Press a No-show At NAGR Press Conference

An organization calling itself the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) held what was supposed to be a press conference this morning but the press was a no-show.  There were four people plus six NAGR staff in attendance.  They introduced an ad targeting House Majority Leader and Richmond area Congressman Eric Cantor. The group said they spent approximately $26,000 to air the ad on the four local Richmond TV stations.

All of the news stories cited in the ad are stories where Cantor has said we should enhance the information in current databases and uses Virginia as a model for such enhancements.  The head of the organization said if we create a new database (he did not mention that Cantor has only said he supports enhancing the existing database) then vets with PTSD would be prevented from ever owning firearms, and that NRA supports these efforts.  He also sited some study that said at some point in time 46% of Americans would seek mental health services and that would prevent them from every owning a firearm under the proposal that Cantor supports. The ad says Cantor supports "Key Parts of Obama Gun Control."  That simply is not true.

The NRA was on the front lines protecting the rights of veterans in 2007 when Congress passed the NICS Improvement Act (President Bush signed it into law in 2008).  One of the protections in that act was a provision that, according to NRA-ILA:

• Prevents use of federal “adjudications” that consist only of medical diagnoses without findings that the people involved are dangerous or mentally incompetent. This would ensure that purely medical records are never used in NICS. Gun ownership rights would only be lost as a result of a finding that the person is a danger to themselves or others, or lacks the capacity to manage his own affairs.

The NICS Improvement Act provides other protections as well.  Cantor has not proposed removing any of these protections, only ensuring that states are reporting the information that was intended in the NICS Improvement Act. So it would appear that NAGR is fishing for red herring.

NAGR is also planning a lit drop in Richmond on Saturday targeting Cantor.

NAGR claims to have 84,000 members in Virginia and says it has "2.5 million members and supporters" (emphasis added) nationally.

You can see the misleading ad below.  You can see Cantor's long record of supporting the rights of gun owners here.