The N.R.A.'s Challenge to America...

[G_j]

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/05/jim-porter-and-the-nras-challenge-to-america.html?mbid=nl_Daily+%28238%29

THE N.R.A.’S CHALLENGE TO AMERICA

BY JOHN CASSIDY
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If there was ever any suggestion that the massacres in Aurora and Newtown would tilt the N.R.A. in a more moderate direction, the elevation of Porter has quashed it. “With Jim Porter, they’ve gone full crazy,” Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told the Associated Press. But it would a mistake to dismiss Porter as just another gun-toting Confederate nut. A self-styled Johnny Reb he may be, but insignificant he isn’t. In declaring war on the coalition that supported the failed gun-control legislation, he and LaPierre aren’t just sticking it to President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg: they are attacking the concept of representative democracy.

As has been pointed out ad infinitum by me and many others, opinion polls showed overwhelming public support for extending background checks to gun shows and Internet sales, as well as majority support for banning semi-automatic weapons and multi-round magazines. But that didn’t stop the N.R.A. from exercising its power. Now, having demonstrated the way in which a forceful and well-organized lobby group can defy the will of the majority, its leaders are determined to press home their advantage in the 2014 midterms.

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So there you have it. In order to mobilize support, Porter, LaPierre et al. will continue to demonize President Obama in the eyes of gun owners and other inhabitants of Middle America, raising the spectre of a black President trying to disarm the populace. But despite what Porter said, the N.R.A.’s ultimate aim isn’t defeating Obama’s effort to pass some gun-control laws—it’s already done that. The N.R.A.’s real mission going forward is to repeat what it did in the 1994 midterms, and put back the prospects of gun control for another generation.

To anybody who cares about keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals, disturbed post-adolescents, and would-be terrorists of the Tamerlan Tsanaev or Timothy McVeigh variety, and to those who don’t care that much about gun control but who harbor the subversive thought that congressmen and senators should carry out the will of the people, the N.R.A. has issued a direct challenge. The organization is determined to frustrate your wishes, and, to this end, it’s already out there organizing, propagandizing, and agitating. You know it won’t stop—it never does.

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