Disarming We the People

When composing their unlettered overtures to disarmament, those who agitate for “gun control” tend to do three things. The first is to ask for a “national conversation,” the second is to ignore that such a conversation is already happening, and the third is to neglect that its interlocutors extend well beyond the halls of power and offices of K Street.

In the immediate aftermath of last Friday’s horrific murders in Aurora, Colo., New York mayor Michael Bloomberg walked this path with a dull predictability. “Soothing words are nice,” he said in an interview on WOR radio just hours after the story broke, “but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it.” “There’s something more important than being elected,” he continued, “and that’s standing up and saying what you think is right.” On Monday, speaking to CNN’s Piers Morgan, the mayor completed the trifecta: “I think there is a perception among the political world that the NRA has more power than the American people. I don’t believe that.”
This last declaration is progress of a sort. Were the uninitiated to listen to most gun-control types talk about the NRA, they would be forgiven for presuming that the organization held a constitutionally enumerated position in the legislative branch and that all new legislation — however mild — was at the mercy of its veto. PBS’s Bill Moyers demonstrated this nicely in the wake of the Colorado shootings, describing the NRA as an “enabler of death” and “the best friend a killer’s instinct ever had.”

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312202/disarming-we-people-charles-c-w-cooke