Hillary Clinton & NRA -- Gun Control | National Review Online
by Charles C. W. Cooke October 23, 2015
‘What is wrong with us,” Hillary Clinton inquired bitterly in Florida this month, “that we cannot stand up to the NRA and the gun lobby, and the gun manufacturers they represent?” She struck a hero’s pose: “We need to act and we need to build a movement. It’s infuriating!”
Implicit in Clinton’s lament was a serious charge: That the “us” in the equation represents the majority of American voters, and that the “NRA” represents an insidious force that has been successful in thwarting that majority’s will. Such presumptions are all-but ubiquitous in progressive-leaning circles. The NRA, President Obama told Marc Maron confidently in August of this year, has developed such an “extremely strong” “grip” on Congress that even “common-sense” reforms cannot make it into law. This, Obama submits, is democratically unjust. “I would particularly ask America’s gun owners,” he griped in a recent press conference, “to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it is speaking for you.”
Seductive as it might be, there is little within the facts to recommend this approach. As Gallup confirmed just this week, the NRA is not a fringe organization that has managed somehow to impose a greatly undeserved octopus’s grip, but a mainstream plank of American civil society with approval ratings of which the vast majority of national politicians could only dream. “Despite a year of blistering criticism,” the polling firm notes, “58% in the U.S. have a favorable opinion” of the NRA — a number that “includes the highest recording of ‘very favorable’ opinions (26%) since Gallup began asking this question in 1989.” That trend line is moving upwards.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426014/hillary-clinton-nra-popularity-gun-control
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426014/hillary-clinton-nra-popularity-gun-control
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