The Left’s Renewed Assault on the NRA

The Left’s Renewed Assault on the NRA

December 18, 2012 By Joseph Klein Comments (53)

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While much of the country mourns the horrific death of the 26 children and adults murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut at the hands of an alleged mentally unstable individual who also killed his mother, the Left lost no time in shamelessly exploiting the tragedy.  In fact, Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY) used the word “exploit” in urging President Obama to take advantage of the Newtown massacre to prod Congress into passing stronger gun control legislation.

The Left’s avowed goal is to use what happened to galvanize support for cutting the Second Amendment into pieces and disarm law-abiding Americans. To accomplish that purpose, they are committed to discrediting and destroying the National Rifle Association.

Some unhinged leftists have taken to social media to literally call for NRA President David Keene and NRA members to be shot.

For those leftists who would not go quite that far, they have called for an all-out political war to take down the NRA. For example, in a clarion call to its readers, the progressive Daily Kos proclaimed:

After Connecticut, we can’t stay silent and just hope that something like it will never happen again. We have to stand up to the political power of the NRA, and we have to do it right now while their support is weakest.

CREDO, a progressive group, organized a march on NRA headquarters in Washington, D.C. These zealots blamed the NRA for the shooting. “To stop the senseless killing we must first stop the NRA,” they said in announcing their march. Evidently, these progressives have as little regard for the NRA’s constitutional right to petition their government under the First Amendment as they do for the right of individuals to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.

The mainstream media is also jumping on the anti-gun bandwagon. “We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets,” CNN anchor Don Lemon demanded during an anti-gun tirade. During the same tirade he said that mental health is a “secondary issue.”

Jeff Greenfield, a political analyst now with PBS who used to work for CBS News, CNN, and ABC News compared the Newtown shootings to the sinking of the Titanic, which cost 1,522 passengers and crew members their lives, and to the horrible 1911 fire that broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in lower Manhattan and killed 146 garment workers, mostly young female immigrants, who were trapped inside. In both of these earlier cases, Greenfield argued, the tragedies spurred tighter regulations. Now, Greenfield wrote, it was time to  “politicize the Newtown school shooting, starting right now” and clamp down on gun ownership.

The progressives who demand stricter gun control measures refuse to look at the consequences of their own actions that have made it very difficult to get mentally unstable individuals off the streets and institutionalized if they represent a danger to themselves or others.  The American Civil Liberties Union is one of the main culprits.

While the ACLU has little use for the Second Amendment, which it has said is only “a collective right,” despite the Supreme Court’s opinion to the contrary, the ACLU endangers communities by advocating the release of potentially violent individuals into society without adequate safeguards, monitoring to make sure they are taking their meds, and intervention if necessary. The ACLU even helped defeat a bill in the Connecticut Senate that would have allowed the state to institutionalize those persons whom it had reason to believe posed a threat to themselves or others. The ACLU charged that the bill would “infringe on patients’ privacy rights by expanding [the circle of] who can medicate individuals without their consent.” Did the ACLU ever stop to worry about the rights of ordinary citizens to go about their business without the risk of coming face-to-face with an unsupervised mentally deranged shooter? Obviously not. Would the children and adults killed in Newtown Connecticut be alive today if that bill had passed?  We’ll never know, thanks in part to the ACLU.

There is room for honest debate on whether to tighten background checks and to consider more restrictions on the sale of military-style automatic rifles. But the Left’s gun prohibitionists have no interest in reasonable dialogue or in seeking a sensible solution to prevent more carnage that addresses all relevant factors including mental health rather than focus single-mindedly on gun control. They are using the slaughtered kids as props for their radical anti-Second Amendment agenda.

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