Now That The NRA Is Dead, Who’s Going To Be The Enemy?
Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s that time of year,
all I know is that there seems to be a definite lack of interest and activity
within the ranks of the gun-control gang. Judging from the frequency of posts
on various Facebook pages and the number of emails that I usually receive from
Gun-control Nation every day, I don’t recall such a period of calm in the ranks
of my gun-control friends at least from before Parkland, or maybe before Trump
embraced the NRA at the start of his 2016 campaign.
According to Google Search Trends, the highest number of searches for the words ‘gun
control’ since July, 2018 was the week of November 4 – 11, 2018 which was the
week of the mid-term elections when guns played a significant role in how some
Congressional races turned out. Last week, this same search term received
almost 90 percent fewer hits. The exact same trend shows up when we
change the search to the ‘gun violence’ term. When we look at the trend over
the past five years, again we don’t find any weekly period where the search
numbers are as low as they are right now.
What’s interesting about these numbers is that they
don’t align at all with the actual gun violence trends. According to our
friends at the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), the number of total shooting incidents has risen steadily from 2014 until the mid-point of this
year. In fact, if we assume that by
dividing the numbers for a previous total year in half would give us more or
less a valid comparison to shootings so far in 2019, there would have been
roughly 26,000 events by mid-2015; right now for 2019 we stand at more than
30,000 reports. Of course the GVA is in no position to estimate total
gun violence accurately because open-source data rarely covers non-fatal
shootings or fatal shootings where someone picks up a gun and points it at
himself. Nevertheless, assuming that GVA tracks its data using the same
sources every year, their numbers make it quite clear that the overall gun
violence trend is up, not down.
How do we explain this apparent disconnect between the
continued increase in gun violence versus what appears to be a lessening of
interest in the problem by the gun-control advocates who should be the folks
who are most motivated and involved? And you can’t put this down to any lack of
gun violence events themselves. After all, just six weeks ago a disgruntled
city employee killed 13 people (including himself) and wounded 4 others in a rampage at the municipal building in
Virginia Beach.
Here’s my theory and although I could be wrong, I
suspect I’m actually right. When most gun-control activists think about gun
violence, the first thing that pops into their minds is not the number of
people killed or wounded with gunfire but the existence and the activities of
‘America’s first civil rights organization,’ a.k.a. the NRA. Every one
of the 2020 Presidential wannabees from the blue team has explicitly mentioned
the NRA in one campaign speech or another; beating up on the boys from
Fairfax is a constant theme in virtually every gun-control fundraising email I
receive.
Right now, the problem for Gun-control Nation is that
the boys from Fairfax seem to be doing a pretty good job of bashing themselves.
There have been numerous public defections from the NRA Board,
resignations of key senior staff, and our friends at The Trace claim that the number of government
investigations has hit ten.
In my first gun book (Volume 10 will shortly appear) I
make the point that if the NRA didn’t exist, the gun-control movement
would have to invent them. For that matter, if Mike Bloomberg and Shannon Watts
didn’t exist, the NRA would have to invent them, too. To all intents and
purposes, right now the NRA doesn’t exist. Can my gun-control friends
come up with a new bogey-man to take the place of the NRA?
