While it’s fair to be horrified after someone walks onto a school campus and wantonly starts killing people, it’s time for liberals to realize that blaming the millions of law-abiding gun owners for someone else’s crime is not the answer. So argues Ken Blackwell, a member of the Policy Board of the American Civil Rights Union.
As criminals have gotten bolder in the crimes they commit, it is fair to debate ways to tackle the problem. Where, Blackwell asks, is the rage at the government failures that allowed an angry young man to slay more than a dozen students?
Rather than addressing the underlying cause of the problem—as the NRA advocates—the knee-jerk reaction of the gun control fanatics is to target lawful gun owners. This in the past has included calling the NRA names or otherwise bad-mouthing the nation’s premier defender of Second Amendment rights. But after the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, the anti-gunners launched a more concerted effort to penalize law-abiding gun owners: they pressured corporations to revoke group benefits they once extended to members of the NRA.
Blackwell asks who that penalizes, and he opines about whether the @boycottnra movement might actually push people to join the NRA because, “This is America. With their rights under attack, people naturally reject the bullies and take a stand for liberty.”
Instead of taking a misguided and simplistic approach that punishes the many for the actions of a few, he says we should turn our attention to the harder task. “We need to face some hard truths together to find solutions to complex problems involving mental illness, law enforcement failure and more.”
