It would really take a book to explain this, but I'll try to keep it simple. In between Obama's insistence that rural whites cling to their guns out of frustration, and Hillary's sudden yearning for the days of Annie Oakley, I think something is getting overlooked.
This obsession with guns is not an American obsession, it's a Democratic Party obsession. How are Americans' obsessed with guns? It's quite difficult to be obsessed with something you've always had around. In fact, you start to take it for granted. Fifty years ago, this was an issue limited to a few oddball precincts, cities, and regions. This was far from the norm. It didn't become a national obsession until following the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963. It kicked into high gear after the assassinations of RFK and MLK, both in 1968.
That's when Lyndon Baines Johnson, at the instigation notably of Ted Kennedy, passed the first gun control legislation, which was supported curiously enough by Charlton Heston. Of course, as unfortunately happens to be the case more often than not, give some people an inch and they want a mile every time. Due to the increasing and suspiciously obtuse demands of gun control advocates, Heston bolted from the movement and became the hard core social conservative and Second Amendment advocate he is remembered as today. There's a lesson there somewhere.
So what is behind the Democratic Party obsession-not the American obsession-with guns? Whatever it is, they've been taken aback by the curious fact that most Americans are unwilling to give up their personal prerogative of self-defense in return for a raise in minimum wage once every decade or so.
So, what do they do? They try to reframe the debate. They are sudden staunch supporters of the Second Amendment, it seems. In fact, they have no problems with law-abiding citizens who are gun collectors, or who like to go hundting, or enjoy the "family tradition" of target shooting.
Listen to them sometime-carefully. In all these reassurances, you never hear them mention the rights of American citizens to have guns for the purpose of self-defense, of themselves and their families, inside their own homes or businesses.
To hear them tell it, the Second Amendment was crafted in order for people like Daniel Boone to settle places like Kentucky. He and his fellow pioneers would never have made it after crossing through the Cumberland Gap without their trusty muskets with which to hunt deer for food.
Of course, it also happens that Kentucky was quickly settled and became a state dependent on river trade and agriculture, even before it became the fifteenth state of the union in 1794. Hunting by this time was in fact not considered as vital to life in the western states as so many seem to assume today. At best, hunting augmented pioneer life. Few, if any at all, depended on it solely or even mainly for their sustenance.
The Second Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with hunting or target practice, nor does it take into consideration the whimsical hobby of "gun collecting". Amendment Number Two was written for the precise same purpose as Amendment Number One, and Amendments Number Two through Nine. It was meant to protect us from the potentially abusive grasping of tyrants not only foreign, but domestic-ie, the Federal Government. Those are just the facts.
An enemy of the state can come in many forms. It can come in the form of a foreign invader. It can come in the form of unelected and/or unaccountable domestic tyrants. Finally, it can take the form of the criminal element that exists unfortunately within all societies, and whose very existence, by their very natures, is a threat to the domestic tranquility.
Unfortunately, again, you will almost never hear a Democratic politician (nor for that matter most Republican ones) frame the debate in this matter. There are two reasons for this.
1. Most criminals from whom one might have occasion to protect oneself, whether black or white, have for the most part one thing in common. The majority of those who vote strangely tend to vote Democratic.
As important as this is, however, it pales in comparison to the importance of the following point.
2. An admission that people might, at any given point in time, find it necessary to defend themselves with guns against a criminal element, is tantamount to an admission that the government has failed to protect the citizens of the United States. It is a failure that reaches from the bottom level of local politics, on up through the state and federal levels.
It is not just an admission of the failure to fight crime, but a failure to combat the root causes of crime, those societal factors and conditions that breed the criminal element. The Republican Party wants to approach it from the corrective level after the fact. The Democratic Party seems to focus traditionally on solving the root causes, the problems of poverty and unemployment, with the added factors of race issues and other cultural factors.
Give them the power to solve your problems, and over time, they would suggest, the crime rate would drop to manageable levels. They will give you a Cops program with 100,000 cops on the streets of America. They will fund after-school programs aimed at targeting problem kids in troubled areas. They will have this and that program aimed at "uplifting" the poor. In time, this will solve the crime problem and so guns will be unnecessary.
You can still go dear hunting, though. No problem. Go along with us, and over time, everything will be just great, and crime will suddenly become a rarity throughout this great land of ours. Just trust us. Would we ever lie to you?
