And while the NRA has attempted diversity pushes and tried to put forward black pro-gun commentators at times (as the group did when it aired an interview with rapper Killer Mike), the VSG data indicate that fewer than 2 percent of individuals who identified as NRA members were black. Eighty-one percent of NRA members reported voting for Mitt Romney, compared to 41 percent of non-NRA members. NRA members are also more likely to be Republican, with 70 percent identifying as Republican compared to 35 percent of non-NRA members. I find that whites are somewhat more likely to be in the NRA, with 78 percent of those reported NRA membership being white, compared with 71 percent of non-NRA members. So how do we look at the racial attitudes of those NRA members? To begin, I examined some simple demographic and partisan characteristics of NRA members found in the Voter Study Group survey. Among the possible organizations was the NRA, an option which 8 percent of respondents selected. The Voter Study Group survey includes a baseline survey that was conducted in 2011 with 8,000 respondents, which included a question about which organizations the respondent was a member of. Using data from the Voter Study Group survey, I found strong evidence of a relationship. However, there has been less study of whether membership in the National Rifle Association is connected to such racial attitudes. I’ve made the complete time series available.The link between racial resentment and attitudes about gun ownership and gun control is well established in the academic literature: Whites who agree with statements like “if black people would only try harder they could be just as well-off as whites” are more likely to own guns. My guess is the NRA continues to grow but at slightly slower pace and finishes the year with close to 4 million members. While some of the ups and downs follow the political calendar, others, like the most recent surge, are due to well-framed responses to threats, both of which are harder to predict. This is a tricky time series to estimate because of its strongly cyclical nature. This blog also hosted a contest to see who could predict the number of members in June of 2013. Congratulations to Ben Lind for having the closest guess with 3,094,723. This might also underestimate the number of new members that month because there was probably some existing members who choose not to renew their membership during that a month. Given the lag between when people sign up and when they are added to the magazine roles, this most likely reflects change in membership during December, the month of the shooting. The biggest jump was between February and March, when the number of subscribers jumped by 184,575. The total number of subscribers to NRA publications went from 3,096,145 to 3,671,054. The NRA recently release circulation reports for the first six months of 2013, giving us the first look at post Newton membership. Since NRA membership comes with a free subscription to one of their magazine and that is the only way to subscribe, I suspect that the total number of subscribers is a good proxy for the total number of members. Mother Jones and the Washington Post both looked into the claims using my method of examining the publicly available numbers of paid subscribers to the three major NRA publications. The NRA added more than 500,000 members in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, based on their latest magazine circulation reports.īack in January and February, the NRA was making claims about its size and growth to ward off potential gun control legislation after the December 2012 school shooting in Newtown, CT.
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