GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
01/22/2013
Remember those I’m-the-NRA ads of a few years back, where people who definitely did not have two heads (a housewife, a deputy sheriff) told why they belong to the dreaded gun lobby – a welcome antidote to anti-gun owner hysteria.
Well, I’m not the NRA. I don’t own a gun. I’ve never hunted. I don’t anticipate Armageddon just around the corner.
I don’t believe in a right to keep and bear howitzers and Thompson submachine guns. But I’m just as committed to maintaining Second Amendment freedoms as NRA honchos David Keene and Wayne LaPierre, and every bit as contemptuous of politicians who are undermining this fundamental right.
The latest excuse for the establishment to hate the National Rifle Association is a 35-second spot the group aired calling President Obama “an elitist hypocrite” (must they state the obvious?) for opposing its proposal to put cops in schools.
“The NRA has struck an incredible new low in public discourse and the ad must be removed immediately,” wailed the well-named Michael Nutter, mayor of Philadelphia. Former White House flack Robert Gibbs called it “disgusting on so many levels.” His successor, Jay Carney, said it was “repugnant and cowardly.”
“The NRA’s sneering references to the president’s family are beyond the pale,” yapped conservative poodle David Frum, while the former Republican Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie (still the governor; no longer a Republican), said that noting Obama's kids have armed protection and yours don’t, “I think is reprehensible” – like giving a big, ole bear-hug to a president who’s shredding the Constitution, a week before Election Day?
Disgusting? Reprehensible? Beyond the pale? A gang that’s using the bullet-riddled bodies of 20 Connecticut school kids to push its panacea for violent crime is whining about the NRA exploiting children.
Where were the calls for new gun laws in 2009, when a Palestinian-American shrink shot and killed 13 soldiers and wounded 29 others at Fort Hood, while shouting “Allahu Akabar”? What deters homicidal maniacs should work equally well with Muslim terrorists.
You don’t have to be a gun owner to support the Second Amendment. I defend the public display of crèches and singing Christmas carols in public schools, even though I’m not a Christian. I opposed Obama’s latest move to despoil the rich, even though I don’t have a six-figure income. Most Christians support the Jewish state’s right to self-defense.
After the Boston Tea Party, Washington and Jefferson sided with the Sons of Liberty, despite the fact that they were Virginia planters who could well afford to pay a three-pence-a-pound tax on tea. When they made their revolution, most of the Founding Fathers had far more to lose than gain.
Each victory in its war on freedom whets the left’s appetite to further control the lives of others. It’s no coincidence that the same liberals who are always on the lookout for new ways to limit the right to self-defense work overtime to turn America into a people’s republic – without the ambience.
They want income-leveling (no matter what they’re paying, the rich aren’t paying their “fair share” of taxes), government as a not-so-silent partner of every business (remember “You didn’t build that”?), new restrictions on political speech (they’re itching to shut down talk radio) and churches forced to knuckle under to their political agenda (making Catholic institutions provide abortion and contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans).
After 2012 – which saw the incumbent reelected by 51% of the popular vote (7.6 million fewer votes than he received in 2008) against the weakest challenger in memory – the president and his gang believe they have a mandate to put America in a food processor and hit “frappe.” After they destroy the successful and hard working, force believers back to the catacombs and disarm law-abiding citizens, what’s next?
Demonizing the NRA may work with the political class. The people aren’t buying it.
The latest Gallup poll (Dec. 19-22) shows 54% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the National Rifle Association – very close to the NRA’s 20-year high of 55% in 1993. The organization reports it gained 100,000 members since the Newtown tragedy (putting its membership at 4.2 million – three and a half times the number who voted for Christie when he was elected governor) – a predictable response that the left finds inexplicable. After repeatedly telling gun owners they’re coming to get them, liberals call them paranoid for taking the threat seriously.
Leftists might as well have flashing, fluorescent-green signs on their foreheads – “We’re going to make it next to impossible for you to own a gun.”
