The Other Enemy

There are a lot of gun rights groups out there, and that’s not always a bad thing. Each represents the gun community in slightly different ways and people can pick and choose based on which groups align most with their values. Overall, though, the goal is the same. All seek to protect and restore our right to keep and bear arms.

At least, that’s the theory.

There’s a problem with some gun rights groups, and that’s the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.

We didn’t lose our gun rights overnight, so an incremental approach to restoring them shouldn’t be a major issue. Anything that moves the needle toward liberty should be a good thing, in my opinion. However, some want it all right here, right now.

And some groups are a bit more…problematic on that front.

After Rep. Keith Kidwell (R-Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Pamlico, GRNC Rated****) once again introduced a permitless concealed carry bill,House Bill 5 (“NC Constitutional Carry Act”), legislators started receiving emails from gun rights supporters claiming the bill wasn’t good enough.

Unfortunately, the emails are being generated through a slick-looking website for a phony gun group calling itself the “NC Firearms Coalition” (NCFC) – one of roughly two dozen such shell organizations run by the infamous Dorr brothers, whose specialty is raking in money by attacking pro-gun legislators and legislation with claims that they aren’t pro-gun enough.

This phony gun group has, to the best of our knowledge, never shepherded the introduction of any legislation in the NC legislature. In fact, the last time we ever encountered one of them at the legislature was in 2017. When we checked with legislators the Dorr brothers claimed to be working with, the legislators had never heard from them.

The Dorr scam purports to be headquartered in Raleigh. In truth, the UPS Store in the photograph you see is their “office.”

In the past, NCFC did predatory fundraising by claiming credit for GRNC’s legislative accomplishments. Now they are telling people to fill out an email form to send a message against HB 5 with vague calls for “disjunction of gun control” (whatever that means).

What people don’t know is that the message form they are filling out is actually one of at least two dozen used by the Dorr brothers to gather millions of emails, which they hustle for money.

I’ve talked about the Dorr Brothers before. A couple of times, really.

As noted above, they don’t get much accomplished, but they do make a lot of noise about gun rights purity. If a bill isn’t absolutely perfect in their eyes, it shouldn’t be passed at all, and this is what they try to frame as “no compromise.”

But passing what you can get passed right now isn’t exactly compromising our gun rights. When the status quo involves restrictions on those rights, the win is any restoration of those rights.

There are some people, though, who benefit more from the constant conflict than in actually achieving anything.

None of the Dorr Brothers organizations have notched any real legislative wins. They don’t get legislation introduced and most lawmakers who they claim to work with have never heard of them. When they have heard of them, though, it’s usually in the context of one of the groups the brothers are affiliated with doing something particularly shady.

For me, the big issue with the grift here isn’t that they’re not accomplishing what they purport to want to accomplish, it’s that they actively work against legislation that’s infinitely better than what’s currently on the books. I’m not saying they’re plants by gun control groups or anything of the sort, but I will say that anti-gun groups might well be smacking themselves in the head for not having thought about doing something like this.

If they were plants from Giffords or Everytown, I can’t think of much they’d do differently. I mean, seriously.