The NRA wants to make sure that background checks are
not required for all people who purchase guns and that assault weapons and high
capacity magazines are not outlawed. If
their first ad is any indication,
they do not plan to do this by publicizing the merits of their position. Unfortunately, it seems that what they plan
to do is to launch personal attacks on the President and other supporters of
this legislation, and stir up and play on people’s fear and anger.
The NRA will try to paint the President as an out of
touch elitist. Which may be true, but
how does that have any bearing on the merits of his gun control plan? Why are the merits of the President’s claims
to be a common man relevant to whether gun owners should have to prove they
aren’t insane or felons? It’s hard to
tell, because while they will call him an elitist, they won’t really tell us
why it matters.
They also won’t tell us why the role of the media
matters. But they won’t give any proof
of the dreaded liberal media bias either.
They will just allude to liberal conspiracies with ads like this one
that include NBC News correspondent David Gregory in the photo of liberal
elites along with Diane Feinstein and Michael Bloomberg. The
liberal press is always a great target when you don’t want to talk about
specifics or provide actual support for your arguments, and clearly the NRA
doesn’t want to talk about these things.
The NRA does, however, want to talk about how the
President of the United States is a hypocritical elitist because he has secret
service protection but wants to regulate guns and thinks putting armed guards
in every school might be unrealistic and unsavory. It doesn’t matter that he is the President,
and a target for disgruntled crazies the world over. It doesn’t matter that a lot of folks right
here in this country still think the President he is a foreign born Muslim
intent on destroying America, can see he is black, and own firearms. Apparently, every President has to tow the NRA
line in order to avoid being hypocritical because they have secret service
protection. To oppose the NRA’s
positions, they would have to agree to go about their lives completely
unguarded. That makes lots of sense.
It also makes a lot of sense that the NRA would talk
incessantly about the Second Amendment without saying anything about it. You won’t hear the Second Amendment quoted, because
if you actually read it you plainly see that it was meant to protect the right
of Americans to arm themselves and in the absence of a standing army join a
militia to defend the country. You also won’t
hear much of the actual ruling from the District of Columbia v. Heller, which
while abandoning the usual conservative preference for a narrow reading of the
text in order to come up with a meaning that almost assuredly isn’t there and
wasn’t meant to be, still makes it clear that nothing in the ruling or the
Amendment stands in the way of reasonable regulations of this ‘right.’ If the NRA acknowledges that there is no
basis for believing that the Second Amendment rules out common sense
regulations, then they would have to start supporting common sense
regulation.
That is, of course, exactly what needs to
happen. We need to get everyone to come
together and work together to pass legislation that regulates gun ownership while
still allowing for gun ownership. Unfortunately, there aren’t good ads for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment