If the only tool you have is a hammer, they say, everything will look like a nail.
And if the only tool you have is a gun, everyone will look like a gun grabber.
Who can forget the NRA's depiction of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents as gun grabbing "jack booted thugs" ten years ago? It cost them the membership of George H. W. Bush and other prominent members.
"To attack Secret Service agents or ATF people or any government law enforcement people as...wanting to attack law-abiding citizens is a vicious slander on good people," wrote Bush in his resignation letter. 1
Two years ago, it was the Sierra Club who were gun grabbers as the NRA refused an invitation to work with them on the shared goal of habitat conservation.
"If the Sierra Club's endorsed candidates had their way, private ownership of firearms would be banned," explained NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. 2
Last summer it was delegates from the UN small arms conference who were going to grab NRA guns--some time after leaving Darfur and before going to Lebanon.
And a few weeks later the gun grabbers were a rival gun organization, the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA)--"a front group that claims pro-gun and prohunting credentials, despite longstanding and current ties to a multitude of gun-ban groups," said NRA's Christopher Cox. 3
Especially since AHSA was eyeing the estimated 77 to 90 million US gun owners who aren't NRA members. (NRA membership hovers at three to four million.) 4
Some NRA members and would be members are fed up with the gun grabbing alarmism-cum-paranoia.
"There is currently no movement within the Democratic Party to do anything with respect to gun control," wrote one commentator after an article about the AHSA on the Washington Monthly web site. "Yet the NRA bombards its members with constant, hysterical messages that the Democrats are going to take their guns away. Why tell that lie?"
"The NRA is and for many years has been nothing more than a Republican lobbying organization that [is] using its members' dues money to promote the GOP," wrote another commentator. "When you have a core membership that somehow equates gun ownership with a macho self sufficient image, they will believe anything. Tell them the Democrats want to take their guns and nullify their 'God given constitutional right' and they flock to the polls."
Columnists have also heard wolf cried too many times.
"I have no deep convictions on the fractious gun issue other than I favor tough regulation of handguns and want assault rifles limited to military use," writes gun owner and sportsman Alan Guebert in the Prairie Star. 5
"I do, however, despise gun advocacy groups who preach fear over fact--gun bans-- to sway elections. Their standard tactic is sweeping incrementalism: 'If they ban assault rifles today, they'll ban BB guns tomorrow.'
That's unsupportable hogwash. Forty years of gun legislation hasn't restrained one child's BB trigger finger or banned one true sporting gun."