They can’t ban firearms outright. In 2010, the Supreme Court admitted what most who can read plain English knew all along: The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual right to armed self-defense. In 18th. century parlance, a “well regulated Militia” meant every able-boded, male citizen. The militia clause sets forth one purpose of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” without limiting its scope.
Since they can no longer distort its meaning, the left has decided the Second Amendment is archaic or evil. "They didn't have assault rifles in the 18th century," we are sagely informed. They also didn't have the Internet, television or high-speed presses, so let's ignore the First Amendment too.
Actor Danny Glover (a “close personal friend” of Fidel Castro, according to the Cuban media), recently told students at Texas A&M that the Second Amendment was written by massahs fearful of slave revolts. In a speech to the Constitutional Convention (June 6, 1787) Second Amendment author James Madison described slavery as “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” Glover’s fantasies are even more bizarre than Rosie O’Donnell’s.
What they can’t accomplish with an outright ban (which Chicago and D.C. had at the time of the Supreme Court ruling), gun-grabbers intend to achieve by piling on as many regulations, restrictions, qualifications and fees as possible – all of which will do nothing to keep Chicago gangs from shooting up each other (the 2012 gun homicide rate in the Windy City was four times the national average) or nutters – schizophrenics, not Philadelphia mayors – from shooting up grade-school classrooms.
Massachusetts already has the tightest gun laws in the nation, including a prohibition on “assault weapons,” mandatory firearms training, a year in prison for illegal possession (regardless of intent) and expensive licensing with frequent renewals. Not enough for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (mini-Barack) who wants to end re-sale of firearms, limit licensed owners to buying one gun a month, tougher background checks and mandatory liability insurance. Will drug dealers and gang-bangers get a group discount?
Nationwide, Democrats are in a fierce competition to see who can propose the most onerous and absurd restrictions on a basic human right – the ability to protect your life and family from those the left coddles.
Firearms-phoebes like Dear Leader piously declaim on the need to protect kids from violent crime – while they let criminal aliens flood the country, won’t let ICE touch them unless they do something drastic, oppose capital punishment and making it easier to defuse human time bombs, and move to legalize drugs under the guise of medical pot.
If I ran the NRA, I’d roll out an ad with two pictures side by side – the Minutemen standing at Concord’s North Bridge (“their flag to April’s breeze unfurled”) and the famous photo of S.S. killers leading Jews away at gunpoint when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed, with the caption, “You get this or you get that.”
The 700-man British force that marched to Concord to seize arms stored there (they should have instituted licensing and liability insurance instead), were better armed and trained and outnumbered the colonial militia. But at the end of the day, the body count was 50 Americans dead and 39 wounded, against 73 British regulars killed and 173 wounded. As the British under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith limped back to Boston, Americans took the first steps toward independence and writing a document which guaranteed the people’s access to the ultimate means of redress against tyrannical government.
The Jews who survived the Ghetto uprising were marched off in a different direction.
The Ghetto fighters numbered a few hundred, armed with pistols, rifles and an odd machine gun, most smuggled in by the Polish Home Army. They faced more than 2,000 crack Waffen-SS troops with artillery, armored vehicles. 82 machine guns and 135 submachine guns. The poorly armed Jews held off the Nazis for almost three weeks.
When the Germans began disarming the people of occupied Europe, those who protested were probably derided as paranoid. (“Vat do you sink vee air going to do to you? Air you some kind uf gun nut? Har, har!”)
I don’t expect detention camps and cattle cars anytime soon – well, at least not in the next few weeks. But isn’t it curious how it always starts with taking guns from the innocent – it did with blacks in the post-Reconstruction South, the Armenians, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Tutsis and other designated victim groups.
And that’s why, even though I’m not the NRA, I’ll stand with it defending the Second Amendment – till Hell freezes over or Danny Glover starts making sense, whichever comes first.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website,DonFeder.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment