“We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment,” the NRA wrote in a statement after a closed-door meeting with administration officials and other gun groups. “While claiming that no policy proposals would be ‘prejudged,’ this Task Force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners - honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans.”
There’s a point where we need to ask a simple question: If the NRA falls in the forest and no one’s paying attention, does it even make a noise worth paying attention to? Perhaps the paranoid conspiracy theorists who run the NRA are just raging against the dying light. Their veneer of invincibility has been pierced, and Wayne LaPierre and his merry band of guns uber Alles obstructionists aren’t prepared. All they’re left with is rage and impotent bleating. How else could they justify going after the President’s children?
The President announced his gun control recommendations yesterday, and now the battle has been joined. In the past, the NRA knew that by getting out in front of the propaganda battle, they could easily thwart any initiatives simply by motivating their membership to exert pressure on their Congressman. That was then; after Sandy Hook, public opinion has swung away from the NRA. There’s something about the senseless slaughter of small children that speaks to us (as well it should) on a visceral level. Now the NRA has been forced into a position from which advocating for the status quo means implicitly endorsing the murder of children as a cost of doing business.
The NRA could have avoided being seen as tone-deaf zealots getting behind weapons that kill children and the people who use them. They could have gotten out in front of popular opinion and presented a plan for sensible gun control. It might not have been all that people like me want, but it would have at least represented a starting point in the conversation. Instead, Wayne LaPierre and his cabal of paranoid conspiracy theorists dug in their heels and refused to abide anything that changed the status quo in even the slightest degree. To the NRA, “reasonable gun control” means “not one iota of change under any circumstances- EVER.”
That position has cost them…and now John Q. Public- many responsible gun owners among them- is beginning to recognize that the Emperor has no clothes. The NRA doesn’t represent reasonable, responsible gun owners (it never has). With this crack in the long-standing aura of invincibility comes the recognition that there’s blood in the water. The NRA is weak, increasingly impotent, and increasingly irrelevant.
It’s time to roll the NRA completely and get on with the business of protecting our children. It will be a good day when the NRA has to hold a bake sale merely to gin up even a modicum of impotent outrage. That day is drawing closer.
