I get one or more "urgent" pitches from the NRA every week. Multiply that by three NRA members in the KintlaLake household and it's easy to see why our shredder is holding out for overtime pay.
I support the work that the NRA does in defense of our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and once or twice I've supplemented my annual dues with a contribution. Having worked for a non-profit membership organization myself, I understand the importance of soliciting "voluntary" donations, but the NRA is verging on postal overload.The organization recently added a telephone campaign to its fundraising strategy. Last night, I finally quit ignoring the "NRA" caller ID that's been appearing on my phone for the last couple of months.
With practiced cordiality, a woman's voice asked me if I had time for a recorded message from NRA Executive VP Wayne LaPierre. After listening to Mr. LaPierre preach a one-minute sermon to my personal choir, a live human returned to the line, this time a male voice. Our exchange went like this:
Apparently that wasn't what he expected, because an awkward silence followed. I swear I could hear him flipping through his script, looking for a place to resume his pitch."Mr. KintlaLake, are you proud to be a gun owner?"
"Yes, absolutely."
"Good. Mr. KintlaLake, did it offend you when Barack Obama said that the only reason you own a gun is because you're bitter?"
"No, not at all."
The rest of the conversation consisted of him offering me a commemorative Charlton Heston knife, in return for a donation, and me politely declining -- three times.
I didn't play well with the NRA script because I know what Sen. Obama actually said back in April:
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."Typical of Sen. Obama, it was a sharp intellectual observation on the psychology and sociology of abandonment -- and it was a colossally dumb thing for a candidate to say in the middle of a campaign for President.
I believe that an Obama-Biden administration would pose serious threats to my Second Amendment rights. The fact remains, however, that Sen. Obama didn't say what the disembodied NRA voice claimed he said.
I'll continue to support the NRA and its mission, but I don't need to be misled in order to do so -- disinformation, in fact, only feeds my natural skepticism. All last night's call really accomplished was to further heighten my scrutiny of the NRA's pitches.
I don't think that's what the organization had in mind.
