On Tuesday, we showed you a fundraising appeal from a group, “Minnesota Gun Rights” (MGR).  MGR is making an entry into the Minnesota Second Amendment battle.

Yesterday, we talked with an Iowa State Representative, Matt Windschitl, who pointed out that a group called the “Iowa Gun Owners” (IGO) had been talking big talk, but not delivering much – indeed, making things worse in terms of practical, day-to-day pro-Second-Amendment legislation.

As Representative Windschitl pointed out, the leader of IGO was an Aaron Dorr.

And as we saw from the fundraising letter, the Executive Director of MGR is Chris Dorr.

Who are the Dorrs?

To introduce the Dorrs and their group, we’ll start in the Minnesota Sixth Congressional District.

Your Niche Is On My List:  Few outside the world of professional and semi-pro wonkery really understood the scandal involving Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Iowa state senator Ted Sorenson.  There were allegations of payments to support Bachmann (and Ron Paul).  Eventually, the allegations led to the Iowa Senate Ethics committee investigating Sorenson, and finally his resignation from the Senate.

Aaron Dorr – the leader of the IGO – was, according to this piece in the Iowa Republican, intimately involved in the deal to buy Sorenson’s support away from Bachmann and for Ron Paul.  I’ll add some emphasis:

New information has been provided to TheIowaRepublican.com that details the courting of Sorenson by the Paul campaign, which began in October 2011, long before his public endorsement of Congressman Ron Paul on December 28, 2011.  The documents also show that Sorenson was negotiating with Ron Paul’s national campaign chairman, Jesse Benton, who is now running Mitch McConnell’s 2014 re-election campaign in Kentucky, and John Tate, Paul’s 2012 campaign manager.

Also involved in the elaborate scheme to persuade Sorenson to defect from Bachmann to Paul is Aaron Dorr, the Executive Director of Iowa Gun Owners Association.  Dorr served as an early negotiator between Sorenson and the Paul campaign.  It was Dorr who drafted a three-page memo outlining Sorenson’s financial demands to get him to jump ship from the Bachmann campaign.  This memo not only discloses the financial compensation Sorenson sought to obtain, but also details his financial agreement with Bachmann.

In addition to the alleged payoffs, Bachmann’s angle involved allegations of stolen mailing list of Iowa homeschoolers,  provided to the Bachmann campaign by – according to the Strib – Chris Dorr was the one who nabbed the mailing list:

In a recent affidavit, [here] Sorenson aide Christopher Dorr acknowledged going into Heki’s office and downloading a database from her computer in the belief that it was a campaign e-mail list. “The office maintained an open environment,” he said. “There was never a need for stealth activity.”

Dorr’s account, however, contradicts a 2012 affidavit from former Bachmann campaign manager Eric Woolson, who said Sorenson told him “we took ” the list and that those involved “stood watch” while Heki was out of the office.

Campaign insiders have suggested that the NICHE list was important to help Bachmann check the momentum of GOP rival Rick Santorum, who was making inroads with Christian conservatives on his way to winning the Iowa caucuses.

Waldron, who has also given an account to investigators, said he told Bachmann about the incident on December 18, 2012, but that the campaign took no action against Sorenson, who later defected to the Ron Paul campaign.

Both of the Dorrs, by the way, are the sons of longtime Iowa political consultant Paul Dorr, who in all honesty I need to point out is not only a scorched-earth political absolutist, but the winner of a lawsuit that is very important for gun owners – and especially skeptics of gun owners’ “slippery slope” – to be familiar with.   The elder Dorr is a longtime Liberty activist.

So – who are the Dorrs – leaders of the Iowa Gun Owners (Aaron) and Minnesota Gun Rights (Chris)?  You be the judge.

The Faint Smell Of Scorched Earth:  One more thing – the Iowa Gun Owners is closely affiliated with the National Association of Gun Rights (NAGR), a national group led by Dudley Brown.  NAGR posits itself as a conservative counterpart to the National Rifle Association, which it constantly portrays as a bunch of squishy, anti-gun accomodationists – rhetoric very similar to that used in Chris Dorr’s fundraising letter, which Representative Windschitl noted looks nearly identical to NAGR’s fundraising boilerplate.

NAGR seems to spend as much time fighting the NRA as they do the gun-grabbers.

And – like the IGO’s counterproductive grandstanding that Rep. Windschitl noted yesterday – when it comes to the politics involved in actually getting legislation passed that actually protects gun owners and the Second Amendment, they can be frightfully amateurist.

How does this relate to Minnesota, and the MGR fundraising letter we talked about on Tuesday?

More tomorrow.

I Mix Them Up Myself:  By the way – as one might expect, the “Iowa Gun Owners” website is registered in Iowa.

And so is the site for Minnesota Gun Rights; Chris Dorr registered the site in Van Meter, Iowa.