NRA’s doomsaying sham
If Americans wake up one day to find out that they’re living in a Stalinist police state and that government agents have confiscated all their guns leaving them utterly defenseless, it won’t be because Wayne LaPierre didn’t warn us. LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association, has been issuing warnings along these lines for most of his 20 years as the public face of what is regularly described as the nation’s most powerful lobbying organization.
LaPierre is, of course, a perennial doomsayer with a nearly unblemished record of wrongful predictions, a record so reliably unreliable that, were it possible to bet against it, one could easily amass a sizable fortune. During the Clinton administration he claimed that a document “secretly delivered” to him revealed that “the full-scale war [to] eliminate private firearms ownership completely and forever” was “well underway.” Yet a decade later Second Amendment rights are stronger than at any time in modern history, and law-abiding Americans are in about as much danger of having their 300 million guns seized by the federal government as by Lord Voldemort.
Four years ago LaPierre dusted off and embellished his Clinton-era prediction, arguing that if Barack Obama were elected, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity would be silenced, and “civil disarmament” would be implemented through a United Nations gun-ban treaty. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, but LaPierre now says it’s only because Obama and his advisers decided prior to his election to forgo implementation of the dastardly plan and instead “hatched a conspiracy of public deception to guarantee his re-election in 2012.” According to LaPierre, Obama still plans to “erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and exorcise it from the U.S. Constitution” in a second term, when he will turn “American’s guns into international soup cans and park benches.” Exactly when that will transpire, and whether Obama will repeal the Second Amendment with a two-thirds vote of the Senate or simply forgo that constitutional formality and resort to extralegal means, remains unclear. LaPierre only says that Obama is “just waiting for the moment to strike.”