This Is How the NRA Lies to Gun Owners About Obama’s Agenda
The NRA takes a page from the Republican leadership — use highly slanted push polls push polls to get the answers you wanted before you came up with the questions.
The National Rifle Association, which thwarted new background check legislation in Congress, recently mailed a “survey” to gun owners with 12 questions related to gun rights, gun laws, and politics. I use scare quotes above because this NRA document (read it here) is a deeply misleading push poll, not an actual survey—and it lies about President Barack Obama’s positions on gun control.
The survey, provided to Mother Jones by a reader, claims that “President Obama has supported a national gun registration system allowing federal government officials to keep track of all your firearm purchases.” This is an all-too-common NRA talking point. NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre echoed it in January, saying that Obama “wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry.”
That’s not true.
Federal law has long banned a national gun registry. And the recent gun control bill that died in Congress, which was cosponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and fully supported by Obama, did not create a national gun registry. In fact, the bill expressly prohibited such a registry. Obama emphasized this point repeatedly, and award-winning mainstream media fact-checkers backed him up.
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