Can The NRA Get Back In Front Of The Gun Debate?
I was going to take a week off and let some of our
pro-gun friends contribute the rest of the content for this week, but a rant on
‘the failing’ NRA-TV gave me no
choice but to
respond in kind. I’m talking about a spiel by Cam Edwards who’s joined the
parade marching against that Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is
attracting lots of attention from the alt-right attack-dogs because she’s using
some of the same language about Trump that Sleazy Don uses against everyone
else. After all, she had the unmitigated nerve to call Trump a racist. What
could be more contemptible than that?
But the problem facing the NRA isn’t going to just go away just because the boys in Fairfax
can serve their membership some red meat by saying something nasty or stupid or
both about AOC. The problem is much
more fundamental, namely, the fact that for the first time since America’s ‘first
civil rights organization’ began promoting itself as a true-blue defender of
everything that’s great about America (and guns), there’s serious competition
from the other side.
The last time a gun bill became law at the federal
level was 1994 – the Brady bill along with the assault weapons ban. But these
bills had two things going for them which don’t exist right now: (1). Control of
both houses of Congress by the blue team; and (2). a liberal Southerner in the
White House who could grease the legislative wheels with federal cash. Which
happens to have been the same political alignment which produced the previous national
gun law in 1968.
On the other hand, and it’s a big other, both in 1968 and again in 1994 you didn’t have the upsurge of grass-roots energy on the gun-control side of the ledger that we are seeing right now. And if Gun-nut Nation wants to continue promoting the idea that the noise being made by the other side since Parkland is nothing more than money being secretly funneled into a gun-control campaign by Socialists like Bloomberg and Soros, they can go right ahead. They happen to be wrong. Dead wrong.
The problem facing Gun-nut Nation is that a majority of
Americans have always supported gun ownership by law-abiding citizens, but the
percentage of Americans who hold negative views of the NRA has not been as high as they are right now since 1995. That
year, the annual
Gallup gun poll found that 51% of respondents held ‘mostly’ or ‘very’ unfavorable
views of the boys from Fairfax, last year the percentage was 42%, but the
number was only 34% in 2005.
What seems to be clear is that, for the very first
time, lots of Americans are now thinking about the gun issue and not thinking
about it in a very positive way. I don’t notice, for example, that the boys in
Fairfax have yet figured out how to deal with yesterday’s Senate hearing
on ‘red flag’ laws, at which time two of Gun-nut Nation’s most stalwart
supporters, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and
Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said all the
correct things about gun violence and even suggested that maybe, just maybe, a
legislative response might be coming down the road although nobody’s holding
their breath. On the other hand, if the Senate in 2020 goes the way the House
went in 2018….
So what does the NRA
do? They have no choice but to try and stick more fingers into the 2nd-Amendment
‘freedom’ dike before it springs some real serious leaks. And the way you do
that is to double-down on the red-meat messaging
which your base wants to hear. Which is why Cam Edwards filled his anti-ACO spiel with just one lie after
another, in particular alleging that her support for the New Zealand buyback
means she’ll vote in favor of the confiscation of every, single privately-owned
gun in the U.S. of A.
I’m not saying that the NRA is the Emperor without clothes. What I am saying is that this particular Emperor may be riding the wrong horse, because the NRA horse is no longer the only one in the race.
