight is the work we've done on guns, not only for the acclaim it's gotten but also because it showcases all the different kinds formats we use. So we compiled a database of all the variables of all the mass shootings in America - work the government doesn't do, thanks to the NRA - which allowed us to surface patterns and make data visualizations of it.
