The media's latest meme is the rise of the gun issue in presidential politics. Gee, where have they been?
By elevating guns as the most prominent domestic wedge issue for November 2016, President Barack Obama has stuck what may be a mortal dagger into Hillary Clinton's political posterior.
The relatively few registered voters who care enough to vote for gun control are already lined up against any Republican or conservative candidate. Does this issue really fire up their nanny-state base? Hardly, but let's give the devil their due — who cares?
The release of Obama's petulant and feckless regurgitation of his three-year-old Executive Orders — now called "Executive Actions," whatever that is — will result in the uber-energizing of the pro-gun rights movement beyond the realm where no gun rights group has ever gone before!
Someone ought to present both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with the joint "Salesmen Award of the Decade."
They have collectively achieved what advertisers could only dream about. Their ill-informed, uninformed and intentionally misinformed, anti-gun rhetoric is a caustic shot directly across our bow. If it's political jihad that they want to wage on this, the most quintessential of all American domestic issues, then it's political jihad they shall receive.
Gun rights matter because over 150 million of us either own firearms or live with someone who does. We believe it's better to own a gun and not need one than to need one and not have one! We know that criminals steal guns and don't politely undergo NICS background checks at retail shops or at gun shows. We viscerally understand that gun rights are the embodiment of our particularly unique American experience.
We instinctively comprehend that a government that no longer trusts its own citizens (us) is no longer worthy of the trust we once placed in them. We, the people who vote, pay taxes, work hard, and have never misused the guns we've owned for generations owe a debt to the new national Democrats for presumptuously informing us that every new restriction they propose is both "common sense" and "reasonable." Thus they suggest we are neither.
Really?
Listen up you pundits of false wisdom, restricting our guns IS restricting our freedom, not the criminals and certainly not the terrorists. So you want this election to be about guns? You want to pick and choose which of our freedoms you can magnanimously eviscerate today?
We Americans used to be innocent until proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt." Now gun owners are suspects merely because we own the very tools used to protect ourselves and our liberty.
Sorry Hillary and Barack, you have placed all our freedoms at risk and their ultimate guardian is the Second Amendment. You know, Bob Dylan said it best Mr. President, "Don't criticize what you can't understand."
You wanted to wake up your anti-gun, anti-freedom base — you have, and the rest of us along with it. It's not about guns anymore. You the government are our servants, we are not yours — get it? Guns are merely a symbol of this struggle, and, once unleashed, symbols are powerful animals indeed.
We may have to look back after this November and say "thank you" to Barack and Hillary for motivating the millions of us who had stayed silent, dispirited, and uninvolved until now.
We at the Independent Firearm Owners Association ("IFoA") may feel obligated to give our Motivator of the Millennium Award to the former President and his former Sec. of State.
Friends, as they say in Chicago — "Vote early and vote often!" Vote like your country, your nation, and our entire heritage depends upon it. It does.
Richard Feldman is president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association.
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