Hey, NRA: Objects in your rearview mirror are closer than you
think.
Outside of war zones, the United States is the most dangerous
place on the planet for gun violence. Photographs of dead children will
eventually prove too much. Even NRA-beholden pols will line up to pass strong
gun control bills.
Like most Wyomingites, I don’t think confiscation is the correct
path. However, the NRA will, one day soon, wish they had agreed to less onerous
gun safety laws when they had the chance. Even those who blasphemously believe
their “right” to bear arms is “God given” will find that god has abandoned
them.
Until now, no one was coming after your guns. That didn’t stop the
NRA and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, from saying so. They’ve
warned you someone wants to take your guns when that wasn’t true. Some bought
it as hundreds of people died from gun violence. Will there never be a
reckoning? Do you think the American people will allow this to continue into
eternity?
The truth is no one wanted to take any of your guns until now. Now,
a back-bench Democratic Party presidential candidate openly warns, “Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15 and your AK-47.
Get it? Hell yes.” Beto O’Rourke is not out in left field on this. A recent NPR/PBS
News Hour/Marist poll shows Americans evenly divided on his proposal.
Actually, it’s a mandatory buy-out, not confiscation
and 45% back the idea, including 55 percent of women voters. The day may be
upon us when politicians find more support delivering gun-law-reform messages
than the old “they’re coming to take your guns” tripe.
Gunowners have no one to blame but the NRA. At every
step, they block rational gun safety laws, insisting that people who are
seriously mentally ill, convicted of domestic violence, or on the terrorist
“no-fly” list be allowed to buy guns.
They carry weapons on the campus of the University
of Wyoming in violation of the school’s rational rules, enacted because of
legitimate safety concerns. Their badge of honor is “open carry,” flaunting
AR-15’s and other weapons, regardless of how frightened those around them are
in an environment where telling a “good guy” from a “bad guy” is challenging.
They force their schemes to arm school teachers on
nervous students and parents as an alternative to rational gun safety measures.
They make political threats against politicians who give any sign of supporting
measures that have the backing of huge majorities of voters.
The director of the Marist Institute for Public
Opinion says it well, “You’d be hard pressed to find something where the gap
between public opinion and legislative action is wider.” His polling data show
how huge that gap is and, as he says, “the congressional crowd is very much out
of step with where public opinion is on this.”
According
to the Pew Research Center, the share of Americans saying gun laws should be
stricter increased from 52% in 2017 to 60% this year. What’s more, there are several proposals on which Republicans and Democrats agree. Around nine-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning
independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor preventing
people with mental illnesses from buying guns.
And
large majorities of both Democrats (93%) and Republicans (82%) favor background
checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows,
72% of women want assault weapons banned, as do 57% of all voters. More than
60% favor red-flag laws, and 57% want gun owners to be licensed.
In 2008, activist Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller that while the 2nd
Amendment protects guns in “common usage” from bans, it does not protect
“dangerous and unusual weapons.” Nor does it inoculate guns from other rational
regulation.
The dam is leaking. The NRA has only so many fingers
to stop the leaks. The time is coming, and soon, when they will rue the day
they uncompromisingly created barriers to anything and everything supported by
large majorities of voters.
