bloomberg.com

If you’re looking for long-term power and relevance in the U.S., getting on the wrong side of kids, women and racial minorities is probably not the best idea. The NRA understands this. The group has been making left-footed attempts in recent days to show it’s hipper than you think, even featuring NRA spokesman Colion Noir, who is black, taking offense at the white privilege of the kids who survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and have become leaders in the gun-safety cause. Black lives (suddenly) matter; just don’t expect support from the NRA if your black son gets shot by a thug or a cop.

The NRA remains a powerful organization. But it’s less powerful today than it was yesterday. It’s less powerful in 2018 — which has already seen a spate of gun regulations passed, even in gun-crazed Florida — than it was in 2017. Blue states across the nation have been enacting aggressive gun regulations without the slightest fear of the gun lobby. California and Hawaii, two states that look more like the American future than the American past, are among the leaders.

And now the gun lobby is facing a countervailing movement. Anxiety, it turns out, is not the exclusive purview of old white men uneasy about the empowerment of women and the racial composition of the nation. People afraid of being shot, or losing their children, willy-nilly because any fool can get a gun are also anxious. The marches helped ease their symptoms but with a side effect: It caused trembling in the gun lobby.