On Saturday, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre spoke at the organization's annual meeting, held this year in Nashville, Tenn.

From the podium, LaPierre engaged in the kind of fear-mongering that, judging from the boos and cheers of his audience, worked well before that crowd, no matter if his hyperbolic assessment of the current presidential administration bore any relationship with reality.

This wasn't about reality. It was about fear.

And LaPierre wants you to be very afraid.

The next 650 days Obama has left in the White House will be the most dangerous in American history, he said.

AL.com Opinion

About the writer

Read more

"As he prepares to leave office and leave his final legacy, there's no telling how far President Obama will go to dismantle our freedoms and reshape America into an America that you and I will not even recognize," he said.

And when Obama is done, he wants to put that legacy into the hands of Hillary Rodham Clinton," LaPierre warned. The crowd booed (Clinton, not LaPierre), and then LaPierre said something that gets to the heart of what he wants you to fear.

"I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough," he said.

What's that supposed to mean?

That we've had enough black people in the Oval Office?

It would seem so.

That we should keep the door there locked to women?

Only men need apply.

And what, even, of Marco Rubio, who's expected to announce his run for office soon?

Or Bobby Jindal, who along with Rubio, spoke at the meeting?

Yes, in one sentence LaPierre managed to say something racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. - all at the same time.

And no one at the conference can be heard to boo at all. Rather, they cheered.

What LaPierre is saying is this ...

Every time a black child in school looks up at the poster of presidents hanging on the wall, he's supposed to believe that last one was a mistake.

Any time a little girl looks up at that poster, she should know better than to get her hopes up.

LaPierre is right. Obama is changing America into something he doesn't recognize, and if a woman -- be it Clinton or any other -- were to win the White House, that America would change even more.

It might for once be a place where every kid in school can believe this is their country, too, where the White House is not a club for white men only.

Anything else is true tyranny -- what LaPierre and his club claim to oppose.

The best thing LaPierre and the NRA could do for law-abiding gun owners is show them to be mainstream, sensible people.

Instead, he has dragged his own constituency further into the margins.