Last month, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre warned of a coming socialist wave that threatens to drown out our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, along with many other aspects of American freedom. Closet and not-so-closet socialists in the upper echelons of the Democrat party, academia and the so-called “mainstream” media are pushing the idea of curtailed freedoms down our throat at a frenzied rate. Their goal is to create a strong enough wave to take back the U.S. House of Representatives this fall, thereby rendering the next two years of Donald Trump’s presidency basically null and void.
LaPierre did a fine job of introducing and explaining the wave nature of this dangerous movement, but space considerations didn’t allow him to even begin to discuss a facet of this topic that could take an entire magazine of its own to discuss—the gun controllers’ effort to roll many unrelated groups of Americans into their dangerous movement.
The Hollywood Connection
Fact is, far-left Hollywood insiders have been pushing a socialist agenda for the past several years.
Just look at the long list of Hollywood “stars” who supported U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist, in his quest for the presidency in 2016. The list reads like a who’s-who of Hollywood a-listers, including directors Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and Matthew Cooke; actors Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Sarah Silverman, Danny DeVito and Susan Sarandon; and singers Miley Cyrus, Neil Young, Art Garfunkel, Dave Matthews and Jackson Browne.
And don’t forget Michael Moore, a socialist and huge Sanders supporter whose films include a number of anti-capitalist rants, along with “Bowling for Columbine”—one of the most anti-gun pseudo-documentaries of all time.
“I think capitalism in general is responsible for a lot of the misery in America and around the world—but maybe it’s on steroids in America,” Moore said back in 2009. “The issue of capitalism [itself] is the core of what is really the problem in our country.”
If there’s anything that Moore hates more than capitalism, it’s private gun ownership. In fact, late last year, Moore even called for repealing what he called the “ancient” and “outdated” Second Amendment.
Moore “thinks it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment and replace it with a 28th Amendment that puts the public’s safety ahead of an individual’s right to own and fire a gun.” He tweeted that he thought it would be ok for individuals to own guns for sport and gathering food, but his proposed new amendment would place heavy restrictions on how guns can be purchased, what types of guns are available to the public and where those guns can be stored.
“This is the sane approach that meets everyone’s needs—everyone, that is, except those of the serial killer, the mass murderer, the violent ex-husband, the disgruntled employee or the disturbed and bullied teenager,” Moore wrote.
And, I might add, everyone but law-abiding American gun owners who prefer to not have their guns registered with the government, who would like to buy whatever type of firearm they deem appropriate and who would like to keep their gun available—and carry it—for defense of themselves and their family.
Last year, Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety created an anti-gun, anti-NRA public service announcement, with a number of Hollywood “stars” making an appearance. On the video, you see Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Melissa McCarthy, Laura Dern, John Slattery, Anna Deavere Smith, Bill Hader and others. Everytown named it “How To Call Congress,” but all it actually does is parrot Everytown’s anti-gun talking points, including its childish attacks on the NRA.
With a healthy dose of help from many in the Hollywood glitterati, high-ranking Democrats, national media and far-left professors are trying to sweep a massive number of people along in this socialist wave—many of whom don’t agree with them on the most basic of principles.
Marching on Women
The so-called Women’s March movement is an excellent example. If you read or watch “mainstream” news, you’d think that all women support this effort, which has been co-opted into supporting any number of restrictive gun control measures and otherwise tarnishing President Trump’s administration in any way it can.
You’d be wrong.
In fact, one woman—a rape survivor—recently questioned publicly why a “right to choose” doesn’t include the right for women to choose how best to protect themselves.
In a Washington Examiner op-ed titled “Don’t victimize me, empower me with the Second Amendment: An appeal from a sexual assault survivor,” Savannah Lindquist wrote that all too often the “women’s movement” tends to ignore or even alienate those who wish to use firearms for defense from attackers.
“My sexual assault made something very clear: My right to self-defense should not be up for debate,” Lindquist wrote. “It does not matter if you are a bleeding-heart feminist who actively tries to fight against rape culture. It does not matter if you believe rape culture doesn’t exist. It really doesn’t even matter if you don’t even believe my own account that I’m disclosing to you now.
“What does matter is that women deserve the right to choose how to defend themselves.”
Lindquist concluded by saying that even though she still carries the emotional scars from the sexual assault she survived while in college, she has chosen to speak out for her rights and the rights of other women.
“I refuse to ever be victimized again, and all I am asking for is to be able to utilize the rights guaranteed to me by the Second Amendment of the Constitution to ensure that I will never again be a victim,” she wrote.
Lindquist’s assertions fly directly in the face of women’s “leaders” such as Shannon Watts, head of Bloomberg’s Moms Demand Action group. Watts and her group would have you think every American mother is anti-gun and wants to see more restrictive gun control laws, what she likes to call “common sense gun safety measures.”
That’s simply not true.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation reports that there has been a 77 percent increase in female gun ownership since 2005. As mother and professional shooter Julie Golob recently put it: “Perhaps even more disconcerting to groups like Moms Demand Action, firearm ownership is not exclusively male. The number of women using guns is also growing. Shooting groups like The Well Armed Woman and A Girl and A Gun are thriving. Resources like NRA Women and Women’s Outdoor News are connecting with women from all walks of life, answering their questions and providing valuable information to help educate those interested in learning more about guns, personal protection and the shooting sports.”
Hijacking Black Lives
The same goes for minorities, as many on the far left—including the Black Lives Matter movement—try to sweep black and Hispanic Americans along in their anti-freedom wave.
