Cut Through the Lies at the NRA Convention
May 3, 2018
As you watch the NRA’s 2018 annual meeting, here are the very best facts to cut through the gun lobby’s B.S. Please share this widely with your friends and family. Click here for graphics and visualizations of some of the tweets below.
Background Checks
Background checks do work. They’ve stopped 2.4 million sales and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Click to Tweet
Chicago
Guns flood into Chicago from states with weak laws, including the Vice Presidents’s home state of Indiana. 60% of guns used in crimes across Illinois came from out of state. Click to Tweet
College Campuses
The NRA says guns will make college campuses safer. The research says they actually make them *more* dangerous. Click to Tweet
Criminals Don't Follow Laws
Gun laws do work. 10 states with the WEAKEST gun laws have an aggregate level of gun violence that is more than 3x higher than the 10 states with the STRONGEST gun laws. Click to Tweet
States that require background checks for ALL handgun sales have lower rates of: intimate partner gun homicides of women; law enforcement officers killed with handguns; gun-related suicides. Click to Tweet
Existing Laws
75% of the weapons used in mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 were purchased legally. There is something very wrong with our existing gun laws. Click to Tweet
.@NRA pretends to support law enforcement, but has spent the last two years brutally attacking the @FBI for focusing on Russia's efforts to undermine our elections. Click to Tweet
.@NRA says it supports law enforcement, but its "guns everywhere" agenda constantly puts them at risk. 1/4 of police officers slain in the line of duty in 2016 were killed by an assault weapon. Click to Tweet
.@NRA sabotages law enforcement at every turn: it limits inspections of firearms dealers, forces destruction of background-check records, impedes prosecutions of illegal gun sales. The list goes on and on... Click to Tweet
Fear
The NRA uses fear to accomplish two goals: 1. Continue to fundraise off its members and grow its coffers, 2. Sell more guns for the gun industry. Click to Tweet
Freedom
I have the right to live free from gun violence. Click to Tweet
My freedom doesn’t need a gun. Click to Tweet
Good Guy with a Gun
An FBI study of 160 active shooting incidents found that: 21 active shooters stopped by UNARMED civilians, 1 stopped by an ARMED civilian. Click to Tweet
Gun Owners
The overwhelming majority of gun owners actually reject the NRA’s extremist agenda and believe that guns should be significantly harder to get.
Gun Ownership
The NRA won’t tell you this, but gun ownership is declining. Number of American households w/ guns has fallen 19 percentage points from 50% in 1977 to 31% in 2014. Guns are concentrated in the hands of fewer people & NRA is helping gun makers find new markets. Click to Tweet
Gun-Free Zones
Of the 156 mass shootings from 2009 to 2016, only 10% occurred in “gun-free zones.” The overwhelming majority occurred in private homes. Click to Tweet
Guns are Deadly
More Americans have died from guns in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history. Click to Tweet
Domestic assaults that involve firearms are 3x more likely to result in death than knives. Click to Tweet
The NRA will never tell you this, but we have more public mass shootings in America than in any other country in the world. Click to Tweet
The gun murder rate in the U.S. is 25x higher than in our peer nations. Click to Tweet
Hate, Guns, and the NRA
Dana Loesch refuses to recognize the identity of trans people, saying, “I’m not going to suddenly pretend that this individual who is pretending to be a woman is a part of my sisterhood.” Click to Tweet
NRA head Wayne LaPierre has called President Obama a “demographically symbolic president.” Click to Tweet
In defending Trump’s Muslim ban, NRATV host Grant Stinchfield claimed “all radicalized terrorists are Muslims.” Click to Tweet
NRATV host Bill Whittle criticized Black Lives Matter for focusing on police brutality instead of black-on-black homicide and claimed “90 percent or more of the racial problems that we have in this country are manufactured by the left." Click to Tweet
The Media
The NRA portrays itself and its members as victims under constant attack by the press, liberals, and Hollywood elites. In reality, the NRA is *incredibly powerful.* It takes in $300M in revenue every year & pays its chief executive over $1M per year. Click to Tweet
Mental Health
FACT: Only 5% of violence is attributable to mental illness. Click to Tweet
