The ACLU tends to be pretty good. I'd argue that per-dollar, they're probably more effective than the NRA, since they focus on direct court battles (and do so smartly) than lobbying.

Yes,they are, but with the NRA, politicians are scared to pass any restrictions on gun limitations, effectively stopping it before it starts. With the ACLU, politicians are quick to erode our other rights and only compromise after a long fight leaving us with fewer rights. Over time, our rights are fewer and fewer. I always ask myself what would a WWI vet think of our current state of rights?

I think the ACLU does a great job, but they aren't as effective as the NRA.

But don't they pretty consistently pass on Second Amendment cases? I know they argue that it's a collective right, not an individual one, but I'm not making a moral or legal claim. All that seems relevant is "the ACLU does not litigate cases to expand legal gun ownership".

So now it's chicken-and-egg. Is the ACLU better than the NRA, but uninterested? Or are their different tactics and results a product of the different topics they deal with?

Oh I was just highlighting them as staunch advocates for the 1st and 4th amendments. If one is looking for a staunch advocate of all those rights, I'd suggest the Libertarian Party but they haven't been able to gain that much traction in elections and consequently haven't been as effective as they could be, IMO.

edit: as an aside, I'm big on the second amendment but stopped contributing to the NRA precisely because, among other things, they're clearly not big fans of other civil liberties. Their magazines contain (or used to, anyway) a lot of bias against anyone who didn't support a heavily militarized police force, or was against torture for suspected terrorists, etc. It also wasn't clear to me how all the money they solicited was being tracked for efficacy.

Yep, agreed on all counts. I was mostly just curious about whether the NRA is worse than it needs to be, or whether 2nd Amendment issues are so warped and conflicted in the US that any group entering that space will become something ugly.

The ACLU has a great record on 1 and 4, as do several of the groups they work with. "Restore the Fourth" is fantastic, and you can guess which amendment they care about.

The NRA is strange and uncomfortable to a lot of people, I think. I share your complaint, but they have strong stances on so many different issues that I've met people who object to them for half a dozen different reasons.

2nd Amendment issues are that warped and conflicted.

When this country was founded, there were no police. Our adversarial justice system was you deciding you were wronged, going and swearing out a warrant in front of a magistrate, and then executing said warrant with the aid of whatever bruisers you could muster. Generally clubs would be preferable to pistols, and there was no chance of using a musket. Also, while there was not an explicit prohibition on maintaining a standing army, the time limit on military appropriations was intended to limit military spending to war-time.

To some degree this changed in 1812, when the far-more-numerous American militia failed to contest the burning of the nation's capital. To some degree it changed in 1847 when Samuel Colt became a successful revolver manufacturer. But to whatever degree this nation has changed its ideas about firearms, these have not been reflected in law, and we've been papering over the situation for the last century at least.

Where the NRA fits into this is to demand protection and expansion of the individual right to bear arms without any consideration whatsoever of the original context of the second amendment. I don't necessarily object to their viewpoint, but their myopia on the subject does make it rather difficult to discuss. Generally I think the way this goes is, ["Founder's intentions", "individual right to bear arms", "standing army"] : pick any two.

To me they were one of the first examples I picked up on of how bad the Republican vs. Democrat divide is getting in America. They'll use principles to argue a certain stance, but then tear those exact principles to pieces when used to argue a different stance. If it's an issue I haven't looked at before and I don't know who proposed it, I would have no way of knowing where party loyalists would fall on an issue because it all seems so inconsistent compared to the values they claim to believe in.

May be relevant - from the ACLU website:

"In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia. The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. However, particular federal or state laws on licensing, registration, prohibition, or other regulation of the manufacture, shipment, sale, purchase or possession of guns may raise civil liberties questions."

https://www.aclu.org/other/second-amendment

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of with individual versus collective rights. The final sentence is a nice acknowledgement of the collective right, but as far as I can tell the (national) ACLU has never taken a rights-expanding stance on a specific gun issue. (Some state orgs may have.)

In practice, they don't advocate for Second Amendment protection. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it would destroy their effectiveness elsewhere without achieving much, but their acknowledgement of the right hasn't involved them actually getting involved with legal cases so far.