The Pro-Crime NRA On Board With Romney


There are few issues- maybe one or two, maybe not- which more clearly demonstrate the extremist nature of the modern Republican Party than gun control.

A right-wing blogger  at the Washington Examiner writes that National Rifle Association president David

Keene said that Obama's statement was a "strategic error on his part" because it blew up the president's pro-Second Amendment rhetoric. "He knows it's politically dangerous to take on the Second Amendment," said Keene.

"We have credibility when we say that Barack Obama is a threat to your rights. But that credibility is obviously enhanced 10-fold when Barack Obama, in a moment of weakness, says, 'Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.' And that's what he did," said Keene. "This is going to help us."

The NRA is blanketing Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin with advocacy mailings and ads, hopeful of persuading the vast majority of pro-gun, non-NRA members to vote for Romney. They made a similar effort during the recent Wisconsin gubernatorial recall effort and several analysts credited the NRA with helping to save Gov. Scott Walker.

Evidently, Barack Obama had brazenly torched the United States Constitution and threatened the very foundations of the Republic when at the second presidential debate he stated

But there have been too many instances during the course of my presidency, where I’ve had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, actually, probably about a month, I saw a mother, who I had met at the bedside of her son, who had been shot in that theater.

And her son had been shot through the head. And we spent some time, and we said a prayer and, remarkably, about two months later, this young man and his mom showed up, and he looked unbelievable, good as new.

But there were a lot of families who didn’t have that good fortune and whose sons or daughters or husbands didn’t survive.

So my belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement

But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a — is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

The NRA is not newly panicked at the President's rhetoric.  Rather, in ads and mailings to pro-gun voters, Keene says, "the president has ratified what we have been saying... see, he peeked out and finally said what he wants."

An impertinent Barack Obama wants "to enforce the laws we've already got, make sure that we're keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill" and better enforce mandatory background checks.

Oh, the humanity of it all!  The President of the United States doesn't want criminals and mentally ill individuals to possess firearms, nor anyone to possess cheap handguns, hardly the weapon of choice for the hunters the NRA claims to advocate for. Moreover, President Obama had begun his statement maintaining "We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We've got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves."    Obama thus implied that the Second Amendment assures an individual right to bear firearms, a widely held position of persons poorly versed in English grammar, but a view he had affirmed in April of 2008.   He expressed support for not only hunters and sportsmen, but also "people who want to make sure they can protect themselves."

Nonetheless, the NRA is hot on the trail of Barack Obama and determined to elect Mitt Romney, with Keene boasting "we can move the race a couple of points."   Their newest heartthrob should be asked why he specifically opposes reimposing the ban on weapons with high-capacity amunition magazines, such as the one which killed six individuals in a Tucson, Arizona parking lot two years ago.  Or why he opposes the effort of many of the survivors of that incident to close the "gun show loophole."
  
Mitt Romney has staked out a radical position on gun control or, as the pro-crime community terms it, "gun rights,"  and so has gained powerful support from the National Rifle Association, whose members know whom to vote for.   Getting a free ride, the GOP candidate is garnering from the nation's most powerful merchant of death active support largely hidden from voters unaware that he is being embraced by the nation's most powerful merchant of death.


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