NRA Raises $200 Million, Toaster Burns Logo on Bread and Going After Obama – Businessweek
By MB Snow at January 2, 2012 | 5:35 pm | Print
Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) — A toaster that burns the National Rifle Association’s logo onto bread fetched $650 at an auction last month, just one reflection of the money-making power in the gun group’s brand.
The NRA, which began as a grassroots organization dedicated to teaching marksmanship, enters the 2012 election season as a lobbying, merchandising and marketing machine that brings in more than $200 million a year and intends to help unseat the incumbent president. From 2004 to 2010, the group’s revenue from fundraising — including gifts from gun makers who benefit from its political activism — grew twice as fast as its income from members’ dues, according to NRA tax returns.
More than 50 firearms-related companies have given at least $14.8 million to the Fairfax, Virginia-based group, according to the NRA’s own list for a donor program that began in 2005. That same year, NRA lobbyists helped win passage of a federal law that limited liability claims against gun makers. Former NRA President Sandy Froman wrote that it “saved the American gun industry from bankruptcy.”
“Unlike organizations which start out controlled by industry and created by industry, like lobbying groups for coal or oil, they really started out as a grassroots organization and became an industry organization,” said William Vizzard, a former agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who’s now a professor of criminal justice at California State University in Sacramento. He studied the NRA for a 2000 book on gun policy.
Going After Obama
One of the group’s latest political objectives is to get President Barack Obama out of office next year, even as gun- control advocates express disappointment in his administration. Obama has done little to “confront the core weaknesses in our gun laws,” said Dennis Henigan, acting president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
via NRA Raises $200 Million as Gun Lobby Toasters Burn Logo on Bread – Businessweek.