It’s Not The NRA Stopping Gun Control, It’s America’s 100 Million Gun Owners

During the Reign of Terror, the most bloodthirsty member of France’s revolutionary government, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, a “vehement, emotional and vulgar man, craving the center of the stage, dramatizing and gesticulating and bellowing when excited” (Ch. 7), called for the executions of “merchants.”

For Adolf Hitler and the German national socialist workers party, the enemy was instead “the Jew.” For Joseph Stalin, it was “the capitalists.” For Mao Zedong, “the bourgeoisie,” “the intellectuals,” and “the reactionary classes.” And for Che Guevara, “rich landowners.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson cannot be placed in the same category as those miscreants. Nevertheless, when the Gun Control Act of 1968 didn’t require the registration of all guns and the licensing of all gun owners as he had hoped, LBJ singularly blamed “the gun lobby.”

President Bill Clinton more specifically blamed “the NRA” when, after Congress imposed the firearm background check system and a nearly make-believe “ban” on “assault weapons,” 62 Democrats, including Speaker of the House Tom Foley, were defeated in the 1994 congressional elections, giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954.