Conservatives vs. the NRA?

“The NRA is all about the NRA — helping their organization and not necessarily the cause,” said influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson, who has repeatedly taken to his blog RedState in recent weeks to urge conservatives to turn their backs on the NRA.

“There’s an argument to be made that we either hang together or all hang separately in the conservative movement,” he told POLITICO, adding, “A lot of conservatives think the NRA has become much more interested in wooing the bipartisan label than in being really effective Second Amendment fighters.”…

Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, said the criticism ignores the reason the NRA is such a powerful brand: that it focuses on its core mission of advancing gun owners’ rights, rather than on trying to advance the goals of the conservative movement, writ large.

“We are part of the conservative movement, but the Second Amendment is unique because it transcends politics; it transcends race, gender, socioeconomic and certainly partisan lines,” he said. “I may have strong personal views on a lot of things — whether it’s health care, immigration, the bank bailouts, taking over car companies, all those things — but that’s not my job. My job and my fiduciary responsibility is to get up every day and protect the Second Amendment.”

He added that many of the groups now criticizing the NRA haven’t helped it in Second Amendment fights and took an oblique shot at Erickson, asserting that “some people would like to use the Second Amendment to drive eyes to a blog.”