Photo: Fredrik Brodén

Difficile d’imaginer un contexte plus favorable. Un président facilement réélu. une tragédie (Newtown), qui a coûté la vie à 20 enfants, en décembre, sous les balles d’un fou surarmé. Un attentat cette semaine à Boston. Une opinion majoritairement acquise désormais à un contrôle plus strict des armes. Et pourtant, le Sénat américain vient de bloquer le cœur de la réforme sur le contrôle des armes.

Depuis sa naissance, la National Rifle Association (NRA) qui se voulait “oldest civil rights organization,” s’est contentée de défendre les intérêts des propriétaires d’armes à feu, chasseurs etc. Ce n’est plus le cas. Il y a eu un changement radical depuis une quinzaine d’années comme l’explique Tim Dickinson du Rolling Stone.

Extraits:

“a front group for the firearms industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora, Colorado.”

“This is not your father’s NRA,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a top gun-industry watchdog.”

The NRA’s alignment with an $11.7 billion industry has fed tens of millions of dollars into the association’s coffers, helping it string together victories that would have seemed fantastic just 15 years ago. The NRA has hogtied federal regulators, censored government data about gun crime and blocked renewal of the ban on assault weaponry and high-capacity magazines, which expired in 2004.

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The NRA’s unbending opposition to better gun-control measures does not actually reflect the views of the nation’s gun owners or, for that matter, its claimed 4 million members. A May 2012 poll conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz revealed surprising moderation on behalf of NRA members: Three out of four believed that background checks should be completed before every gun purchase. Nearly two-thirds supported a requirement that gun owners alert police when their firearms are lost or stolen. “Their members are much more rational than the management of the NRA,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, tells Rolling Stone. “They’re out of touch.”

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The NRA insists in its publications that it is “not a trade organization” and that it is “not affiliated with any firearm or ammunition manufacturers or with any businesses that deal in guns and ammunition.” That is a lie. NRA’s corporate patrons include 22 firearms manufacturers, 12 of which are makers of assault weapons with household names like Beretta and Ruger, according to a 2011 analysis by the Violence Policy Center.