Funding the Anti-Gun Rights Culture Warby Timothy Wheeler
In researching my panel presentation for this weekend's 20th Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in Los Angeles, I ran across this report from the California Wellness Foundation . It's a restrospective analysis of the CWF's 10-year grantmaking spree, the Violence Policy Initiative, during which $60 million was flung at various violence control measures. Much of the money went toward public relations campaigns against gun ownership in California.
The report, prepared by an outside consultant, is riddled with the expected liberal-progressive narcissism, although it does raise serious questions about how effective the VPI was in its stated goal of reducing violence. California's three strikes law, for example, was credited with some of the drop in violent crime, no doubt to the horror of the CWF staff.
But there is little doubt that VPI money is in part responsible for the ban on gun shows at the L.A. County Fairgrounds, the passage of several local Saturday Night Special (aka affordable handgun) bans, and a few state gun control laws.
Check the California Wellness Foundation's web site. It shows one little corner (only $1 billion in assets) of the enormous private philanthropic foundation community. That world of wealth was mostly created by the capitalist engine of America, but its liberal-progressive stewards use it to promote the administrative state.
http://www.claremont.org/localliberty/archives/003797.html.
