This feature appears in the November ‘16 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
Zero hour is here, and it’s all on the line.
Election Day, Nov. 8, poses a greater danger to your Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms than any election in American history.
In my 25 years as executive vice president of the National Rifle Association of America—in fact, in my entire life—I have never seen an election more crucial, more far-reaching or more potentially disastrous for your firearms and your freedom to own them than this one.
Hillary Clinton has made it clear:
She hates firearms.
She distrusts the Second Amendment-protected right to own firearms. She despises those who dare to defend the Second Amendment.
And she’s willing to go to any length—from demonizing you as “deplorable” and calling you “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it”—to trying to demoralize you, silence you and shame you into sitting out this election.
But I’m here to tell you: That’s the most dangerous thing that you could possibly do to your freedom.
With four years in the White House or longer, Clinton could effectively destroy the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms as you and I know it. That’s no exaggeration. The only thing that can stop Hillary Clinton is 5 million voting NRA members and 100 million voting American gun owners. It’s up to us. No one else can do it.
The only way we can win and ensure our freedoms survive is if every one of us not only votes on Election Day—but also gets everyone we know to vote the same to save our freedom.
At the end of this article, I’ll tell you how you can help do that in these final few crucial weeks before the election. But first, let me remind you exactly why it’s so important.
Clinton’s White House: A Four-Year Blizzard Of Nightmares
Clinton has made no secret of her gun-ban agenda. She brags about it.
On her campaign website, she vows to ban firearms like the AR-15, the best-selling firearm in America. And she’s willing to lie—calling them “automatic weapons,” a term that actually refers to machine guns—to frighten Americans and deceive them into accepting her bans.Right now, the Supreme Court is split four-to-four. Four current justices believe the Second Amendment is your individual right—and four justices don’t. - Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA Executive Director
But that’s just the beginning of her plans.
Clinton blames American gun makers for violent crime, and she vows to expose the entire American firearm industry to baseless but potentially bankrupting lawsuits. So what happens to your right to keep and bear arms if you can’t buy firearms or ammunition anymore?
Clinton publicly stated that Australia’s gun ban—in which 650,000 firearms, from pump-action shotguns to semi-automatic .22 rimfire rifles, were banned, confiscated from lawful people like you, and destroyed—“would be worth considering doing on the national level” here in the United States.
Indeed, over the years, Clinton has supported every kind of gun ban, restriction, limitation and rationing scheme you can think of, from gun bans to national gun registration and owner licensing with photo IDs, to waiting periods, one-gun-a-month limits, indefinite delays for firearm purchases, gun safe mandates, private transfer bans and everything in between.
This isn’t “fear-mongering,” and these aren’t exaggerations. They’re documented facts—in most cases, straight from Clinton’s mouth.
You know, people accused me of “fear-mongering” when I warned Americans eight years ago about Barack Obama’s long history of pushing gun control. Yet every prediction I made came true: Obama did call for gun bans. He did circumvent Congress to impose anti-gun executive orders. He habitually exploited tragedy to push more gun control. Throughout his presidency, he has tried time and again to diminish our freedom. And the only thing that has stopped President Obama is NRA members like you.
But the way to stop Clinton isn’t through a four-year siege of continual legislative battles, Supreme Court confirmation fights and extended litigation in the federal courts to reverse her anti-gun executive orders. No, the way to stop her is to prevent her—now—from ever setting one foot into the White House.
Because the fact is, you have to ask yourself: If Clinton admits this much, what does she really have planned for your firearms and your freedom to own them?
If Clinton wins the White House, here’s what you can count on right off the bat: Semi-automatic gun bans. A legal assault that could drive America’s firearm industry out of business. Universal government gun registries institutionalized under the cover of so-called “universal” background checks.
And to ensure all her anti-gun schemes stand up to any constitutional challenge, President Hillary Clinton will have the power to install an anti-gun majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to rubber-stamp and ratify all her prohibitions for the next 30 years.
Don’t forget—with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, we lost our one-vote majority on the Supreme Court.
Don’t wake up on Nov. 9 to find that Clinton has been elected president and say, “I wish I had done more when I still had the chance.”One of the first things the next U.S. president will do is nominate a justice to fill the vacancy left by Justice Scalia.
