Gun Control Reform Activism

flaming lib: Two very interesting articles today at The Trace

I just signed up to receive their email today, then got directed to the website. I don't care for O'Malley (tho his guncontrol policies are fine), since I saw him on TV & when asked a specific question he diverted onto a planned speech about something entirely different for 2 minutes - was wondering why the interviewer didn't reply 'I'll take that as non responsive'. He is obviously imo just in it to gain experience for a possible (but hopefully not) future effort, or to gain attention or publicity. I doubt he will ever be president.

Here was a good one from the Trace (Bloomberg's Everytown for Gun Safety magazine; go get the nra bums:

sep 15, 2015: NRA Campaign Contributions Under Investigation in Connecticut Following Activists’ Probe
..he Connecticut State Election Enforcement Commission (SEEC) is launching a formal investigation into whether the National Rifle Association violated the state’s campaign finance law. The probe comes just weeks after a group of young activists filed a complaint with the SEEC alleging that the gun group had directed thousands of dollars from its national political action committee to state-level campaigns. In certain states - Connecticut being one - such tactics are illegal.
The Trace’s Mike Spies reported on the Connecticut complaint in August. The unlikely muckraker spearheading the charges: Sam Bell, a Brown University doctoral student who just two years earlier dredged up nearly identical irregularities with the NRA’s political contributions to lawmakers in Rhode Island. That investigation resulted in a $63,000 fine for the gun group, and inspired Bell to follow up on the number of “fishy things” he discovered in the process of his work.
One of the complainants leveled nearly-identical accusations last year in the neighboring state of Rhode Island. In the summer of 2013, Sam Bell, a Brown University doctoral student in geology and the state coordinator of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, was searching for answers to what he deemed an illogical turn of events: Bell had been part of an effort to pass an assault weapons ban in his state, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, and it had failed spectacularly. The mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was still a recent memory, but local politicians could not be swayed. Bell, 26, heard the NRA had donated significant funds to state officials, and decided to investigate.

In Rhode Island, campaigns and state PACs are not required to report the sources of donations worth less than $100. The average campaign finance disclosure form therefore shows a mix of higher dollar donations, along with the names of their donors, and amounts below the $100 threshold with their provenance not listed. Bell noticed that the NRA’s state affiliate, which had given money to many elected officials, did not report the names of any of its donors at all.
The total reliance of anonymous donors, to Bell, suggest a stream of dollars coming from outside the state: By staying under the $100 mark, the NRA could obscure its use of outside money — cash from people who live elsewhere in the country — to influence elections and legislation in Rhode Island. It was also able to skirt the state’s campaign finance laws, under which, as with those in Connecticut, the practice is illegal.
Bell checked the campaign finance report of NRA’s federal political action committee, The NRA Political Victory Fund. Then he analyzed the report of its Rhode Island affiliate. He found that both committees had recorded donations of the same dollar amounts to the same candidates. But a look at the candidate’s report showed only one NRA-affiliated donation, which, according to Bell, indicated that the money had originated with the federal PAC and been transferred to the state organization before being given to the state campaigns. The discovery prompted Bell to file a complaint with the Rhode Island Board of Elections. In 2014, the regulatory body fined the gun lobbying group $63,000.
Bell was curious about whether the NRA had broken similar laws in other states... they discovered what they believe is evidence that the NRA may have committed the same violation in Connecticut, and quickly moved to file a complaint.
http://www.thetrace.org/2015/09/nra-connecticut-campaign-finance-violation/