{"id":5173,"date":"2009-08-04T07:30:21","date_gmt":"2009-08-04T12:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5173"},"modified":"2009-08-04T09:44:04","modified_gmt":"2009-08-04T14:44:04","slug":"wishful-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5173","title":{"rendered":"Wishful Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you can’t remember the seventies, it’s hard to remember what a dismal time it was for Second Amendment rights.\u00a0 Gun control was at flood tide.\u00a0 There was serious talk of society-wide gun bans.\u00a0 Poliiticians could seriously and openly discuss repealing the Second Amendment without fear of electoral reprisal.\u00a0 Many states that’d never had problems with firearms imposed stupid gun laws to keep up with the Joneses; Minnesota, which until 1974 required no permit for the law-abiding citizen to carry a handgun, imposed a cranky “might-issue” law (and what exactly has <\/em>happened to crime in Minnesota in the past 35 years?\u00a0 I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here…)<\/p>\n

Starting in the late seventies, that changed.\u00a0 One of the greatest grassroots political uprising in American political history turned the story around.\u00a0 Within 25 years of the mid-seventies nadir, gun control was a third rail, onto which not a few Democrats electorally whizzed, to their chagrin.<\/p>\n

And it was the National Rifle Association that was the fulcrum of this movement.\u00a0 And ever since, the left has been trying to find a way to neutralize the organization.<\/p>\n

And it’s shifting into high gear:<\/a><\/p>\n

The National Rifle Association<\/span>‘s threat to punish senators who vote for Supreme Court nominee<\/span> Sonia Sotomayor<\/span> has been met with a shrug by Democrats from conservative-leaning states and some Republicans who are breaking with their party to support her.<\/p>\n

The gun rights group is used to getting its way by spooking lawmakers about the political consequences of defying its wishes. But it never before has weighed in on a Supreme Court confirmation<\/span> battle. It was cautious about breaking that pattern, and it looks like a losing a fight to defeat President Barack Obama<\/span>‘s first pick for the court.<\/p>\n

Sotomayor is expected to easily win confirmation in a vote this coming week that could deflate the long-accepted truism in Washington that you don’t cross the NRA<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It could <\/em>deflate the NRA – as indeed, every crisis it’s faced in the past thirty years could have.<\/p>\n

But the media has declared the NRA’s political influence “on the wane” and “dead” more times than Tokyo Rose declared the USS Enterprise<\/a> <\/em>sunk during World War II.<\/p>\n

The thing the story’s writer misses is that the NRA’s power isn’t making sure you can’t get good restaurant reservations; it happens at election time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you can’t remember the seventies, it’s hard to remember what a dismal time it was for Second Amendment rights.\u00a0 Gun control was at flood tide.\u00a0 There was serious talk of society-wide gun bans.\u00a0 Poliiticians could seriously and openly discuss repealing the Second Amendment without fear of electoral reprisal.\u00a0 Many states that’d never had problems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}