It’s not unusual to see an increase in support for the partisan lobbying groups following a national event like the school shooting in Connecticut. Heck, I’m pretty sure the AARP gets another donation every time someone skates on the sidewalk in front of my Grandmother’s apartment. But according to the Brady Campaign, they’ve received so much traffic that it basically DOS’ed their site . . .
From the Huffington Post:
While it is not unusual for nonprofit organizations to see an uptick in donations following a devastating event, anti-gun violence organizations reported on Friday afternoon the number of gifts they had received far surpassed the bump in charitable giving they usually see after mass shootings.
[…]
“Our site crashed today, and its bandwidth had been boosted after Aurora,” said Caroline Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Brady Campaign, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for gun-control laws, referring to the movie theater slaughter in the Colorado town. “Americans are reaching out in extraordinary numbers.”
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence also had a banner day:
Sarah Hench, director of development at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a nonprofit research and policy organization in Washington, said her organization had a record number of gifts Friday, surpassing the surge that followed the Aurora movie theater shooting that killed 12 and wounded at least 50.
FYI, we’ve also had our biggest day ever in terms of traffic today. And the day’s not over. But you don’t see us dancing in the blood of the victims while the bodies are still warm. You also don’t see our site crashing, thanks to they people at Zippykid.
It takes a ton of traffic to bring a major website to its knees. Working in network security, I see it almost every day. But for an individual site it’s a “black swan” sort of event. Someone mentions a company on Oprah or a chef goes on a talk show and their website is instantly hammered with traffic, each one taking a bite out of the available bandwidth until there’s none left. Hint: scalability is the key.
Anyway, while the Brady Campaign is getting a transfusion of cash, I somehow doubt that the same is happening to the Second Amendment Foundation or the NRA right now — the entities that we rely on to keep our rights secure from knee-jerk reactions and opportunistic legislation.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. With a rejuvenated war chest, a lame duck congress, an emotional president and a major event on their side we might just see the dreaded legislation that I thought we still had time to fight get pushed to the forefront of the national debate. The pendulum was swinging in our favor, but that can always change. We might just be seeing our own Dunblane unfolding before our eyes.