No more allowing big-dollar anti-gun donors to live in the shadows
For far too long, anti-gun groups have been nothing more than snake-oil salesmen. They claim to speak for a vast army of grassroots citizens, but the reality is these groups astroturf. They aren’t rooted in anything more than anti-gun animus.
They’re also not nearly as down-to-earth with the people they claim to represent. They’re a high-price but cheap knockoff of the real thing. It’s fugazi grassroots.
No summertime plans? Attend Ohio firearm training and special events
NSSF has called them out in the past for their bought-and-paid-for activism. It’s time to do it again. Pull back the curtain and it’s easy to see that the anti-gun movement isn’t much more than a few billionaires and activist foundations pouring cash into their gun control pet projects — to the tune of over $400 million every year. It’s a willing media that goes right along with them, parroting half-truths and twisting narratives to demonize American gun owners and the firearm industry that serves them.
No more. Welcome to Gun Rights Insights.
Gun Rights Insights is a new outreach initiative, including periodic videos, to pull back the veil that these anti-gun billionaires creep around telling America to give up their Second Amendment rights while they enjoy paid armed security. The “rules-for-thee, not-for-me” era must come to an end. That’s why NSSF’s Gun Rights Insights will be making note of the gun control hypocrisy.
Anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg
Take for instance, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City Mayor has made it his life’s goal to eliminate Second Amendment rights across the nation, spending over $50 million to attack lawful firearm ownership. While mayor, he organized Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG). That group was discredited when they “honored” the terrorist and Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a “gun violence victim” in 2013. Add to that, several MAIG members have, ironically, been charged with firearms-related offenses.
Bloomberg, of course, is the financier of Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and funds their anti-gun media mouthpiece The Trace.
The Trace was seeded with funding tied to the gun control movement. The Trace claims to be “editorially independent,” but when a newsroom is funded by and built around a single political issue with the backing of major gun control activists, it’s fair — necessary, even — to scrutinize how it frames the facts. After all, The Trace is headed by John Feinblatt, who also heads Everytown for Gun Safety and once served as a senior advisor to Bloomberg when he was New York City’s mayor. Feinblatt is the principal officer listed on tax filings for The Trace. Everytown, of course, is a gun control organization that wants to see lawful firearm ownership eliminated in America.
To top it all off, The Trace admits that it has “more than a thousand readers who have stepped up to support financially.” The Trace reported they received over $6.3 million in 2024, according to the watchdog group InfluenceWatch. That means to make that budget work, each of those readers would have had to donated over $6,300. That’s not likely. The Trace’s own website states they make public all donors who give over $1,000 or more per year. The Trace does list over 60 donors and donating foundations that reads like a veritable “who’s who” of gun control supporters.
Soros family and foreign money
George Soros, and now his son Alex, are another source of deep pockets for anti-gun efforts. George Soros’s entities spent $9 million for lobbying efforts to attack Second Amendment rights, including fighting to allow frivolous lawsuits to clog the courts and attempt to bankrupt the firearm industry through a “legislation-through-litigation” strategy. Soros even worked with the Gun Action on Gun Violence, which assisted in the ill-fated and unfounded $10 billion lawsuit by Mexico against U.S. firearm manufacturers.
That doesn’t take into account the Hollywood celebrities who harangue gun owners and the firearm industry. They do this while they make movies and television shows featuring firearms, many times being used in irresponsible and illegal ways. And they do this while they enjoy armed bodyguards.
The time is past due to expose this astroturf effort for what it is. It’s a paper-thin effort to ostracize lawful firearm ownership, funded by wealthy elites who can afford their own armed security but want to deny Second Amendment rights to law-abiding Americans. Poking holes into that false narrative is what Gun Rights Insights aims to do.
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