CAM EDWARDS looks at the AHSA, an astroturf “moderate” gun-rights group that’s been touted in The New Republic. It’s got big name supporters, rich-guy backing, and press folks willing to misrepresent its nature and history. It’s got everything but members! As Jim Geraghty comments: “Dude, 150 members. You get more than that in one theater of a large multiplex on a Friday Night. About ten or eleven rows of seats in the Meadowlands.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

150 members? That’s about as many members as the New Jersey Coalition For Self Defense, a genuine grassroots group I had a hand in launching a few years back. (http://www.njcsd.org)

Of course, the NJCSD has no rich guy backing, has a press willing to entirely ignore them, a legislature willing to write them off as extremist agitators, its supporters painfully cough up the $20 membership fee, no coffers to speak of, and it is crewed entirely by volunteers who are paid nothing to squeeze a few minutes or hours out of their full work and family day to work for the group’s agenda.

THAT is what grass roots looks like. It’s tiresome, frustrating, and thankless when you’re the voice crying in the RKBA wilderness that is NJ.

Indeed. It’s more fun being astroturf, I imagine.