By Mark Overstreet
Friday, September 13, 2019
During the Reign of Terror, the most bloodthirsty member
of France’s revolutionary government, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, a “vehement,
emotional and vulgar man, craving the center of the stage, dramatizing and
gesticulating and bellowing when excited” (Ch. 7),
called for the executions of “merchants.”
For Adolf Hitler and the German national socialist
workers party, the enemy was instead “the Jew.” For Joseph Stalin, it was “the
capitalists.” For Mao Zedong, “the bourgeoisie,” “the intellectuals,” and “the
reactionary classes.” And for Che Guevara, “rich landowners.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson cannot be placed in the same
category as those miscreants. Nevertheless, when the Gun Control Act of 1968
didn’t require the registration of all guns and the licensing of all gun owners
as he had hoped, LBJ singularly blamed “the gun lobby.”
President Bill Clinton more specifically blamed “the NRA”
when, after Congress imposed the firearm background check system and a nearly
make-believe “ban” on “assault weapons,” 62 Democrats, including Speaker of the
House Tom Foley, were defeated in the 1994 congressional elections, giving
Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954.
Pick The Target and Polarize
It
Participants in this year’s Democrat presidential debates
have also pointed their accusatory fingers at “the NRA,” along with a laundry
list of other groups and individuals, including “corporations,” “big
corporations,” “the 1 percent,” “big pharma,” “big insurance companies,” “the rich
and powerful,” “those with money,” “the special interests,” “PACs,” “the Koch
Brothers,” “Mitch McConnell,” and, of course, “Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where vagrants reportedly
cover the sidewalks with feces, urine, and needles—a condition aspired to for
Austin, Texas, by its mayor, Steve Adler, and its like-minded city council—the
Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution labeling NRA a
“terrorist organization.”
Throughout history, the left has achieved power by
rallying its mob, and rallied its mob by giving it someone to hate. Vladimir
Lenin encouraged “language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and
scorn toward those who disagree with us,” Saul Alinsky advised radicals to
“pick the target . . . and polarize it,” and leftists continue the practice
today.
So, a few days ago, left-wing columnist Michael Tomasky
wrote that the gun laws Democrats are now pushing can be imposed if “The NRA
Can Be Beaten.” Having worked in the NRA’s political division from 1991 to 2016,
I might laugh at Tomasky’s notion, if I had a sense of humor about such things.
The left’s everyone-on-message vilification of “the NRA” may inspire
high-pitched squeals of approval during the Democrats’ presidential debates and
campaign rallies, but anyone who thinks that the NRA is all that stands in the
way of disarming the people of the United States has another think coming.
It’s Not the Electoral
College When You Lose Congressional Elections
Those 62 Democrats who were defeated in the 1994 elections
didn’t lose just because of the several hundred of us who worked at NRA
headquarters, nor even because of the NRA’s 1 million or so members at the
time. There were 60 million other gun owners in America in 1994 and soon
thereafter polls showed that more Americans identified with the NRA than with
either major political party.
NRA’s membership roughly doubled to 3 million after
Clinton and the Democrats imposed gun control and rose to 5 million after
President Barack Obama tried to impose more gun control during his second term.
There are now 100 million gun-owning Americans, and gun owners tend to be
single-issue voters.
Tens of millions of Americans own handguns, which
anti-gun activists tried to get banned in the 1970s and 1980s. Seventeen and a
half million Americans have permits to carry handguns for protection away from
home. A comparable number own semi-automatic rifles that Democrats in Congress
have been trying to ban since 1989.
Since the 1990s, every time Democrats inside the Beltway
have acted against the right to keep and bear arms, or threatened to do so,
purchases of guns, particularly those that Democrats want most to ban, have
soared. For example, in August, the first month of Democrats’ new push against
guns, gun purchases increased roughly 16 percent, compared to the number in
August 2018.
Yet Democrats believe they have reason to hope. Polls
show support for some of the gun laws they are demanding, though support for
gun control typically falls once the public becomes informed about the details
and it has fallen this year. Also, some have recently claimed that there are
internal troubles within the NRA, inspiring some of its detractors to speculate
that the organization can now be defeated and gun control now be imposed.
Speculations about defeating “the NRA” may titillate the
mob, but even if NRA disappeared overnight, there are still 100 million gun
owners, their family members, and their friends. Donald Trump won the 2016
presidential election because he won “swing states” Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida, all of which have large populations of gun
owners. If gun control supporters achieve their goals, it will be because gun
owners are complacent or don’t understand the details and ramifications of what
Democrats are demanding, not because of rumors about the NRA.
Don’t Forget the Supreme
Court
Conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t predict what
the court might do in a specific case. But three of the justices who voted with
the majority in District of Columbia v.
Heller (2008), Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence
Thomas and Samuel Alito, are still on the court, and most observers think the
most recent appointees to the court, Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett
Kavanaugh, have similar respect for the Second Amendment and the right to keep
and bear arms.
Heller observed
that self-defense is an “inherent right” that is “central to the Second
Amendment,” and ruled that the amendment protects “the individual right to
possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” and “extends, prima facie,
to all instruments that constitute bearable arms.” One needn’t a crystal ball
to conclude that might not bode well for state laws that impose unreasonable
restrictions on carrying arms for protection or that ban firearms and
ammunition magazines owned for the inherent right the amendment protects.
Confiscate Guns?
Finally, while “Beto” O’Rourke—another “vehement,
emotional and vulgar man, craving the center of the stage, dramatizing and
gesticulating and bellowing when excited”—says Americans would agree to hand
over their semi-automatic rifles, the last time our government tried to
confiscate guns from the people, it received a revolution in return.
As Meghan McCain said on “The View” several days
ago—courageously taking a stand while Republican members of Congress we elected
to protect our rights hide in the shadows—“If you’re talking about taking
people’s guns away from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence.”
Or, as Alinsky observed, paraphrasing Lenin, the radical
left cannot begin murdering its political opponents in the United States,
because it’s the rest of us who have the guns.
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