The Death of Gun Control: Not so fast

That Atlantic splashed “The Death of Gun Control” headline across their page last Friday, sharing a fairly straight-forward assessment of gun control in America after its supporters were routed in the Colorado recall election last Tuesday.

While we agree that gun control is on the ropes, it’s far from dead.

There’s too many supporters of statist, nanny-states out there for it to be dead.

It’s merely suffered a setback as those who favor victim disarmament patiently wait for hysteria to overcome the population in order to promote their efforts to recreate past tyrannies through gun control.

Here’s excerpts and our comments:

(The Atlantic) – Ever since the Senate voted down gun-control legislation in April, some advocates have remained convinced there was still hope. As of Tuesday, that hope is officially dead.

No, they are still hoping for more innocent blood to lubricate their efforts to pass more gun control.

On Tuesday, two Colorado state senators, both Democrats, were recalled by voters for their votes in favor of gun control. Gun-rights advocates instigated the recall drives; the National Rifle Association spent $360,000, sending mailers and airing television ads calling the lawmakers “too extreme for Colorado.” Gun-control proponents, buoyed by donations from New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, outspent their opponents five to one. But the NRA turned the money against the lawmakers, painting them as pawns of fancy-pants out-of-state liberal interests. And the NRA won.

Wow, my hair (what’s left of it) has been blown back with the spin there.  “But the NRA turned on the money against the lawmakers”…  Roughly one-tenth the money that the gun control advocates spent and that’s “turning on the money”?

Nevermind it was a couple of plumbers upset and disgusted with their state senator that started this thing in one case.

Nevermind that the state senators voted the interests of an out-of-state, nanny-state liberal on guns instead of their constituents.

Democrats and gun-control advocates have come up with a number of rosy rationalizations to minimize the loss…

Honestly, what else would we expect from these people who have a reputation of dishonesty and a dearth of integrity?

…Advocates needed to send a signal that politicians could vote for gun control without fear of ending their careers. Instead, they sent the opposite message. Now risk-averse pols, already all too aware of the culture-war baggage the gun issue has historically carried, will have no incentive to put their political futures in jeopardy by proposing or supporting gun-control legislation….

They needed to send that signal…  they failed.

We sent the signal that if you as an anti-gun politician, awake the sleeping giant on guns, we’re going to leave you unemployed.

…When it comes to gun control, politicians have feared the NRA for decades. They’ve seen Democrats lose at every level, from president on down, in part because of the gun issue, and they saw their party make a comeback, particularly out west, when it started embracing gun rights instead.

The supposedly new-and-improved gun-control lobby was convinced that conventional wisdom was out of date. It set out to convince politicians that the landscape had changed….

They tried to sell that snake-oil that the NRA was finished and gun owner votes don’t matter.

Giron, Morse, et al bought it and drank it.

They found their analysis failed in an rather epic manner.

[The anti-gun types] needed to prove that they could protect the lawmakers whom they coaxed out on a limb. On Tuesday, they failed that test. Future lawmakers facing similar votes aren’t going to care about the particulars; they’re going to look at John Morse and Angela Giron and think, That’s going to be me. No thanks.

And that’s exactly what those pols need to think.

Respect our rights or expect to find yourself spending a lot more money on a tight campaign at best, and unemployed at worst.