Foreign Policy by the NRA? The Prospect of Gingrich and Bolton.

[DanTex]

110. I disagree.

Starting with a "clean slate" on the issue sounds a lot to me like trying to placate the NRA crazies by caving on gun control. However, Democrats have been caving on things for years and it doesn't seem to have helped much at all. Obama, for example, has actually been a very business-friendly president, yet wall street hates him, and he still gets called a Socialist. And Obama has done basically nothing on gun control, but that doesn't stop the NRA from claiming that he's still somehow conspiring to ban guns. In general, what happens when you cave to the right-wingers is that the right-wingers move further to the right, and nothing else changes much.

Especially on guns, which is such an emotional/identity issue for the right-wing base. Obama was quite right when he pointed out that people "cling" to guns in the face of economic and social discontent. I think most pro-gunners even understand that the current lax gun laws are actually bad policy -- the statistics in terms of gun deaths in the US vs the rest of the developed world don't really leave much to the imagination.

But, for a certain strain of spiteful conservatives, gun militancy is a way of saying FU to the supposedly liberal elite. Is it really necessary to be able to buy a gun at a gun show without a background check? Of course not. That's just stupid. But the fact that the NRA has been able to push "gun rights" to these absurd extremes, even at the cost of thousands of lives every year, is a rallying point, and a point of pride, for so many right-wing ignoramuses.

If the Dems were to just cave, and give the NRA everything it wants, the NRA would simply make increasingly crazy demands, to the point where basic human decency would entail resisting. In fact, I would argue that we have already passed this point.

If progressives start caving every time they run into a little resistance, or anytime the Supreme Court has a right-wing majority, etc., then we would never make any progress on anything. Why not cave on abortion as well, after all, that would make a lot of wingnuts happy. And then start teaching creationism in schools. And privatize social security. And give up on global warming. Etc.