Posted on 12/26/2012 5:47:25 AM PST by Kaslin
When you argue for a living, you can tell how an argument is going for you. The evidence and my gut both tell me that the liberals have lost control of the gun control narrative.
Not for lack of trying – it was almost as if they were poised to leap into action across the political, media and cultural spectrum the second the next semi-human creep shot up another “gun free zone.” This was their big opening to shift the debate and now it’s closing. They’ve lost, and they are going nuts.
The evidence is all around that this is not going to be the moment where America begins a slide into disarmed submission through an endless series of ever-harsher “reasonable restrictions” on our fundamental rights. You just have to look past the shrieking media harpies to see what’s really happening.
Let’s start with the most obvious omen that this tsunami has peaked. President Obama thrilled his base by grandstanding at the memorial, and then promptly washed his hands of it by handing it over to a “blue ribbon commission.” Making Joe Biden its chairman was like staking a vampire through the heart, then hosing him down with holy water before burying his body beneath the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
Why does Obama want this gun thing buried? While intensely popular with metrosexual pundits, coastal liberals, and cultural bigots slobbering at the opportunity to stick it to those banjo –strummin’, God-believers out in the hinterlands, gun control remains poison to Red State Democrats.
Joe Manchin of West Virginia couldn’t resist some sanctimonious posturing, but clearly he heard enough from his constituents to sprint-back his heresy with a WaPo op-ed explaining how awesome the NRA is and how groovy gun owners are. He will never take sides against the family again.
We didn’t see the Red State Democrats up for re-election in two years out dumping on their constituents to please the media. Call it “the Fredo Effect,” and 2014 is the rowboat. We won’t hear from the likes of Senators Landrieu, Pryor and Begich until they vote “No.”
Sure, Senator Feinstein will submit her gun ban wish list to Harry Reid, who will look at it sagely, nod politely, and let it die. He’s more Tom Hagen than Fredo. He is going to retain the NRA “A” rating his website proudly showcases regardless of what Chuck Schumer thinks. What gets you hosannas in Manhattan gets you unemployed in Searchlight.
So, the politicians’ actions have spoken louder than their words, but what of the media? We lawyers always say that when your case is strong, pound on the law and the evidence, and when your case is weak, pound on the table. The furniture is splintering in Liberalland.
Their post-Newtown strategy was always to prevent an effective response from the pro-gun freedom side by both rapid action and by demonization. But the holidays and the kabuki theater that is the fiscal cliff drama meant that legislative action, their Holy Grail, would have to wait. That gave people time to think and the gun freedom side the time to react.
Demonizing those who support gun freedom was always intended as a weapon to silence them. It was also critical that we, law-abiding gun owners, become the Other. By dehumanizing us and painting us as evil, it is that much easier to strip us of our rights.
But gun freedom advocates fought back. Using the mainstream media, conservative media and especially social media – we need to understand its huge significance here – gun freedom advocates countered liberals’ bogus “facts.” Media reports about “automatic” weapons were corrected, clownish statements about “high caliber magazines” and “large capacity round” were mocked. The struggle raged over millions of Facebook posts. The average citizen saw gun banners ask “When will America control access to weapons?” and then saw several experts among his or her friends post about the significant hurdles one needs to get over to get a gun. Truth bypassed the mainstream media and became a weapon for the side of fundamental rights.
The banners overplayed their hand, losing credibility with every distortion, evasion and smear. The cries of “Blood is on your hands!” failed to resonate – reasonable Americans just did not blame the actions of a single sociopath on millions of their fellow neighbors. And it did not help when third-string celebrities and wizened literary has-beens took to hoping gun rights advocates would be shot for daring to oppose disarmament.
The gun banners also counted on a narrative that portrayed a respect for the Second Amendment. They sought only “reasonable restrictions” – why, no one wants to ban or confiscate your guns! The problem was one of memo distribution – not everybody got that memo. Mayor Bloomberg was putting out that what few guns he might graciously deign to leave in the hands of the unworthy would be starved of bullets, while Governor Cuomo acknowledged that confiscation was one of the options.
