The Corporations-Are-NOT-People banner stood out at the Sarasota March For Our Lives. Last Saturday, Sarasota students raised their collective voices to make preventing gun violence a high priority. How corporations have intervened in the gun debate is up for debate. Is the National Rifle Association (NRA) a big player in our state and national legislatures? And who provides the largest chunk of NRA funding - is it millions of individual members or a handful of gun manufacturers? The answers are more complex than you might think. To start with, there are six non-profits that make up the NRA. And it just gets more complicated from there.
The investigation into these questions led to one chart produced by Politifact that clearly shows the effect of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. Since that ruling, an exponentially increasing chunk of NRA spending has been in the form of outside and independent expenditures. Basically the NRA pours money into campaign attack ads to take down any legislators who don't tow the NRA-party line.
This breakdown was an eye-opener for many attending the March for Our Lives. Thank you to all who collected petitions during the March and to those who signed those petitions!
