The NRA's Challenge to America

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...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.

How do I know this? In Porter’s speech on Saturday, which you can watch on the organization’s Web site, he laid it all out, with commendable clarity. Noting that gun sales have surged in recent months, he said that President Obama’s push for gun control was motivated by “revenge” and had created “political spontaneous combustion.” He continued:

People are reacting to a series of threats to our liberties. The media calls it fear. That’s not it, that not it. It’s a sense of rational outrage that’s been building for a very long time. It’s not going to diminish. It’s not going to go away….
I hear some Americans say with the last election the country is lost. No. No. An election was lost. There’s another election more important to the Second Amendment right around the corner. With the U.S. Senate and the House up for grabs, we as individual N.R.A. members can direct the massive energy of spontaneous combustion to regain the political high ground. We do that, and Obama can be stopped.

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...

Read More: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/05/jim-porter-and-the-nras-challenge-to-america.html