Many gun-ban proponents—backed by lies from an ignorant, complicit media—like to say gun ownership is racist. In truth, it’s America’s anti-gun laws that are deeply rooted in racism.
As constitutional scholar Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute has pointed out time and time again in various publications, the desire to keep freed blacks from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms led to many of our nation’s early gun control laws—the very types of laws that nra continues to fight against today.
Kopel wrote last year at thehill.com that the Special Report of the Paris Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 found that freedmen in some southern states “were forbidden to own or bear firearms, and thus were rendered defenseless against assault.” Consequently, white supremacists could continue to control freedmen through the threat of violence.
Later, firearms made possible the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Charles Cobb’s book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, describes how pacifist community organizers from the North learned to accept the armed protection of their black, rural communities.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed community defense organization founded in 1965. With .38 Spl. revolvers and m1 carbines, they deterred terrorism in the “Klan country” region of Louisiana and Mississippi. When Dr. Martin Luther King led the “Meredith March against Fear” for voter registration in Mississippi, the Deacons provided armed security.
Just a half-century later, anti-gunners claim that the Second Amendment is racist. They say that despite the growing number of black and Hispanic gun owners in the country. A June 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that a growing number of black and Hispanic respondents told researchers that there is a gun in their home.
The bottom line is that the Second Amendment protects the right of all law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms—regardless of race, ethnicity or other descriptors. And the desire to protect home and hearth crosses all boundaries.
Co-opting the LGBTQ Movement
Many on the far-left and in the national media want to pull gays, lesbians and transgender Americans along in their socialist wave. They say that fewer guns in private hands will result in fewer assaults on those in the gay community.
While they’re dead wrong, you won’t hear that in the mainstream media. In fact, many in the gay community are embracing the Second Amendment like never before.
Take the pro-gun, pro-self-defense LGBTQ group Pink Pistols. The group has grown substantially since a mass murder in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016 highlighted the fact that unarmed Americans are helpless Americans—gay, straight or otherwise.
“This is exactly the kind of heinous act that justifies our existence,” Pink Pistols spokesperson Gwendolyn Patton said after that attack. “At such a time of tragedy, let us not reach for the low-hanging fruit of blaming the killer’s guns. Let us stay focused on the fact that someone hated gay people so much they were ready to kill or injure so many. A human being did this. The human being’s tools are unimportant when compared to the bleakness of that person’s soul. I say again, guns did not do this.”
In fact, the organization’s website explains the group’s thoughts on the right to keep and bear arms quite clearly.
“There are now more than 45 Pink Pistols chapters nationwide, and more are starting up every day,” it states. “We are dedicated to the legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community.”
That doesn’t sound like the words of Americans who can easily be swept along in an anti-American, anti-Second Amendment wave.
America’s Medical Elites
Nearly all American doctors are anti-gun. Right?
If you get your information from press releases produced by anti-gun organizations, then funneled through the national media as “news,” you probably believe that. Fact is, it’s
not true.
Most Americans hold onto the belief that the staunchly anti-gun American Medical Association represents most, if not all, U.S. doctors. This was close to the truth in the early 1950s, when the AMA represented about 75 percent of all U.S. physicians. But membership has steadily declined every year since then, to about 14 percent of full-time practicing physicians today.
The quickly growing organization Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO), a nationwide advocacy and watchdog group of physicians and other health professionals, reinforces that point quite well. DRGO members value the foundational tradition of firearm ownership in the lives of Americans. And they believe that “firearm policy must always accord with the enumerated individual civil right to keep and bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment.”
With that in mind, drgo educates health professionals and the public in the best available science and expertise about firearms, including gun safety as well as preventing injury and death through wise firearm use and lawful self-defense. And they teach what science shows—that guns in responsible hands save lives, reduce injuries and protect property by preventing violent crime.
DRGO founders recognized the coordinated political movement emerging among public health agencies and medical organizations to advocate for gun control. Leaders of prominent medical organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and even the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control loudly proclaimed firearms to be a public health menace that should be severely restricted or even banned.
“This public health gun prohibition movement attempted to ‘frame the debate,’ to use a popular phrase of the time, so that its agenda would not be seen as a frontal assault on the constitutional right of gun ownership,” DRGO states in its position statement. “Their intent was to portray it as a valiant effort to stamp out the ‘disease’ of ‘gun violence.’ Concurrently, these academic and institutional leaders suppressed the already-large body of criminology science that shows gun ownership by responsible people to be a public health benefit, through the prevention of violent crime.”
American gun owners and other lovers of freedom must fight the lie that all doctors oppose private gun ownership, and because of that, you should, too. Gun-ban advocates don’t have your best interests in mind, but they’re happy to sweep you along in their growing movement.
Fighting the Wave
The coming socialist wave—a wave that cannot coexist alongside the Second Amendment—is trying to engulf a wide swath of America by co-opting various “segments” of society that, in all honesty, appreciate and cherish the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.
To fight the wave, we must let everyone know that the Second Amendment was written for all Americans. And when we fight to protect the right to keep and bear arms, we fight for the rights of all.
NRA President Pete Brownell recently put it best in a column he wrote for the Association’s official journals:
“The Constitution does not care about the tone of your skin, who you love, which political party you’ve vowed to support or which language you speak—if you’re speaking the language of freedom. If you’re willing to protect your family no matter the cost, and if you want to have a say when it comes to your rights as a law-abiding, responsible American gun owner, then I want you to join us.”
Mark Chesnut has been the editor of America’s 1st Freedom magazine for 17 years and is an avid hunter, shooter and political observer.
