It isn't just the gun nuts that are dupes. There are a lot of reasonable gun owners who think it's a good thing for the NRA to push wacky ideas they don't agree with. By staking out crazy, extremist positions, gun owners think the debate get's re-centered in a safer place for them.

But that's worked a little too well, when you have the ATF rendered impotent, and science research into guns censored. And proposals with 91% public support, like universal background checks, treated like questionable notions that lawmakers aren't even willing to debate, let alone enact.

If ever a radical special interest held Washington hostage, it's the NRA.

Of course they are.

The ACLU falls in the same category as the NRA.

A "radical special interest," upholding unpopular Constitutional amendments since the Con-Convention...

BTW, Christopher Dorner (x-LAPD officer and currently dead guy) was a raging Liberal who thought the same way as "ol crazy" up there (Cthulhu).