How the NRA Really works - PBS broadcast except:

Mike Spies is a staff writer for The Trace. The piece appears in The New Yorker. He joins me now.

Mike Spies, why ascribe so much power to this one woman? Tell us a little about her accomplishments.

Mike Spies:
in every part of the process, she has a hand.

She ultimately oversees the development of legislation. She often creates it with her NRA lawyers and then shepherds it through the legislature. And that means there are government staffers who help make sure that language in bills accords with the Constitution and stuff like that.

And she’s working directly with the staffers as if she were a lawmaker, which, of course, she’s not. She’s a lobbyist. But what winds up happening is that legislators ultimately abdicate their responsibilities to her, so she effectively acts as if she were a legislator, though she’s more powerful than they are, and then does things like, you know, as the piece detail, sets up her own bill signing ceremonies once a bill gets to desk of the governor.

...She’s been around for nearly four decades in the Florida legislator — or in Tallahassee, rather.

And she has accomplished some truly amazing things, things that have actually transformed not just Florida, but also the country. Beginning in the 1980s, she helped pass — she was responsible for pushing through, rather, the country’s first concealed carry law, which effectively allows people to carry concealed handguns in public if they can satisfy a very basic criteria to get a permit.

And that law has been replicated virtually in every state in some form. So, before that, it was more or less — it was very rare for someone to be able to carry a concealed weapon in public. And now it’s essentially been normalized. ..."

[pbs.org]

Anyone with half a brain can plainly see that. This is the same ploy used by the tobacco companies for decades. When will people learn about the simple idea of conflicts of interests.

No surprise. It's been a fact of life in the USA for decades.

That's a good way of putting it, actually.