Standing Guard | Why The Democratic Party Turned Against Your Freedom

Wayne LaPierre

by Wayne LaPierre: The mainstream media likes to insinuate that the NRA is a partisan organization. It isn’t. Politicians earn their grades and endorsements from us (nrapvf.org/grades) based on how they vote and on what their positions are with regard to the Second Amendment. It’s that simple. A politician’s grade has nothing to do with their party affiliation.

If it seems as if the NRA is partisan today, this is because the Democratic Party is a much smaller tent than it used to be. When Barack Obama first won the presidency in 2008, for example, there was a sizeable block of Democratic members of Congress who understood that our Second Amendment freedom is a good thing that must be protected. Many of those Democrats, however, lost their seats in Congress as Obama pushed the party left.

This purge of Democrats in Congress who vote for your Second Amendment rights has continued. Today, the party has pushed out almost all of it pro-freedom politicians. By 2016, in fact, the Democratic Party’s official platform, under Hillary Clinton, was more anti-Second Amendment than it had ever officially been before.

All of the candidates currently fighting for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president want to ban popular semi-automatic rifles; they want to bankrupt America’s gun manufacturers by once again giving frivolous lawsuits legal cover; they want to nominate judges who don’t believe the Second Amendment is an individual right and so much more.

These extreme positions aren’t even smart politics. Past polling has indicated the number of union households with guns in them in the United States goes from a low of 40% in California, to a high of 60–70–80% in states like West Virginia, Michigan and North Carolina. These gun owners in those states want their Second Amendment rights protected. When Democrats go against the Second Amendment, they go against a large part of their base.

This isn’t true of the Democratic Party in every local election, and I have hope that the Democrats will come to their senses. Nevertheless, the polarization on this issue, which again is coming from the left, is not helping us.

So why did the Democratic Party decide that its own party’s platform should blame law-abiding gun owners for the actions of criminals? Why did their party’s elites purposely expunge more rational opinions from their political party with regard to this constitutional issue?

Here are two big reasons.

First, mainstream-media outlets located in big cities along the coasts dominate the conversation on the left. These left-leaning media outlets aren’t interested in honestly investigating gun-related issues. They are instead solely focused on pushing an anti-gun narrative. They don’t host guests who can humanize the freedom side of this issue; for example, they have little interest in having a woman on who just had to use her self-defense firearm to defend herself or her children. What these media outlets are interested in is pushing gun control. One way they do this is by helping candidates who express anti-gun opinions.

The other big reason is these politicians follow the money. Michael Bloomberg is a good example of the left’s deep-pocketed elites. Bloomberg has long used his $50-plus billion war chest to further restrict or outright take away your right to keep and bear arms. He is now in the race for president, and he is spending big. Whether Bloomberg wins the Democratic Party’s nomination or not, his money is a real factor in this election.

Many of the Democrat’s big donors hold fundraisers in places like Beverly Hills and New York City’s Upper East Side. These far-left donors have pushed the Democratic Party further left—especially on issues like Second Amendment rights. These wealthy Democratic donors live behind walls and have armed security—they live separate, elite lives—and they look out over America and think that all those little people between the coasts should not have the Constitutional right to own a firearm nor should they be entitled to the same level of self-protection they themselves enjoy. Voters need to remind them—as they did to Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016—that American freedom should not be a partisan issue, and Americans will always stand and fight for their Second Amendment freedoms.
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Wayne LaPierre is NRA's Executive Vice President and contributes to the America's 1st Freedom.

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