Pro-gun bloggers cover NRA convention

While many old-school beat reporters stayed in New York or Washington this weekend to write about conventional political and social events, the pseudonymous “Sebastian” live-blogged GOP head Michael Steele’s fiery speech from the press box at the National Rifle Association convention in Phoenix.

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With some 55,000 readers a month, Sebastian, an “IT guy” from Pennsylvania who writes the snowflakesinhell.com blog, is part of a contrarian gang of gun bloggers attending the 2nd Annual Second Amendment Blog Bash here.

But here’s the real news: In the press box, bloggers outnumbered national reporters by a good margin. And officially, nearly 50 bloggers — compared to 100 mainstream print journalists — were accredited by the NRA press office to attend the 138th annual convention.

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While their standard battle stance is from an underdog position, the pro-gun forces are, for now at least, winning the battle for hearts and minds, even gun control advocates concede.

“If you compare the pro-gun activity in the blogosphere versus the pro-gun-control activity, the scales have just tipped tremendously in their favor,” says Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, which advocates for more gun control in the US. “There’s much more engagement, more involvement, and they clearly have more free time than people on our side of the issue do.”

In the process, gun bloggers are taking on issues like gun control preemption laws in Philadelphia and putting pressure on firearms firms for their choice of spokesmen. And while their reach can be argued, their rise appears to mirror polling data showing that Americans, sometimes by double-digit gains, increasingly favor more gun freedoms, not gun control.

Gun control groups have roughly 150,000 members in the US while gun rights advocates number closer to 12 million, with perhaps as many as 80 million Americans owning some 200 million firearms.

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NRA board of directors member Tim Pawol says the NRA appreciates the role of the gun-bloggers, saying they can tackle especially local issues that the NRA doesn’t have the resources to focus on. But some say the bloggers are even more influential than that, often pulling the NRA into fights or stances — not the other way around.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon in a political science sense,” says Dave Kopel, research director at the conservative Independence Institute in Golden, Colo. “You wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Times, but the communicative message of the pro-gun side is not nearly as much something that is under NRA control as it used to be.”

The NRA’s early hands-off stance on the Supreme Court’s Heller case, which last year affirmed the right of citizens to protect themselves with firearms, infuriated Kevin Baker, the proprietor of “The Smallest Minority blog”, a story he has detailed at length.

“They wanted to derail it because they were scared it would fail,” says Mr. Baker.

NRA board of directors member Tim Pawol says the NRA appreciates the role of the gun-bloggers, saying they can tackle especially local issues that the NRA doesn’t have the resources to focus on. But some say the bloggers are even more influential than that, often pulling the NRA into fights or stances — not the other way around.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon in a political science sense,” says Dave Kopel, research director at the conservative Independence Institute in Golden, Colo. “You wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Times, but the communicative message of the pro-gun side is not nearly as much something that is under NRA control as it used to be.”

The NRA’s early hands-off stance on the Supreme Court’s Heller case, which last year affirmed the right of citizens to protect themselves with firearms, infuriated Kevin Baker, the proprietor of “The Smallest Minority blog”, a story he has detailed at length.

“They wanted to derail it because they were scared it would fail,” says Mr. Baker.