Anti-NRA Activists Should Be Careful What They Wish For

by Tom Knighton: Right now, the National Rifle Association is under fire. The largest gun rights organization is being blasted over something it had nothing to do with. After all, the shooter in Parkland, Florida wasn’t an NRA member. The NRA didn’t put the gun in his hands or the evil in his mind. The NRA didn’t keep the deputies outside the school as the carnage was taking place.

But the NRA is getting blamed for it.

Anti-gun crusaders have been going after the NRA for years, but now they’re really working toward trying to destroy the organization. They want to see the NRA destroyed. They believe that the NRA’s death will open the floodgates and allow any manner of gun control to pass through Congress.

They should be careful what they wish for.

You see, while many of us are NRA members, there are more than a handful of gun rights activists who take serious issue with the NRA. The problem? The NRA is far too willing to subvert our rights in exchange for political capital.

For example, take the NRA’s response to Las Vegas and bump stocks.

The NRA was willing to deal on bump stocks. From a political standpoint, that’s smart. You can deal with bump stocks–something few of us really fool around with–and get something we all want like, say, national reciprocity. There’s a case to be made for that.

But on the flip side, it’s giving up something we already have for something we should have already had. It’s giving ground to the anti-gun hystericals who are convinced the sky is falling.

In short, the NRA is really too squishy for many of our tastes.

If the leftists get their way and the NRA is disbanded–which is about as likely as Jessica Alba showing up at my front door with a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel Reserve and the OK from my wife–they are convinced they’ll finally win.

What they don’t get is that the NRA’s power has always been in their numbers. They reached a critical mass where even those of us who think they’re a little too willing to deal still feel obligated to back them up.

But if that disappears, gun owners aren’t just going away. We’re simply going to go somewhere else, probably to the Gun Owners of America or a similar group.

Then that group will be the voice of the millions of gun owners in this country. They’ll fill the power vacuum created by the left successfully shutting down the NRA, and they won’t be nearly as willing to deal.

Whereas the NRA is willing to sit down and talk with its opponents, the new “gun lobby” will have more of a “take no prisoners” approach. They’ll begin pressuring lawmakers to step right or face a primary defeat, and they’ll have the power to push that through. They’ll make certain no one can back an anti-gun bill and still keep their pro-gun credentials.

It’ll be scorched earth in Washington when it comes to guns, and there won’t be an effort to play nice with the left on any level. There won’t be any willingness to debate.

Instead, there will only be the millions of gun owners who are through playing around.

Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.
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Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger at Bearing Arms. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia and contributes to PJ Media.

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