The NRA won the argument, the author writes. Thank you, NRA

In America, we are supposed to like constitutional rights.

One would think that an organization that vigilantly — and effectively — safeguards a constitutional right would be honored as a kind of national jewel.


Yet the National Rifle Association gets only obloquy. It is all that’s wrong with Washington, our politics, our system. It’s practically branded an accessory to murder whenever a lunatic shoots people. It’s labeled a nefarious special interest that lobbies Congress into submission.

No one can doubt the enormous clout of the NRA. But it comes about it the right way. It represents millions of members — including lots of union members and rural Democrats. Its supreme act of influence is defeating officeholders in free-and-fair elections. And its signature victory over the past two decades has been to bring about a sea change in public opinion on gun control.

The NRA won the argument. Its influence is a function of its success in the art of democratic persuasion.

How successful? In the aftermath of the Aurora massacre, with the NRA taking its usual ritualistic beating in the press, the White House scuttered away from the slightest hint of support for new gun laws. Spokesman Jay Carney averred that the administration doesn’t want new laws — it only wants to enforce the ones already on the books.

Never mind that this isn’t quite right. Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder said the administration supports reinstituting the lapsed assault-weapons ban. It is, nonetheless, a sign of how far the cause of gun control has fallen.

In 1959, Gallup found that 60 percent of people supported banning handguns. Now, Gallup doesn’t even show majority support for banning assault weapons. The case for gun control collapsed on the lack of evidence for its central contention that tighter gun regulations reduce crime.

Federal gun laws are unrestrictive. Forty-one states have right-to-carry laws, up from 10 in 1987. Some 80 million people own guns, and about 8 million have conceal-and-carry permits. Yet violent crime is at 40-year lows in the U.S. If the proliferation of guns were the cause of violence, the country would look like Mogadishu.

The nation’s highest-profile champion of gun control is a mayor who presides over a metropolis where guns are all but prohibited — though hundreds of people are killed by them each year. If that hasn’t made New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stop and think, nothing will. After Aurora, he challenged President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to be as unreflective and preening as he himself is on the issue.

Bloomberg and his allies rushed to plug their favorite gun-control ideas, evidently caring little whether they would have stopped James Holmes, the alleged Colorado mass killer.

With no criminal record, the movie-theater shooter passed a background check. He used an AR-15, among other weapons. The assault-weapons ban prohibited that gun. But he would have had access to a very similar gun regardless. Assault weapons are semiautomatic rifles that may look more threatening than other guns but are indistinguishable in operation from common hunting rifles.

Holmes also used a high-capacity magazine for his ammunition. The assault-weapons ban prohibited the new sale of such magazines. If the ban had been in place, Holmes could have still reloaded with smaller magazines or bought a used version of a larger magazine.

Highly intelligent, methodical and determined to kill, Holmes the person constituted the elemental danger. Guns, even scary-looking guns formerly banned by Congress, do not go on killing sprees on their own.

A relative of mine owns an AR-15. Every few months, he removes it from the gun safe and takes it to the shooting range. He’s a careful — nay, a meticulous — gun owner. I live in the serene confidence that he will never harm anyone with it — any more than he will with his cheese-paring knife or his chain saw.

He’s an NRA member, by the way.

By the standards usually set for our politics, the NRA is a model organization. We say we want people more involved in the process. The NRA’s more than 4 million members are highly engaged. The organization’s recent national conference in St. Louis attracted 73,000 people — one of the largest conventions ever held in the city.

We say there’s too much partisanship. Single-mindedly committed to its cause, the NRA endorsed about 60 House Democrats in 2010.

And we say that we value the Constitution. Gun-control advocates, nonetheless, treat the Second Amendment like an “ink blot” (to borrow Robert Bork’s famous phrase for the Ninth Amendment). They consider it an anachronism, an unfortunate lapse by James Madison, a forlorn leftover from the 18th century. They were all duly shocked when the Supreme Court ruled, in its 2008 decision District of Columbia v. Heller, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.

No one, during fair political weather or foul, has been as unstinting in its protection of that right as the NRA. For that, we should be grateful.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

This article tagged under: Lowry Opinion