Media Hit Job on David Kopel, NRA

You know David Kopel's scaring them when they do hit jobs like this. You also know they're getting intellectually desperate.

The Progressive is creating much ado about the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund contributing money to the Independence Institute, for which David Kopel works. The point? They're concerned that Kopel's byline in the press has never made mention of this, nor has he started his introduction to the Senate during testimony with this disclaimer (not that any such people make these disclosures in such situations). The concern is that the public should know about the donations before listening to his reasoning.

Okay, but NPR and PBS don't invite Kopel onto programs thinking he's going to advocate gun control. They invite him to write, testify and speak because he's a highly respected scholar on 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, and very adept at offering a counterpoint to gun control advocates.

Does the NRA money compromise the logic of his reasoning? I really doubt that Kopel's secretly a closet gun control advocate; as if the absence of these funds from the NRA would change his reasoning.  If you spend any time reading his material, he approaches legal theory with a pretty dispassionate and systemic cry for consistency.

I can't argue with The Progressive that the funding should be public knowledge - I think it already was (Hell, the NRA and the Independence Institute publicly submit amicus briefs together). If their aim is to detract from the advocacy for giving the second amendment full recognition in the courts, I think they're barking up the wrong tree and showing signs of stress fractures by lobbing this out as a scandal.

Keep in mind that the NRA is 5,000,000 members like me putting money into the organization's various funds, while the money behind the handful of national gun control organizations comes from a small number of billionaires like Bloomberg and Soros.