This feature appears in the June ’16 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
“The NRA and its friends … have planted a poisonous weed of political paranoia in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans. … This barrage of cynical, fundraising NRA propaganda about the Second Amendment has convinced many people that there is a vast plot to seize their guns and ‘take away their rights.’” —Charles Schumer
Yes, America, there is indeed such a “plot,” and it is the life’s work of New York’s senior U.S. senator, Charles Schumer, who is in line to take command of the Senate if his party wins the majority in the November elections.
When it comes to the Second Amendment, Schumer is possibly the most rabidly aggressive, ruthless and spiteful enemy of the right to keep and bear arms ever to serve in Congress. He once infamously boasted, “We’re going to hammer guns on the anvil of a relentless legislative strategy. We’re going to beat guns into submission.” Schumer’s hatred for gun owners and the NRA has not diminished since he spoke those words. He has simply become more shrewd in couching his intentions. If the gun-ban-driven Democratic party wrests control of the Senate this November, Majority Leader Schumer would control every lever of power in that body.
Imagine the nightmare of Schumer being elevated to Senate majority leader—giving him the immense power to impose his national gun-ban agenda. But worse, imagine Schumer wielding that power to shape the U.S. Supreme Court, with at least three vacancies in the offing.
That is what we are facing if the pro-Second Amendment Republican majority in the U.S. Senate is lost in November.
If the gun-ban-driven Democratic party wrests control of the Senate, Majority Leader Schumer would control every lever of power in that body, from the makeup and enforcement of the rules that govern Senate procedure, to the legislative agenda, to the calendar controlling what legislation, treaties and appointments will be brought to the floor for consideration. He would control the assignment of committee chairmanships and determine the role and power of individual committees. He would control oversight and the investigative functions of the Senate. Above all, he would control the very process of advice and consent on presidential nominations.
In contrast with that nightmare, look at the steadfast Second Amendment support of the current Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
Under McConnell’s steady leadership, every effort by the gun-ban group—always aggressively led by Schumer—has gone down in smoke. No criminalizing of now-legal firearms transactions between private individuals under the guise of “universal” background checks. No U.N. gun-ban treaty. And a principled stand against lame-duck President Barack Obama’s anti-gun nominee to fill the vacancy left by the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Coupled with Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House, the stakes in the Senate are enormous for the nation’s gun owners. Schumer and his cabal know that the only way to beat the nation’s gun owners “into submission” is to silence the NRA.
To that end, Schumer has already telegraphed his intentions to replace the First Amendment. The current Republican majority thwarted a Schumer-led drive to rewrite the First Amendment—replacing James Madison’s hallowed words with ones that would give Congress the power to create endless fine-print alterations that would destroy the guarantee of free assembly and free political speech.
This Schumer version of the First Amendment would begin the process of banning grassroots communication expenditures for political speech. In a years-ago rant against the Second Amendment, Schumer labeled the NRA’s public discourse influencing like-minded citizens “the poisoning of our political dialogue.” He has never wavered from that view. In Schumer’s world, the NRA’s use of your contributions to get our message to voters would be drastically diminished or outlawed.
When Schumer and his crowd brought their effort to replace the First Amendment with their gutted version, McConnell’s majority stopped the attempt in its tracks.
Anyone wanting to measure Schumer’s hatred for the NRA and for American freedom needs to look no further than his epic tantrum before the House Judiciary Committee’s historic April 1995 hearing on the Second Amendment. Before a gathering of the most learned scholars on the right to keep and bear arms, Schumer mocked the NRA’s unyielding belief that the right applies to individuals, braying, “The NRA’s Second Amendment is an empty cereal box in the marketplace of ideas.
“Second Amendment fanatics just don’t get it,” he sputtered. “The Second Amendment is not absolute. It does not guarantee the mythical individual right to bear arms.”
Today, Schumer—like Hillary Clinton—glibly claims to embrace the Second Amendment, but always with deep exceptions for endlessly escalating infringements that would ultimately render the right pointless. Imagine the nightmare of Schumer being elevated to Senate majority leader—giving him the immense power to impose his national gun-ban agenda.
A master of deceit, he is just following the cue cards provided by Jim Kessler, his former policy director who authored a seminal propaganda directive called “Taking Back The Second Amendment” that changed the language of the gun banners and the media.
Kessler, recognizing polling data showing that a huge majority of Americans understand they possess the individual right to keep and bear arms, wrote in his manifesto: “[P]rogressives need not change their positions”—they need simply to “change the rhetoric they employ.”
Never forget that in Schumer’s world, as in Hillary Clinton’s world, there is no infringement too great to cross the line of their Second Amendment. To understand that fact is to reconcile Schumer’s big lie with his record.
From the enactment of the onerous Brady bill in 1993, to Bill Clinton’s “assault weapons” ban in 1994, to efforts to impose licensing and registration on law-abiding gun owners, to supporting gun seizures from law-abiding citizens in New Orleans, to opposing the NRA’s successful efforts to shut down lawsuits that are designed to bankrupt the lawful commerce of firearms, to the current effort to criminalize all now-legal private firearm transfers between law-abiding individuals. In his 18 years in the House of Representatives—and nearly that long in the Senate—there has hardly been a single legislative attack on the Second Amendment in which Schumer has not played a leading role.
As Americans who love freedom, we must work as never before to stop Schumer and his gun-ban cabal from wresting control of the U.S. Senate.
At our polling places this November, each and every citizen who cherishes the Bill of Rights must vote to elect pro-Second Amendment U.S. senators who will stop Schumer and his thirst for power over our freedom’s future.
