I'm not the NRA, but that bubba over there is

Something that's been bugging me: the use of the phrase "gun lobby" in news stories by NPR, the New York Times, and other supposedly objective major news orgs. Now, the NRA is psychotically paranoid about government gun-grabbers, but the fact is, it's a grassroots organization funded mainly by individual gun owners. It is not some astroturf industry front; gun companies are not particularly profitable, (several of them have gone through or flirted with bankruptcy recently), and they don't provide the bulk of its lobbying funds. You wouldn't find anyone referring to the Sierra Club as the "tree lobby," but the organizations' funding and methods are similar.

The standard journalistic technique in reporting the supposedly unwarranted power of the gun lobby is to compare the results of a poll with the actual fate of legislation. But that ignores the fact that those opposed to gun legislation (nutball gun owners, mainly) care a lot more about it than the people randomly badgered by a poll-taker. Gun nuts will give money to get guys beat in an election, which is the particularly electrical stimulus that makes the congressional dead frog twitch.

You get a large enough bunch of mad mothers up there lobbying for gun laws, they're gonna pass, Charlton Heston be damned. See MADD, the temperance movement, et al. Unfortunately for Handgun Control, the class of women who tend to drive those movements, stay-at-home, middle-class soccer moms, are somewhat split on whether guns are a) evil child-killers or b) something to keep in the minivan glovebox to shoot muggers with.

The current method of debating gun laws -- used by pro-gun control politicians, and abetted by generally anti-gun journalists -- is to stigmatize NRA lobbyists as somehow special. That's OK for politicians -- this ain't beanbag -- but it's hardly objective journalism. That hurts the credibility of the journalists, who are claiming to be objective, in turn hurting the efforts of gun control advocates who need good journalism to use in bolstering their arguments.