Oops. “Gun control” is a process that is designed and intended to lead to a total gun ban, and the banners are counting on people not realizing it.
Their credibility and motives already in question, the gun banners became vulnerable to a shift in the paradigm from depriving law-abiding citizens of effective defensive weapons to the idea of protecting kids with armed personnel in schools.
Suddenly, the gun banners had to argue two ridiculous positions. The first was that allowing trained educators or police having weapons in schools is a danger. The problem is that people generally like and trust teachers and cops. The second position was even worse, that armed personnel or police are somehow utterly useless against untrained, amateur creeps who seek to confront six-year olds. All over America, millions of parents noted how none of the wealthy gun banners were disbanding their personal security teams and thought, “You know, I think I’d like having a cop around my kid too.”
Frustration at the fact that their argument had not been unquestioningly accepted morphed into faux moral outrage that their opponents had dared offer any alternative proposal at all. E.J. Dionne of the WaPo was a prime example. He had to “grope for words to describe the National Rifle Association’s proposal,” yet he managed to find some: “Absurd, unbelievable, tragic, obscene,” as well as “insane.”
Note that Dionne’s righteous fury does not apply to the armed guards at the Post’s front door, surrounding President Obama, or to anywhere else other than in the vicinity of regular people’s children.
Particularly amusing are the liberals who transform into green eyeshades misers with the public purse when it comes to cops in schools. The folks who can’t spend enough dough on fudge-smeared, patriarchy-challenging performance artists suddenly become thrifty Scotsmen when it comes to doling out a few shillings to put a cop on campus.
They have been unable to articulate any coherent argument opposing putting cops in schools because there is no coherent argument against putting cops in schools. But more than anything, the mommies at the affluent Los Angeles-area school my kids attend have convinced me that the narrative has escaped the gun grabbers.
Knowing our reputations as proud conservatives – we represent diversity for our liberal friends – a pal of my wife remarked, out of the blue, that “I think my husband and I need to buy guns.” Whoa.
And as third graders sang holiday songs at their pageant while I surveyed the packed, vulnerable room, I blurted out to another mommy that I wished I could legally carry a weapon to protect those kids. And she told me that she wished that I could too. Whoa.
Gun banners, you lost the President, the senators, the social media, and now you’ve lost liberal LA mommies. You’ve lost everything. Again.
Shelves empty of guns and ammo and 2 hour wait lists at gun ranges pretty much tell the tale...
Um, it hardly gets bluer than Obama's home state, and even here in Illinois, almost EVERYone I talk to, liberal or otherwise, has come over to the "dark side" of supporting gun rights as a way to protect the children. I totally stumped the most liberal person I work with by a simple challenge, how do you define an assault weapon? These people, at the infantry level, cannot handle even the simplest engagements. Even my own lib extended family, who would normally try to shut me up on any politically controversial topic at a holiday gathering, sat silent or otherwise supportive as I extolled the virtues of gun ownership and the ridiculousness and impossibility of citizen disarmament. Just like the author of this article, I was floored. Pleased, but floored. I had expected an all out "bad family argument." It didn't happen. Amazing.
So, IMHO, if anything, the left is ripe to lose this argument big-time. Why? Because the logic of self-defense is so basic and so natural that even a deeply programmed liberal cannot escape the power of the argument: we have a right and a duty to protect our kids, and weaponizing their caretakers is still the best, simplest way to do this in a world where craziness happens. Period. We win. They lose. Deal with it.
Peace,
SR
“Let them try... quitter...”
...You are incorrect. I’m no quitter. I am ashamed of myself however for sounding like one.
I’m not sure “stand-down” articles like this are believable. It would be like this administration to force its way toward gun control, even if everything in the article were true. The enemy is not to be trusted to be predictable.
The RNC should be out there beating liberal politicians over the head with this instead of trying to find a middle ground, but the RNC is run by RINOs.
