Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy article in the April 12, 2012 issue of the NewYorker magazine.  The facts below look like something I’ve posted before, but they stand out as an important part of the strange incongruity of our national discussion about guns. 

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American.…The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five. 

However, this minority of gun owners seems to have disproportionate power.  I says seems because it looks to me like the NRA is the group with the power—that is, they’re the group with the money.  And, according to Walter Hickey of Business Insider, “The bulk of the group’s money now comes in the form of contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources.”  Hickey goes on to say, 

There are two reasons for the industry support for the NRA. The first is that the organization develops and maintains a market for their products.  The second, less direct function, is to absorb criticism in the event of PR crises for the gun industry. 

This sounds like a great deal for the gun industry, a strange and possibly compromising arrangement for the NRA, and a set of handcuffs for politicians worried that the NRA will spoil their chances for re-election.