The National Rifle Association is throwing down nearly $200,000 to defeat a very pro-gun Republican candidate, simply because she does not support one controversial bill that would effectively make it illegal for businesses to ban guns on their premises.

State Rep. Debra Maggart (R-TN) will face off against opponent Courtney Rogers in today’s primary in the state, and even though the Republican leadership agrees with her, the money is not in her favor. The NRA, seemingly to test its own power, has put its forces behind defeating Maggart.

Despite her entirely pro-gun, anti-gun control record, the group insists that Maggart is trying to take away peoples’ guns. They’ve even placed billboard ads comparing her to President Barack Obama, though the two couldn’t be more different on policy stances — except that neither has proposed any gun control legislation:

“We’ve put up ads and billboards comparing Debra Maggart and Barack Obama. That’s because while both say they support our second amendment rights, they both worked against our freedoms behind closed doors,” said Chris Cox, with the National Rifle Association.

The NRA believes Maggart worked behind closed doors to defeat a bill that would have allowed people to keep guns in their vehicles while at work. It’s a claim she’s long denied, saying she only wanted to study the issue further.

“I think Debra is taking heat for doing something where she was really trying to find the right answer of supporting business interests, as well as second amendment rights, which she believes in both. If the decisions were easy we’d go into session and be done in a week, and I think Debra worked hard to get to that answer,” said Governor Haslam.

“I am not against guns I have a gun permit, my family owned a business that sold guns, I sponsor a skeet shoot every other year, I am very pro second amendment, but I am also pro property rights,” explained Maggart.

The bill that Maggart will not support would make it legal to carry a firearm in a vehicle at any time, including when that vehicle is on private property. Since major companies in Tennessee have come out against the bill, it’s put Republicans into a bit of a bind, pitting two of their favored lobbies — big business and guns — against each other.

In making his controversial argument that “culture” was the main reason Israelis were wealthier than Palestinians, Mitt Romney cited two authors who had written major works on the wealth of nations, Daniel Landes and Jared Diamond. The latter took to the New York Times op-ed page on Thursday to clear the record, saying Romney’s account of his argument was wildly inaccurate. While Romney saw Diamond as arguing that “physical characteristics of the land” like iron deposits were the key determinants of a nation’s success, Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel instead emphasizes water access, local plant and animal life, and geographical features like latitude as being determinative. Diamond calls Romney’s interpretation “so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.”

But, in Diamond’s view, this misrepresentation isn’t “the worst part.” Rather, it was his reduction of an immensely complex subject to a simplistic, one-word explanation:

Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.

Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power. That is not to deny culture’s significance. Some countries have political institutions and cultural practices — honest government, rule of law, opportunities to accumulate money — that reward hard work. Others don’t. Familiar examples are the contrasts between neighboring countries sharing similar environments but with very different institutions. (Think of South Korea versus North Korea, or Haiti versus the Dominican Republic.) Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.

Diamond concludes on an even harsher note, saying “Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.” This isn’t the first time scholars of national wealth have repudiated Romney’s remarks — Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of the seminal Why Nations Fail, also argued that Mitt got the subject wrong, saying “Mitt should do some more reading.”