Reply #364: BLOOMBERG Pro-Gun Groups Call to Sell Seized Weapons Advances to States (ALEC) Bloomberg Aug 11... [View All]

The proposal is the brainchild of the National Rifle Association, and it was adopted last week by a task force at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Republican-leaning policy group that brings together state lawmakers, advocacy groups and corporations to write model legislation.
The gun bill, which was passed 12 years ago in Kentucky and recently championed by the NRA in nearby states, provides an example of how a law in one state can be taken up by an interest group, passed on through ALEC and spread across the country to create quasi-national policy and momentum for an issue that eventually could emerge in Congress.

Republican Rise
“Given the results of the 2010 midterm elections, many states are now one-party controlled, Republican legislatures. Once ALEC model legislation is introduced, there is really no opposition, and little public debate, before the legislation is enacted as law,” Clopp said.
Iowa state Representative Linda Upmeyer, a Republican who sits on ALEC’s board, disputes that. After an ALEC-drafted model bill is introduced in the state legislatures, it still has to be debated before it becomes law. “It goes through committees and subcommittees and hearings,” she said. “There is no voice getting shut out of the process.”
(break)
The gun seizure bill was one of several proposals approved at ALEC’s 38th annual meeting in New Orleans last week. ALEC doesn’t make its model legislation public. Bloomberg obtained meeting agendas and copies of ALEC model bills from people who attended the sessions.

Bill’s Authors
The model legislation was drafted and approved by ALEC’s public safety task force, which included representatives from stun-gun maker Taser International Inc. (TASR), energy conglomerate Koch Industries, the American Bail Coalition, and the NRA, according to ALEC documents. Corporate and special interest group members seeking to serve on task forces charged with writing legislative language can pay as much as $35,000 or more to get a seat at the table, according to ALEC’s web site.

Communication Difficulty
“For a variety of reasons, we’re not really communicating very well with Republican state legislators right now,” he said, referring to the FOP’s (Fraternal Order of Police) effort to defeat or rollback new state laws that reduce or eliminate their members collective bargaining rights. ALEC didn’t draft those laws, according to Raegan Weber, the group’s spokeswoman. The legislative drafting procedure at Washington-based ALEC is drawing criticism from Democrats, government ethics groups and some Republicans, who say it allows special interests an unfair advantage.
“It’s such an insidious thing that they’ve gotten together here,” said Brett Bonin, a Republican who serves on the Orleans Parish School Board in Louisiana and is opposed to some ALEC model legislation on education.

Kentucky state Representative Robert Damron, a Democrat and ALEC member, in 1998 proposed the bill to stop police departments from destroying guns seized in crimes and instead require that they be auctioned. Damron represented a rural area where local police officers were looking to upgrade their body armor and other equipment.
(break)
The bill passed, and NRA representatives visited Damron to check on how the law was working. Damron informed them it was working well. His relationship with ALEC was deteriorating, though, and he ultimately stopped attending their meetings.

ALEC has “become, in the last few years, so partisan,” Damron said. “The last meeting I went to, they spent all their time bashing Democrats. I don’t particularly care for an organization that’s so partisan.”