I hope so. Difficult for me to gauge. Where I live gun ownership is a given. It is the blue Northeast states that concern me.
It is not what Obama and his crowd of fawning demons do in public view that bothers me, it is what he does behind the scenes that is so damaging. I would not break into the “home run trot” just yet. They will keep trying.
I am ashamed for thinking that your were one. I apologize to you my friend.
Belated Merry Christmas.
LLS
And if they ever do lose the narrative, why they’ll just order up another mass killing or two.
What really, really pains me about your comment is that it is utterly believable and probable .... and that I would even think this to be true is almost unbelievable, except it isn’t.
I too think that this is probable. It might seem paranoid to think that individuals are being watched and primed to commit an atrocity when one is needed to advance an agenda. But for some reason it happens over and over right on schedule when needed. And then the Politicians “have to act quickly” because the media has pushed the populace’s “hot button”.
But if they wait too long to act then reason and the real facts come out to squash their agenda. At that point it’s time to have another atrocity to show that this is not a fluke. All we have to do is look at recent history over the last fifty years to see the pattern.
What’s changed though is that media no longer fully controls the means of distributing information. The cracks in the “Gate keepers Dam of News worthiness” are about to fail spectacularly.
Most people, especially gov’t/elite worshipping leftists, are appalled at the notion that those in power would seek even more power through mass murder.
But they will, and historically, it’s proven that it is ENTIRELY likely that they will.
Without guns, how will you shoot back?
I got nothin to lose anyways.
Bttt
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.- B. Franklin
My sister works with the ‘Safe Neighborhoods Project’, a get guns off the streets program and she agrees with the cops in schools idea and has talked about getting a gun for protection because of some of the bad ‘hoods’ she goes into.
I think the Left lost this argument years ago. I know at least five women who have purchased personal protection guns in the last couple of years because of what they see as a dangerous devolution of society. I think all these women have taken the ‘when seconds count the police are only minutes away’ mantra to heart.
I notice they haven't talked too much about the murders of the firefighters in Webster NY. I also notice that BamBam didn't interrupt his Hawaiian vacation extravaganza (all on our dime) to visit with the families of the victims of that massacre. A few reasons I suspect (I'm a cynic I know)
1) The gunman served 17 years in prison for killing his grandmother with a hammer in 1980. He was convicted only of manslaughter, and was paroled in 1998. Maybe Liberals see that this would cause the masses to start calling for more stringent sentences on convicted psychos, and that goes against all that the Schumers of the world believe in.
2) The suspect was already banned from owning guns. Notice it didn't stop him from setting a fire, waiting for the firemen to arrive then gunning them down. Even if he didn't have a gun who's to say the fire he set wouldn't have taken out a fireman.
3)NY has the toughest gun laws in the country. He was forbidden to possess a gun.....didn't stop him.
So this psycho didn't fit the media template therefore the story will be forgotten within a week.
I think the tide is turning in our favor. Per local law any building owner may prohibit bringing firearms into the building by posting a notice . In my office such a notice has been affixed to the entrances for years. The building manager was asked a day after the Newtown murders if he would consider taking it down. They were removed this week.
Don't forget this is the justice dept behind Fast & Furious. This was the original intent behind that debacle. Give Mexican drug gangs access to high powered weapons, a few killings in the U.S. and viola, anti gun hysteria and calls for gun bans and confiscations. Newtown CT just accomplished that (in the left's eyes) more efficiently and with no connection to the regime.
Things I thought of as unthinkable 4 years ago seem very likely today.
What I find interesting coming from my liberal friends is their total lack of acceptance that a government could turn on its people to the point that the people would feel compelled to fight back. I always get the eye roll, OMG sigh and the ‘it’s not the 18th century anymore’ comment.
Here’s how we win:
Do what I did Saturday. I took two teacher friends out and shot guns with them. We shot several guns (that I unfortunately lost later after they fell out of a canoe) and the two friends genuinely had a good time breaking bottles and shooting scope. They are now interested in purchasing (and loving) their own set of guns.
If each of us did that, we will win.
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