“Social movements and their bases respond to either fear or hope. The NRA has cranked up the fear meter to 11 and has kept it there for a really long time. Threat is really the strongest source of mobilization. In magazines and mailings to its members, the NRA’s messaging is about one existential threat after another . . .
“In some ways it’s kind of puzzling because there’s some scholarship that suggests you can’t constantly say the sky is falling. Eventually, folks are going to get tired of that kind of rhetoric, but that hasn’t seemed to be the case among the NRA’s core members.” Scott Meltzer quoted in This Sociologist Spent A Decade Studying the NRA — and Saw How It Paved The Way for Trump [via thetrace.org]