People with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence (they are 5x more likely to die by homicide than the general population & 2x as likely to die from suicide) than the perpetrators of violence. Click to Tweet
More Guns, More Crime
More guns = more crime. A 2017 Stanford University study found that states with loose concealed carry laws experience 13%-15% increase in crime. Click to Tweet
FACT: States with higher levels of gun ownership experience a gun murder rate that’s up to 114% higher than states with low levels of gun ownership. Click to Tweet
The NRA's Power
Since the shooting in Parkland, 7 states have passed new restrictions on guns and public support for gun measures is at all-time highs. Click to Tweet
The NRA's Racism
Former @NRA head Harlon Carter waged an “all-out war to hurl… Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico” as head of Border Patrol in 1954 and tried to use U.S. military to remove undocumented immigrants in “Operation Wetback." Click to Tweet
.@NRA head LaPierre called Obama a "demographically symbolic president" in 2015. Click to Tweet
NRATV hired commentator Bill Whittle who promoted discredited theories about black people being less intelligent and claimed African Americans commit voter fraud on behalf of Democrats as a condition of ongoing slavery. Click to Tweet
Long-serving @NRA board member Ted Nugent devoted an entire 2015 column to praising the word “nigger,” including its use as a racial slur. Click to Tweet
Long-serving @NRA board member Ted Nugent called Trayvon Martin a "dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe.” Click to Tweet
Their Russian Ties
The NRA is under investigation for secretly funneling Russian money to support the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. Click to Tweet
The Second Amendment
To the Founding Fathers, #2a was about citizens’ civic duty to defend their communities within the confines of a *militia.* Click to Tweet
FACT: If you search the phrase “right to bear arms” in the Congressional Record of the time period, you won’t find a single mention outside of the context of the military. Searching a database of all the writings and papers of the Founding Fathers reveals that “right to bear arms” only referred to the formation of militias. Click to Tweet
Self-Defense
Guns are used far more often in criminal homicides than in justifiable acts of self-defense. In 2014, for every self-defense gun homicide in the United States, guns were used in *34 criminal homicides.* Click to Tweet
Guns are nearly 2x as likely to be stolen than to be used for self-defense. Click to Tweet
A gun in the home doubles your risk of homicide, and triples your risk of suicide. Click to Tweet
For every 1 justifiable gun homicide in 2012, America experienced 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and 2 accidental gun deaths. Click to Tweet
Video Games
An analysis of video game expenditures & violent crime rates in 10 industrial nations and found no relationship between increased video game playing and increased real-world killing. Click to Tweet
Women
The presence of a gun in a home with a history of domestic violence increases the risk that a woman will be killed by 500%. Click to Tweet
.@NRA has repeatedly defended Trump against detailed allegations of sexual assault and harassment. Click to Tweet
FACT: Women are 5X more likely to be killed if their abuser has access to a gun. Click to Tweet
Youth and Guns
U.S. children are far more likely to die from a gun accident. Click to Tweet
Gun violence has surpassed motor vehicle accidents as a leading killer of young people in U.S. Click to Tweet
A young person is shot & killed by a police officer in the United States almost every day. Click to Tweet
Out of the young people being shot by police officers, 34% were African Americans among which at least 40 were unarmed. Click to Tweet
African Americans between the ages of 15 and 29 are 18x more likely than their white peers to be the victim of a gun homicide. Click to Tweet
While African Americans accounted for 15% of the population of young people in this age range, they comprise 64 percent of gun homicide victims. Click to Tweet
From 2006 to 2015, the rate of domestic violence gun homicides of young women was 30 percent higher than for women of all ages. Click to Tweet
American teenagers are 82x more likely to die from a gun homicide than their international peers. Click to Tweet
One experiment found that a full 1/3 of 8-to-12 year old boys who came across a handgun actually pull the trigger -- despite being counseled about how to safely behave around guns. Click to Tweet
This document was compiled by Guns Down and The Center for American Progress.