Posted on 07/28/2012 3:45:49 AM PDT by marktwain
A week ago, a senseless and tragic shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, took the lives of 12 persons and wounded dozens. But instead of discussing what appears to be the gunman’s mental illness, the liberal mainstream media has spent most of its energy trying (to no avail) to use the incident to revive interest in gun control. This effort has utterly failed, with even President Obama refusing to obey the admonitions of some of his journalistic supporters to leverage the bloodshed for an attack on the National Rifle Association (NRA). This has only compounded their frustration, leading them to publish editorials like today’s New York Times jeremiad against the NRA, which rails about the reasons why “Candidates Cower on Gun Control.”
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the gun control solutions favored by liberals would not have prevented alleged Colorado killer James Holmes from carrying out his crime. As Lowry points out, “Even scary looking guns formerly banned by Congress do not go on killing sprees on their own.” But the interesting point to be gleaned from the rehashing of the old debate about guns is not so much whether the NRA’s critics are right but the way they have come to demonize the organization. Leave aside for a moment the merits of their case about guns, and what comes across most clearly is an unwillingness to acknowledge that the NRA’s success is rooted in the nuts and bolts work of political organizing. Like the Walt-Mearsheimer “Israel Lobby” thesis which cannot explain the enormous bipartisan popularity of the State of Israel by means other than a shadowy conspiracy of money and influence peddling, the NRA’s critics need to understand that it succeeds not by intimidation but because most Americans agree with it.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
I won’t join the NRA until they stop endorsing Democrats.
I don’t consider myself to be a “conspiracy nut” but I do find it curious how every timne the libtards need a distraction some loser decides to go on a rampage just when they need it...
Not bright. AT MINIMUM the NRA has to be seen as politically neutral. There are a very few Democrats who are staunch supporters of RKBA.
If the NRA adopted your way our gun laws in 2012 would be similar to the UK’s. The NRA is successful because they focus like a laser on the gun issue, nothing else matters. If other organizations adopted the same methods, maybe they would be as successful as the NRA is.
They all have been of the left... even this psycho professor wannabe, grant whore monster.
LLS
I have to agree. The NRA, by attempting to be politically neutral, can attract the small minority of Democrats that are pro-gun. That could make a difference in close votes. That is also a common position to have in the South.
Staying on target, so to speak, also avoids having to discuss, defend and argue all the other issues dividing the two parties.
I remember 1964-1968. No gun owner wants to go through that hell again when the MSM steamrolled the 1968 Gun Control Act through Congress.
The NRA, with no lobbying arm managed to deflect it enough so Americans were not declared criminals in their own homes and still retained the rights to own and buy guns with certain restrictions.
Only army surplus rifles and small foreign made handguns were banned from the US, and now we are seeing WWII army surplus rifles begin to flow again.
I stood behind this theory back in the 1960s, much to the dismay of my friends who all thought I was nuts. Think about this, in 1962 you could buy a gun in the mail, many left wing politicians(democrats)wanted to eliminate the sale of guns through the mail but had no crime statistics to back them up. Then in 1963, just at the peak of the ban mail order guns frenzy, Kennedy was shot with, wait for it, a nut with a mail order rifle. Banning mail order guns was a cinch after that. Then a few years later, as the gun grabbers shrieked about "saturday night specials" and wanted to ban handguns, Robert Kennedy was shot by a nut using a small cheap handgun. Ta da, we had the gun control act of 1968, parts of which still haunt us today. Every time there is a big push to ban guns or a certain type of gun, there is at least one incident of a type that makes their(gun grabbers)arguments seem cogent. However, today people are thinking more clearly about it and the laws are not getting passed as easily as then did back in the day.
The National Firearms Act of 1934, as originally written, would have included handguns, along with machine guns and short-barreled shotguns, as requiring federal tax stamps to possess or transfer.
That the pistol provisions were removed was entirely due to the efforts of the NRA.
And people still demonize them, for withdrawing their opposition to the bill, in exchange for having the pistol provisions removed.
There are times you’re on the defense, and the best you can hope for is to minimize the damage. The NRA plays better defense than any other group on this issue.
Had the NRA not been playing defense, the cop-killer ban would have outlawed almost every centerfire rifle cartridge, instead of just the few rare bullets of unusual construction that it did. And the Brady Bill waiting period would have been permanent, instead of transitioning to the instant check system.
Yes, there are times the NRA plays more defensively than I think the current politics requires, but they’ve been at this for far longer than most of the other players, and they deserve credit for carrying the banner when times seemed darkest.
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