January 17, 2013

Welcome to the NRA Wine Club

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/raymanoz/4527937500/sizes/m/">Raymond Barlow</a>/Flickr

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The NRA may or may not be a gun club for whiners, but it does have a wine club. The NRA Wine Club, as it is known, offers “limited collector’s editions NRA wines.” If you sign up, you’ll also get a “Custom NRA Engraved Wine Box.”

Sadly, the NRA does not offer a domestic-beer club. Yet in one sense, marketing alcohol of any kind to hard-core gun owners is a stroke of brilliance: According to a 1997 study in the American Journal of Public Health, owners of semi-automatic weapons are more likely than other gun owners to report binge drinking.

Now if only the NRA could start a tobacco club, it would be primed for a raid by the “jack-booted thugs” in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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