joelrosenberg ([info]joelrosenberg) wrote,
@ 2006-11-22 15:37:00
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Happy Thanksgiving
... from "the gun guys":
The thing about the movement against gun violence is that, unfortunately, it has no real financial interests. There’s no money to be made in stopping gun violence.
Amazing.  This is from "The Gun Guys", an operation of the Mark Karlin PR Agency's "Freedom States Alliance", which has picked up at least $1,027,000, from the anti-gun Joyce Foundation alone, over the past few years. How many more millions have they landed, and from whom?  I dunno; they won't say. 

But they will then complain, bitterly and repeatedly, that their PR agency finds that there's "no money to be made."  What would they call "some money"?  Billions? 

Unsurprisingly, there's no mention of that on the "Freedom States Alliance" website. Just claims that their wholely-owned subsidiaries -- "The Gun Guys," "50 Caliber Terror," "Newspaper Loophole", etc. -- are a "family" of websites.  A "family."  Like, say, the Sopranos. 

In the spirit of the season, though, I'll wish a Happy Thanksgiving to those, well, turkeys.


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[info]wombat_socho
2006-11-22 09:51 pm UTC (link)
Looks like they're making plenty of money in the attempt to restrict RKBA. As Thomas Sowell said so many years ago, there's no such thing as a true non-profit organization. Somebody's taking home money at the end of the day.

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[info]dd_b
2006-11-22 11:08 pm UTC (link)
Well, at a big enough scale that's true -- when they have full-time people working there, paid people.

But it's NOT true in general; lots of non-profit orgs are small enough they have no employees, it's all run by volunteers.

This is a bit of a red flag issue for me, because I keep running into people who assume that people running science fiction conventions are pocketing money -- when in fact they're paying out of pocket. When I've chaired Minicon I pay for my own membership and hotel rooms out of pocket, and it doesn't get reimbursed. The last time I chaired Minicon I *gave up* a free membership -- I'm entitled to one as a former guest of honor, except that being on the convention committee running a particular year overrides that. And as for the World Science Fiction Convention, I know people who have come close to bankrupting themselves (tens of thousands of dollars in debt) from their work on that non-profit (this pretty clearly involved some sub-optimal choices on their part, but even breaking even is essentially impossible, it costs money to work on the Worldcon).

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[info]wombat_socho
2006-11-22 11:42 pm UTC (link)
I guess I could have been clearer about that, considering that you and others on Joel's list are involved in fandom - as am I. I know all too well the history of Worldcon and its finances, which is one of the reasons that Anime Detour has the inflexible rule "Everybody pays (for their own membership and hotel rooms) and everybody fights -nobody gets to be a corporate officer or Board member who isn't on AD staff and has paid their dues by attending meetings and taking an active part in making AD work. We've learned from other conventions' hideous examples. *nodsnods*

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[info]zsero
2006-11-24 01:38 am UTC (link)
Amen. Then there's the small operation which consists of one or a handful of people working full time to do the work that is the purpose of the charity, and almost all the money raised goes to paying them an inadequate salary so they can keep on doing it. And the quicker they raise enough to pay themselves, the more time they have to devote to the work itself. The kind of organisation where if they landed a $1M grant, they wouldn't pay themselves more, they'd just stop taking time off their real work to fundraise. That too, I call non-profit.

Most of my giving is either to all-volunteer groups or to small ops like that.

Once an organisation goes big time and needs full time paid administrators, and has to offer competitive salaries to attract such people from other jobs, which means that to them it's just a job like any other, then I start to ask what percentage of the funds raised is spent on administration and fundraising, rather than on the org's purpose, and if I'm not happy with the answer I don't give.

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[info]joelrosenberg
2006-11-24 02:12 am UTC (link)
I couldn't agree more with the analysis and the sentiment expressed here. But fandom -- and not just SF fandom -- is a special case.

With The New Thing -- more on that here, and on the Forum shortly -- one of the things I'm trying to help do is replicate some of that in the pro-gun community: people getting together to do fun and useful stuff; the idea is that keeping people working at useful things is easier on everybody when it's fun.

And, that said, I think heavily-funded, gold-plated antigun astroturf groups are quite a different thing, and making fun of their cries of poverty while blowing their noses in silk hankies provided by the Joyce Foundation is pretty funny, and not a little despicable.

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