What does GOA do with the money? I see NRA launching and winning lawsuits like Heller and the recent victory in Chigago.
If the NRA endorses Reid, I’m through with them and need to know where to send my donations. I just don’t see what GOA does.
“I see NRA launching and winning lawsuits like Heller...”
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Then you had better get your eyes checked!
The NRA didn’t participate in Heller, and tried to prevent it from reaching the Supreme Court. Heller’s attorney won Heller.
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Gun Owners of America (GOA) is a gun rights organization in the United States with over 300,000 members. They make efforts to differentiate themselves from the larger National Rifle Association (NRA), and have publicly criticized the NRA on multiple occasions for what the GOA considers to be the selling out of the gun rights movement.
The organization has often been in opposition to the NRA in their respective endorsements and ratings of politicians and candidates. For instance, the GOA was outspoken in its opposition to John McCain's 2008 presidential bid, describing his gun-rights voting record as "abysmal, wretched, and pathetic" and rating him with an F- on Second Amendment issues since 2004 as opposed to the NRA's (through its political arm, the NRA-PVF) C+ rating of McCain. The GOA especially took issue with the NRA over the 2007 NICS Improvement Act.
They have been described by Congressman Ron Paul as "The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington." This quote from Paul has long been displayed front and center on the homepage of the Gun Owners of America website, and Paul was the only 2008 Presidential candidate to gain an A+ rating from Gun Owners of America.
Gun Owners of America is a non-profit organization whose main goal is to preserve and defend the Second Amendment. They see the right to bear arms as a fundamental freedom issue. GOA's stance is to "never compromise" and to never accept the status quo. According to GOA's official website, their Board feels as though Americans have lost some of their precious gun rights, and GOA strives to get them back. For the past 30 years GOA has been building a network of lawyers around the nation to aid in taking on anti-gun legislation in the courts. GOA has been involved in legal proceedings in almost every state in the nation, in the hopes to maintain and further pro-gun legislation, and pro-gun rights.
Uh, couldn't exactly say it was launched by the NRA...
In 2002, Robert A. Levy, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, began vetting plaintiffs with Clark M. Neily III for a planned Second Amendment lawsuit that he would personally finance. Although he himself had never owned a gun, as a Constitutional scholar he had an academic interest in the subject and wanted to model his campaign after the legal strategies of Thurgood Marshall, who had successfully led the challenges that overturned school segregation.[6] They aimed for a group that would be diverse in terms of gender, race, economic background, and age, and selected six plaintiffs from their mid-20s to early 60s, three men and three women, four white and two black:[7]
Shelly Parker – {bio snipped]
Tom G. Palmer – {bio snipped]
Gillian St. Lawrence – {bio snipped]
Tracey Ambeau (now Tracey Hanson) – {bio snipped]
George Lyon – {bio snipped]
Dick Heller – a licensed special police officer for the District of Columbia. For his job, Heller carried a gun in federal office buildings, but was not allowed to have one in his home.[16] Heller had lived in southeast D.C. near the Kentucky Courts public housing complex since 1970 and had seen the neighborhood "transformed from a child-friendly welfare complex to a drug haven". Heller had also approached the National Rifle Association about a lawsuit to overturn the D.C. gun ban, but the NRA declined.