During the "Overtime" portion of HBO's Real Time, host Bill Maher led his panel in a provocative discussion on how to push back against the NRA's ability to influence lawmakers on gun laws and came to the conclusion that hitting them in the wallet is the best approach.
"Why does the NRA get a tax exemption and how to do we take it away?" host Bill Maher proposed as his audience applauded.
"They would like to say that they don't run a political action committee, but they do have that wing, saying they are a grassroots non-profit organization," Sirius radio host Nayyera Haq explained as comedian Pete Dominick interjected, "Elect Democrats."
"They use legal corporate tax loopholes to build out an entire political lobbying wing that doesn't get taxed," Haq continued. "That's a corporate loophole but that is also because the NRA knows how to work the system."
"Boy do they. By the way, they know how to use a crisis. They never let a crisis go to waste," host Maher replied adding the movement to arm teachers was the NRA's way of "selling more guns."
"But follow the money on the NRA," financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin offered. "You can go after them on the taxes or whatever it is, but the real thing, the real opportunity is the companies. It's all the companies that do business with the NRA, and people who do business with guns. The credit card companies that allow the transactions on the cards. It's AppleTV, it's Amazon -- everybody that allows this stuff over their airwaves."
"Washington is unfortunately not going to do anything soon," he continued. "I hope I'm wrong, but in the meantime I think there is a huge slate of stuff that can happen."
Watch the video below via HBO:
(Graphic: Center for Biological Diversity)
