Recently, I wrote about the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) falsely claiming that Delegate Chris Head is pro-gun control. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Chris has the NRA endorsement and has high ratings on his record from the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
Shortly after that article was published, I started to receive phone calls and emails from around the state. Unfortunately, I discovered that Chris was not the only pro-gun candidate to be attacked with these false mailers. The following candidates and their staff have confirmed with Bearing Drift that similar mailers were sent out in their districts:
House of Delegates:
Delegate Chris Head
State Senate:
Senator Emment Hanger
Former Delegate Bill Janis
Today, the Virginia National Rifle Association blog posted a piece asserting that the Janis attack mailer is completely false:
“When you click on the graphic of the mailer you will note that the three proposals Janis supposedly refuses to oppose are questions that were on a questionnaire the NAGR claims to have sent to Janis and that they claim he failed to answer. In reality, a quick phone conversation with Janis revealed that he did not even receive the NAGR questionnaire until Tuesday, May 26 by certified mail. The hit piece landed in mail boxes about the same time meaning NAGR never planned to wait for a response before dropping this trash in voters mail boxes.”
I, too, spoke with Delegate Janis’ campaign manager and he confirmed that Bill Janis did not receive the survey until May 26. This was no accident. The Janis campaign agreed to exclusively give us a copy of the NAGR survey letter:
The NAGR asks for the survey to be returned by May 1st of 2015. Fair enough, except the NAGR cheated. The Janis campaign has also shared with us the tracking info for the survey, along with the postmarked envelope:
The post mark date is May 19th, 2015. This means that the letter didn’t even make it to the post office until 19 days after the survey was due. A delay of this extent cannot be an honest mistake. This wasn’t a simple oversight by a staffer not paying attention! After all, this is 2015. Who only uses snail mail to send a candidate survey anymore? There is this fancy smancy invention called the Internet, and this company called Google has this thing called GMail, and it lets you send documents all over the world in a matter of seconds!
The NAGR blatantly sent the survey 19 days late, and then dropped the mail piece last Saturday May, 23rd 2015. If you look at the tracking info, the Post Office didn’t even to attempt to deliver the survey until Tuesday, May 26th. No one takes the time to attach a tracking number to their letter only to completely ignore the progress of that letter’s delivery.
This means the NAGR purposefully sent the mail piece late to make it look like Janis never took the survey. This dirty political trick is low brow cheap politics in its truest form.
But this cheap campaign trick is something to expect from the NAGR. The NAGR has posted negative and false Facebook posts about the following elected officials in Virginia:
Speaker Bill Howell
Delegate Mark Dudenhefer
Delegate Chris Head
Former Delegate Bill Janis
Senator John Cosgrove
Senator Emment Hanger
What do all of these gentlemen have in common? They were all endorsed by the National Rifle Association for the June 9th primary. These smear campaigns are not about Virginia, nor any of these elected officials.
These attacks are about the NAGR’s all-out turf war with the NRA!
This turf war has been going on for a while. On the NAGR website, they go out of their way to explain how “terrible” the NRA is and how the NAGR is better:
“The National Association for Gun Rights and the NRA are both gun rights organizations, but the similarities end there. NAGR has grown in recent years because hundreds of thousands of gun rights activists across the country are tired of the “inside the beltway” institutional gun lobby. There has been a perception that the institutional gun lobby is more interested in having access to politicians and “getting something done.” NAGR does not want “access” to politicians, though we have friends that are elected officials, and certainly does not want to pass a gun bill “just to get something done.”
So, as you can see, there a number of differences between the two organizations. We believe in absolutely 100% NO COMPROMISE. Gun activists across the nation have gravitated toward that message, making NAGR the fastest-growing gun rights organization in the country.”
Newsmax had covered the difference between the NRA and the NAGR last year.
The NAGR’s sole reason for existence is to be the far right wing gun group that hates the NRA. When I get approached by a 2nd Amendment organization looking for support, my first question has become ‘how much of their time and energy do they spend bashing the NRA?’ Well, NAGR is pretty much top dog at that. Dudley Brown’s main focus appears to be nipping at the NRA’s heels,” one commenter on a forum discussing the two organizations wrote in 2008, “It’s somewhat ironic that I can’t recall them scoring a single successful lawsuit or piece of legislation. They just yell.”
The NAGR is desperate for attention and money. The NAGR doesn’t bother to look at the records of the politicians they endorse, they just pick the NRA’s candidate and oppose them.
Myself personally, I am a PROUD member of the National Rifle Association. My parents are lifetime members, and I am saving to get my lifetime membership myself. There is no better organization to be involved with than the NRA. They advocate for gun education, gun safety, and work with elected officials on positive gun rights legislation. I like the fact the NRA focuses on gun education and gun safety just as much as they lobby the federal and state governments.
Also, the fact the NRA is “inside the beltway” is a positive thing. Would you rather be a member of a prestigious gun lobby that can help educate legislators, or a nuisance of an organization that doesn’t help get pro-gun officials elected? The NRA has defended more pro-gun legislators and defeated more gun grabbing liberals than the NAGR could ever dream of.
It’s time for Virginians to realize, the NAGR does not speak for gun owners in Virginia. The fact that they are based in Colorado is evidence enough. They are an outside agitation group that uses Alinskyite tactics to try to demoralize NRA supporters and destroy the candidacies of NRA affiliated elected officials. I would never support a fringe group like the NAGR, or any group like it. They agitate gun owners just to advance their extreme agenda and line their own pockets.
So to the multiple candidates who got falsely smeared by the NAGR, don’t worry about it. It’s not like the group actually cares about the Commonwealth’s gun owners. Their claims are so off-base that anyone familiar with these candidates will know the truth.