If you want to know what kind of justices Hillary Clinton will nominate to the highest court in the land for the rest of their lives—and she could get the chance to appoint three or even more justices if she wins the presidency—just remember this: Clinton said the Supreme Court “was wrong” to uphold the Second Amendment as your individual right to keep and bear arms to protect yourself in your own home.
If a majority of the court agrees with Clinton, everything we’ve fought to achieve could be lost. After all, if you have no individual right to own a gun, even to defend yourself in your own home—then the Second Amendment means nothing at all.
The consequences that could cascade from such a Supreme Court decision—from state-by-state abolition of your right to carry and more—would truly be monumental.
The Greatest Danger: Clinton’s Anti-Gun Bigotry And Hatred
But here’s the most disturbing fact of all: Clinton knows that gun bans are toxic in election polls, yet she pushes them anyway.
Her own husband, former President Bill Clinton, said the NRA was directly responsible for ending 40 years of Democrat control over Congress in the 1994 elections—just two months after those Democrats imposed the Clinton gun ban.
And in 2000, when Al Gore tried to build his entire campaign around gun control, Bill Clinton admitted it was the NRA that kept Gore out of the White House. “I think the NRA had enough votes in New Hampshire, in Arkansas, maybe in Tennessee and in Missouri, to beat us,” Clinton said.
What that means is that Hillary Clinton isn’t pushing her gun-ban agenda out of political expediency. She’s not just doing it because she thinks she can deceive American voters into accepting her gun bans.
No, the reason Clinton insists upon making gun control a central plank of her presidential platform is because she hates firearms, she despises Americans like you who defend that freedom, and she’s willing to risk everything to impose her will upon you.
That’s why she brags that the enemy she’s most proud of is NRA members like you.
It’s why she compares the NRA to “the Iranians or the communists.”
It’s why Clinton rails against what she calls the “pernicious, corrupting influence” of NRA members like you who dare to oppose her anti-gun policies, let alone expose her anti-gun lies.
And it’s why she claims that Americans who stand up for the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms are “a minority of the people that hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of the people.”
Make no mistake: We’re not a minority. We are the majority! But that majority can only win if that majority votes.
Clinton knows the only people who can stop her from winning the White House, banning firearms and redefining the Second Amendment out of existence are 5 million NRA members like you who vote, and 100 million American gun owners
who vote.
That’s why, as head of the NRA, after devoting my entire career to defending your right to keep and bear arms, I’m calling on you, here and now, to do your duty for freedom by reaching out to everyone you know who cherishes freedom, and getting them to save freedom on Election Day by voting to defeat Hillary Clinton.
How Only You Can Help Save Our Freedom
How can you help do that?
First, I urge you to tear out this article, photocopy it, post it and pass it around at your gun club, your shooting range, at the local hardware or sporting goods store. Scan it and email it to your relatives, friends, neighbors and co-workers. Find it on the Americas1stFreedom.org website and share it on social media and with everyone you know.
Second, we may not be able to match Michael Bloomberg’s billions—or Hillary Clinton’s millions—but we need every penny we can muster to educate voters and get them to the polls on Election Day. So please consider renewing or upgrading your NRA membership now. Please also consider contributing to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and the NRA-ILA Political Victory Fund to finance the urgent communications we need to combat the endless lies and limitless checkbook of Clinton and her global gun-ban backers.
And third, go that extra mile to reach out to every hunter you know, every gun owner you know and every American you know who cares about freedom, and get them to save freedom on Election Day by defeating Hillary Clinton.
You know, during the span of history, dangers of this magnitude to our freedom—and opportunities to defend our freedom—only come to one of every few generations.
Don’t wake up on Nov. 9 to find that Clinton has been elected president and say, “I wish I had done more when I still had the chance.”
Don’t realize—only too late—that your state was the state that turned the White House over to Hillary Clinton.
Don’t risk having to explain to your kids someday why they no longer have a right to own a gun in their own homes to defend themselves—a right that generations of Americans gave their lives to uphold and bequeath to us undiminished—simply because you couldn’t find the time, or didn’t have the ambition, to do what freedom demands of you when it might have made the difference.
Do your part now to save your God-given right to defend yourself and your family from the gravest danger it’s faced since the founding of our nation.
Do your part to defeat Hillary Clinton and save our second amendment-protected freedom.
Because if we don’t do it, there’s no one else we can count on who can.
I’m counting on you.
Sincerely,
Wayne R. LaPierre
Executive Vice President
