Gun Control thread (merged many)

[Feuer Frei!]

The N.R.A. (National Rifle Association) released an ad which takes a shot(excuse the pun) at Obama and Bill Clinton, and stating that: "Washington doesn’t give us rights, but we are the ones that grant them power".
After denouncing Obama and Bill as arrogant in which the NRA states that both of them made offensive remarks about gun owners.

Bill's comment, made at a speech for donors, which stirred the ire of the NRA:

A lot of these people…all they’ve got is their hunting and their fishing or they’ve been listening to this stuff for so long that they believe it all.

and Barack, to a room of San Francisco elites in 2008:

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion

Are there extremists in charge at the NRA? Probably not.
Imagining itself and its guns as the embodiment of all that is true and good in this world. That's a feeling one might get, certainly this would give some weight to the argument that arrogance, and a an aura of "hey look at us, we can do what we like, when we like because we fund the politicians" or is it something other than arrogance or a feeling of being untouchable hence the arrogant attacks and media exposure and the slogan of the ad, saying pretty much what i believe, and has caused me to start this thread.
Today it is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared.
These are people that say no.
They are absolutist in their interpretation of the Second Amendment. The NRA learned that controversy isn’t a problem but rather, in many cases, a solution, a motivator, a recruitment tool, an inspiration.
Gun-control legislation is the NRA’s best friend. It uses fear when necessary to motivate supporters. The ultimate goal of gun-control advocates, the NRA claims, is confiscation and then total disarmament, leading to government tyranny.
“We must declare that there are no shades of gray in American freedom. It’s black and white, all or nothing,” Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said at an NRA annual meeting in 2002, a message that the organization has reiterated at almost every opportunity since.
“You’re with us or against us.”
Timothy McVeigh’s April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day-care center, and although the NRA had nothing to do with the terrorist attack, the association’s strident anti-government rhetoric drew national attention. News reports focused on a fundraising letter, signed by LaPierre and sent to NRA members before the bombing, that said the new assault-weapons ban “gives jackbooted Government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure and kill us.”
Even staunch NRA members began to get queasy. Former president George H.W. Bush resigned his NRA membership. Former NRA president Richard Riley, who headed the association from 1990 to 1992, told The Post at the time, “We were akin to the Boy Scouts of America . . . and now we’re cast with the Nazis, the skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan.”


Fortune magazine ranked the NRA as the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, surpassing even AARP. That was in 2000.
The NRA is now headquartered outside the Beltway, in Fairfax, and, according to its 2010 filing with the IRS, has 781 employees and 125,000 volunteers. Annual revenue tops $200 million. It’s a tax-exempt, “social welfare” organization with the self-described mission “to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, to promote public safety, law and order and the National defense.”
Here
is an article which seems to give creedence to it's 'more guns is the answer to everything' line.
So, "We are America", the title of the video for the ad, which is here: http://www.nrastandandfight.com/video/we-are-america


A group who questions and attempts to hold the State accountable or a too powerful and arrogant group who thinks it can do and say what it feels like?