By themselves, numbers are fairly meaningless – I could tell you that I have ten heffalumps, but is that a lot, a little, in the “who cares” category? Well, if I provided you the context that the national level of heffalump ownership was zero, ten suddenly seems like more than you might initially think.
So here is a little perspective for you – there are more people expected to attend the NRA Annual Meetings in Pittsburg (65,000) than there are “members” of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (50,581).
When your competing organization can have more people show up at a nation-wide conference than you have total membership (and note that second number is total historic membership – the Brady Bunch’s number of “active” members is just over half that), you may rest assured that your organization is slipping away into irrelevance… quickly.
That’s such a sad story!!
“But… but… look at all these MAIG polls!” sputters our favorite bespectacled hoplophobe.
And I wonder how many of those 50K are actual NRA members spying on the opposition.
However, there is a sad truth; those are the true believers in taking away our rights, while a good number of emotional and poorly informed voters will support their cause or wear their MAIG shirts because it seems like a “sensible” thing to do. That is why we have to continue to call them out on their lies and their inability to recognize the realities of living in a dangerous and unkind world. It is their choice to disarm themselves, but it is not for them to impose that on me. I choose not to be a victim. I choose to have the tools to protect my family. They can rely on 911.
Molon Labe!
I hesitate to marginalize any group that wants to restrict my liberties. History shows that those charging for more control have the advantage. They don’t rely on “members,” the true believers just need complacency from the majority. Something in abundance these days.
I hope we eventually get to a world where gun grabbers are bucketed with racists. At that point they will be truly impotent. Until then, I’ll continue to keep a watchful eye.
@ Tango Juliet: Could not happen to a better bunch, right?
@ alcade: Well, at least in this case, they did not buy-and-pay-for the poll themselves… only the study that crunched the numbers. Still, their money involved in the situation only further perverts whatever the conclusion may be.
@ Bob S.: All of those 50k were supposedly folks who gave money to the Bradies, but the gun-grabbers could have lied to the folks who purchased the mailing list from them. In fact, a little “inflatoin” would not surprise me at all.
@ Braden Lynch: You will find no disagreement from me on any of those points, believe you me… And that was entirely the reason for my writing this post – to point out to them that their imagined “support base” is not nearly as large as they might like it to be. Not that it matters – my rights exist no matter how many people say otherwise – but they seem to think it does.
@ aczarnowski: There is a reason this post was written to the Bradyites, and not to my regular readers – I was not encouraging my fellow pro-rights advocates to ignore the anti-rights cultists, but rather pointing out that those cultists are not nearly as numerous as they might like other people to believe.
So many of their arguments rely on public opinion, the support of a “silent majority”, and so many other “appeal to popularity” logical fallacies, it is good to occasionally point out that those fallacies are even more fallacious than they are on the surface.