Who Is The Real Enemy On Guns?
The NRA is as strong as ever. The group has done a strategically magnificent job of creating a loyal coalition – millions strong – that passionately defends and promotes the group’s role as “America’s foremost defender of Second Amendment rights”… and then some.
But what separates the NRA from almost any other interest group is that the organization knows how effective it is to have a sworn enemy. It knows that having an enemy reinforces a reason and a need to fight, to organize, to contribute. It knows that if an enemy attacks, you must be doing something right and have something worth defending.
Following the horrifying slaughter of innocent civilians in Parkland, Florida, columnist Paul Waldman of the Washington Post offered his solution to gun violence in the United States:
If we actually want to do something about gun violence, both the dramatic mass shootings and the relentless toll of 30 or so gun homicides we experience each and every day, there is something we can do. Don't vote for Republicans.
Waldman’s callow take is a page-click strategy. Republicans click, share, and shout with outrage. Non-Republicans click, share, and sleep soundly reassured that their principles are the correct ones.
It’s exactly the kind of piece that keeps the NRA in business. Enemies who write like Waldman and the Washington Post act as a call to arms for the NRA and its members. And as the NRA circles the wagons its opponents do the same – endlessly.
What’s even more fascinating about the NRA’s success is that it really doesn’t buy its way into the policy debate – in the last 20 years, the organization has donated a relatively insignificant $4.1 million to current members of Congress. The group is in the driver’s seat because it’s landed on a message that’s incredibly popular with its members and reviled by its opponents.
As a result, the NRA has carved out a place in our cultural fabric and the brand is as recognizable and as crisply defined as McDonald’s or Nike or Lego. But amazingly, this has not happened by leveraging a traditional, all-inclusive model for growth.
As often happens in politics, the group’s identity has grown wildly popular not just because people love it, but because millions of people profess to hate it.
In fact if the NRA were unable to convince its membership that it was perpetually under attack it would have a real problem. After all, if there’s no reason to fight, what reason would there be to to care at all?
The question we must ask ourselves today – not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans – as we continue to watch our neighbors fall to gun violence, is whether the enemy is actually who we’ve been led to believe it is.
The financial markets often witness corrections. A correction in the gun reform debate is long overdue. The current path, quite simply, is unsustainable.
Waldman’s correction solution takes place at the polls, but stopping gun violence will not happen in the voting booth.
We’ll stop people from doing us harm when we recognize that the Second Amendment is in no danger of repeal and the right to own a gun is not being threatened.
We’ll stop people from doing us harm when get behind new laws designed to protect our families, our students, our co-workers, and our children. We’ll stop people from doing us harm when we advocate for new laws designed to protect responsible gun owners and keep guns out the hands of madmen.
What our representatives in Congress truly fear are the people who hire them to cast the difficult votes: the American electorate. It’s our responsibility to move from the far wings of the firearms debate and the hypnotic influence of interest groups. It’s our civic duty to tell our representatives in Washington that we support a sensible plan to save American lives and protect the Second Amendment. Believe it or not, these actions are not mutually exclusive of each other.
Americans are dependably at their best when the times are at their worst. How much worse must it become before we reach across the aisle and rise to the occasion?