Trampling 2nd Amendment Not
Enough for Gun Ban Zealots
By Kurt Hofmann, July 2nd 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
Picture, Oleg Volk
Although the Second Amendment is obviously the part of the Constitution the anti-gun "progressives" most love to hate, it's certainly not the only part they will destroy if we allow it. More and more, they have set their sights on the First Amendment as well, because gun rights advocates' free speech is interfering with their forcible citizen disarmament agenda.
Writing for the Long Island Press last week, Jaime Franchi went so far as to advocate "redefin[ing] the NRA as a terrorist/lobby organization." She begins:
Remember when Kentucky Fried Chicken became simply KFC? By changing the name of their restaurant, they changed the unhealthy perception that every delicious bite was not-so-slowly killing you. They took "fried" right out of the title, kept the Colonel"s famous recipe, and reaped healthy profits.
Brilliant.
The NRA has employed similar tactics.
Exactly, because the NRA was once called . . . oh, wait--they've always been the National Rifle Association, throughout their entire 150-year history. Well, you get the idea. If they ever had been called the "National Fried Rifle Association," they would certainly have changed the name by now.
If Franchi wants to talk about name changes to re-brand the message, it's the "gun control" groups that would seem to be the place to look. The Brady Campaign once called itself "Handgun Control, Inc." (back when they were much less shy about acknowledging their outright handgun ban agenda), and before that, they were the "National Council to Control Handguns." Likewise, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence only ceased to be the "National Coalition to Ban Handguns" when they decided they wanted to ban so-called "assault weapons," as well.
Actually, she claims that what the NRA has done that is comparable to Kentucky Fried Chicken's name change is to challenge anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg's "Everytown for Gun Safety" gun ban group's contention (and speaking of name changes, first there was "Mayors Against Illegal Guns," then "Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America," and now they're both under the "Everytown" umbrella) that there have been 74 school shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary atrocity, because most of those 74 would not qualify as "school shootings" as the term is generally used.
What Franchi doesn't mention is that the debunking of the "74 school shootings" claim was not the work of the NRA, but of journalist and researcher Charles C. Johnson, whose reasoning was sound enough to convince even the reliably anti-gun CNN to retract the claim.
This offends Franchi, so to retaliate, she figures she can simply invent new meanings for words, and voilà, the NRA is now a "terrorist organization."
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.
2. a person who tries to influence legislation on behalf of a special interest.
These two definitions come from different places, yet both have similar aims. The second one, however, does not count among it terrifying the population in order to achieve their political means. And that"s what the NRA does. By instilling fear in the public that more and more weaponry is needed to protect ourselves from outside threats, they do more than inflate their bottom line: they redefine how our lives are led. They change the culture.
Franchi is of course not the first to come up with this idea, and indeed if she were, she could probably be safely laughed off as some fringe goofball with no real influence. Recently, however, former First Lady, former United States Senator, former Presidential candidate, and very possibly future Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton not only claimed that gun rights advocates "terrorize" the majority of Americans, but that we cannot be allowed to "hold a viewpoint" that causes such terror. We're not only "terrorists," but "thought criminals," as well.
Before that, militantly far-left cartoonist Ted Rall suggested that people legally openly carrying firearms should be "bundled off to Bagram," like hardened Al Qaeda killers. Similarly, radical "progressive" gun ban jihadist Mark Karlin has advocated putting the NRA "at the top of the list" of "suspected terrorists"--a list, remember, that being on, if the anti-gunners had their way, would be enough by itself to cancel one's Second Amendment rights, without a conviction, without an indictment, without even an arrest or formal charges.
And then remember that the Obama administration has asserted (and indeed exercised) the "right" to use armed drones to assassinate suspected "terrorists," without regard to their American citizenship. And people like Franchi accuse us of using "violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes"?
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A former paratrooper, Kurt Hofmann was paralyzed in a car accident in 2002. The helplessness inherent to confinement to a wheelchair prompted him to explore armed self-defense, only to discover that Illinois denies that right, inspiring him to become active in gun rights advocacy. He also writes the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner column. Kurt Hofmann Archive.
