Gavin Newsom’s Imaginary National Rifle Association of Time Past

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, November 19, 2015

So sayeth California’s lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom:

I forget who at National Review first pointed out to me that, as time passes and memories fade, progressives invariably come to believe that their long-dead foes were somehow “different.” In recent years, we’ve seen this happen with President Reagan, with Newt Gingrich, and even with George W. Bush. “If only the contemporary Republican party could be more like those guys,” the lament goes, “then we might get something done. Alas, this crop is uniquely evil.”


Now, we’ve seen it happen to the NRA.

In pushing back against this silliness, it’s difficult to know where to start. Frankly, there is no way in hell that Gavin Newsom or any other embryonic gun-controllers were happy with the NRA back in the early ’​90s. In 1987, 1991, and 1993, the organization went all out against what eventually became the “Brady Bill,” thereby putting on the record its opposition to the very background checks that the Democratic party believes are so vital to the nation’s security. In 1994, it not only fought Bill Clinton’s “assault weapons” ban all the way to the bitter end, but it promised (and delivered) “retaliation” against lawmakers who had voted for it. And after the bombing at Oklahoma City, the group’s leader shocked many in Congress and beyond by referring to federal law-enforcement agents as “jackbooted thugs” and “Nazi stormtroopers.” If anything, the group was more “extreme” 20 years ago than it is now.

Today, Republicans are pretty much wholly united against further restrictions on the Second Amendment. Back in the early ’90s, however, this was not the case. Then, former president Ronald Reagan was happy to lend his support to both of Bill Clinton’s major gun-control initiatives. Then, former president George H. W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership because he disagreed with the outfit’s rhetoric. Then, the group opposed background checks not just on private sales but on all gun sales, period. Are we really supposed to believe that, in 1995, a young Gavin Newsom was applauding the group for its reasonableness? Hardly.

As for Newsom’s central claim — that the group has “gone from repping their members 2 serving as lobbyists for gun industry” — I must admit to confusion. I can only imagine that Newsom is basing this judgment on polling that shows that the NRA sometimes takes positions that its members do not. That’s fine as far as it goes. But isn’t the real proof in the pudding? Unlike, say, membership in labor unions, membership in the NRA is entirely voluntary. If the group had actually moved away from its members’ interests, wouldn’t we expect to see some drop-off in support — or, at the very least, to witness the rise of a more “moderate” alternative? Moreover, wouldn’t we expect to see the group becoming less popular in the country at large? That we haven’t — in fact, that we’ve seen it increase both its membership and its popularity — should tell us something important. Each year, nearly 100,000 people flock to the organization’s annual meeting. Having attended three of those meetings myself, I can assure you that the guests are not locking themselves in private rooms and griping about the leadership’s steadfast opposition to magazine limits. In fact, the NRA’s rank and file seem to be pretty happy, which may go some way to explaining why the group has had the same leader for two and a half decades.

Given that the question here is essentially of rights, the reflexive use of “industry” as an anti-gun bogeyman is peculiar. As a matter of dull fact, the NRA is not actually the gun industry’s “lobby group”; that’s the much less frequently maligned National Shooting Sports Foundation. But, arguendo, suppose for a moment that it were. What, one has to ask, would be wrong with that? Nobody would be surprised if the New York Times, Penguin Random House, and HBO were vocal defenders of the First Amendment’s free-speech protections. The First Amendment is how they make their living! Likewise, nobody would pretend that there was something insidious about the Catholic Church’s filing pro-RFRA amicus briefs with the Supreme Court, or about the anti-war movement’s obvious enthusiasm for the right to peaceably assemble. If a right exists, its beneficiaries are going to defend it. Just as a people who hope to enjoy a free press are going to need a series of uncensored newspapers to supply their demands, a people who hope to enjoy a robust right to keep and bear arms are going to need gun manufacturers to supply them with those arms.

Where, one wonders, is the conflict of interest? If one is so disposed, one can argue that NRA members and the gun industry are out of step with everybody else in America. But to suggest that they are at odds with one another simply doesn’t hold up. If I think that I should be able to buy an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine, I am inevitably going to support the liberties of everybody involved in that transaction. That the manufacturers who make the products I covet agree with me tells us nothing of interest at all.

By wading unarmed into this debate, Gavin Newsom has once again revealed the gun-control movement’s foundational weakness: rank and unyielding ignorance. This week alone, we have seen the Democratic party endorse the expanded use of a terror watch list toward which it is customarily skeptical, purely because it sees an opportunity to get at gun owners; we have seen a number of Democratic representatives pretending that it is easy for law-abiding Americans to buy automatic weapons of the sort that were used in Paris; and, now, we have seen it suggested that the NRA was once a fount of Second Amendment moderation but that it has of late become extreme. Apparently, there is at least one thing on which Gavin Newsom and I can agree: Shooting without thinking is a seriously bad idea, regardless of who you are or what office you hold. Time to go back to the drawing board, lieutenant.