SIGN ME UP
During China’s Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao conscripted children called “Red Guards” to terrorize adults whom he felt displayed insufficient ideological fervor.
It was difficult to not think about that when seeing film clips of CNN’s appalling “town hall meeting” on guns, wherein Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and other culprits were confronted by angry schoolchildren and jeered by the audience, even accused of complicity in mass murder, for not “doing something” about school shootings.
The only thing missing were those dunce hats that the Red Guards made their victims wear on the way to the re-education camp.
CNN’s goal wasn’t to further understanding of a serious public policy issue; rather, it was to demonize the National Rifle Association and any politicians that the NRA supports, apparently on the assumption that they are the real problems, not nuts like Nikolas Cruz.
The broader objective is to morally stigmatize gun owners and supporters of that pesky thing called the Second Amendment that protects gun ownership.
By conveying the message that anyone who supports gun rights has Parkland blood on their hands, a viscerally anti-gun media seeks to create a cultural climate wherein anything associated with guns becomes morally odious.
I’m not sure how to stop school shootings, but I am fairly sure that the vast majority of those who participated in CNN’s hate-fest have even less of a clue than I do. And, more to the point, that such displays of anti-gun fanaticism ultimately set back the cause of passing reasonable gun-control measures that might make tragedies like that which happened at Parkland less frequent and deadly.
No one disputes that students who survive school shootings deserve great sympathy, second only to that bestowed upon the families of those who didn’t, but surviving a mass shooting doesn’t make you an expert on gun control, any more than surviving a plane crash makes you an expert on aeronautics or surviving a train wreck makes you an expert on railroad regulation. Your opinion on guns matters no more than the opinion of others, and even less if based on emotions and feelings rather than facts and logic, as is usually the case with the opinions of children.
To risk understatement, it is probably a good idea to avoid taking our public policy cues from teenagers who, by definition, lack the knowledge and maturity to be allowed to vote.
But of course the children were only instruments in all this — the anti-gun media made stars out of the Parkland kids because, as Kyle Smith put it in National Review, “They are telegenic, sympathetic vehicles for a message media personalities wish they could get away with openly espousing themselves.”
Like Mao’s Red Guards, the Parkland kids are being used as props in an ideological crusade; in this case to strike a blow against the Second Amendment and the broader “gun culture” that includes the NRA, Republican politicians and gun owners.
But the unavoidable truth is that lots of people have guns because they want to and the Second Amendment permits them to. And the NRA exists largely because many of those people who have guns (and even some that don’t) sense that lots of other people want to take them away.
If the NRA seems stubbornly resistant to even reasonable-sounding gun control proposals, it might be because its members fear that making the slightest concessions to their foes puts us on a path toward eventual repeal of the right to bear arms.
In that sense, the NRA’s thinking isn’t all that different than that of radical feminist organizations which behave as if even modest restrictions on abortion put us on slippery slope toward repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Ironically, the kind of anti-gun hysteria that CNN sponsored will likely backfire by increasing NRA membership and levels of gun ownership.
The key moment in that regard came when Rubio tried to calmly inform the audience that some of the gun-control proposals currently being circulated would require banning “every semi-automatic rifle that is sold in America” and the crowd erupted in cheers.
The hunch is that if Rubio had said “ban every gun that is sold in America” the cheers would have been even louder.
Either way, such scenes are unlikely to convince gun owners that the gun-control crowd isn’t interested in confiscating their guns and gutting the Second Amendment. Such clips are also likely to be put to good use by the NRA itself in its fundraising.
At the heart of the gun control/school shooting conundrum thus lies distrust flowing from dishonesty — gun owners suspect that many of those demanding that something be done about guns deep down want to ban guns altogether, but simply aren’t honest enough to admit it. And based on what CNN broadcast, they are right to have such suspicions.
So let’s lay our cards on the table and have a genuine, honest debate about repealing the Second Amendment, a debate in which we use facts and logic about guns rather than children as props.
I don’t own any guns, not even a BB gun or pellet rifle. And I’ve never even thought about joining the NRA.
Until now.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.