The NRA Has Blundered Into An Untenable Position

(Cartoon image is by Tom Curry in the Big Bend Gazette.)

Francis Wilkinson has written an excellent article for Bloomberg News on how the NRA has made a strategic blunder. I highly recommend you read the whole article, but here is a part of it:

Like the Republican Party and Trump, the NRA responded to a diversifying nation by cultivating racial reaction. Before Trump’s “American carnage,” NRA leader Wayne LaPierre routinely portrayed the U.S. as a dystopia overrun by madmen, criminals, perverts and fanatical terrorists. The government won’t save you, LaPierre told his followers. Only guns -- lots and lots of guns -- will.

The NRA seized its advantage under GOP legislatures and a GOP Congress to promote a no-compromise agenda of guns everywhere for anyone. It went for all the marbles -- guns in bars, churches, schools, colleges, parking lots, playgrounds -- hoping to make them so pervasive that the cultural pendulum could never swing back. And it fought, even after massacres of children, to make sure that the most damaged and dangerous among us maintained convenient access to military-grade firepower.

Instead of seeking to accommodate a changing world, it vastly overreached. Payback is unlikely to be pleasant. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the NRA has got to go” was a frequent chant throughout the country Saturday. . . .

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 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.