Less than a week ago, before my nine-year-old daughter scampered
down a school hallway and into her classroom, I passed a BB rifle
to her through my car window. Neither one of us was accosted by
security guards, reported to emergency system operators, or met
with fearful stares from the teachers helping children open car
doors that morning.
I’d like to think that the handful of people who witnessed our
exchange know the difference between a BB gun and a so-called
“assault rifle,” but I must admit that their collective poise had
more to do with remembering an assignment to re-enact the Battle
of the Alamo on the playground than anything else.
An intrepid fourth-grade teacher trying to make the last exploits
of Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, and William Travis more vivid for
children with few ties to Texas had asked her students to bring
toy weapons to school. As a “teachable moment,” the re-enactment
was a rousing success. Jane couldn’t wait to tell me afterward
that she was “the last American alive, even though we all had to
die.” She also reported that 200 Alamo defenders had fought 6,000
attackers, and when she switched to the Mexican side and got
“shot,” she died exclaiming “Ay, caramba!” That she learned that
expression from Bart Simpson rather than from her Mexican uncles,
and that the re-enactment lacked the solemnity of a Ken Burns
documentary, are trifles I’m willing to overlook.
He who has minions to run background checks on plumbers who
question his tax policy would not be as sanguine about playacting
military history. Worse, in the opinion of those coastal
Democrats who think the world of Barack Obama, I accelerated a
slide into redneck culture that same night, by taking my
ten-year-old son to a Scout troop meeting where boys just a
little older than he were excitedly planning a trip to a shooting
range.
LIKE THE TEENS and ‘tweens who have anchored American literature
from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn up through
Bertrand R. Brinley’s Mad Scientists’ Club, Richard
Bradford’s Red Sky at Morning, and Homer Hickam’s
Rocket Boys (October Sky), these Boy Scouts
were dazzled by the chance to earn merit badges for demonstrating
proficiency with rifles and shotguns.
There are good reasons to believe that the Second Amendment does
not get a comparable welcome from anyone in the Obama household.
Say what you want about the virtues of the NRA or the Appleseed Project, but a
lawyer
irritated by the free speech provisions in the First
Amendment cannot be expected to embrace the “shall not be
infringed” language of the Second Amendment, either.
Certainly Obama made a point of
saying that “if you have a gun in your house, I’m not taking
it.” He also let it be known that he agreed with the Supreme
Court’s finding in District of Columbia et al. v.
Heller. Like a majority of the justices in that case, Obama
now affirms that the right to bear arms applies to individuals.
Yet those head fakes toward the political center remain
unconvincing. Obama still leaves the impression that he
thinks of the Second Amendment as an embarrassment, rather than
as the earthly linchpin of everything else in the Bill of Rights.
His gun views are closer to those of folk singer Cheryl Wheeler
than to the gun views of Joe the Plumber, Todd the Snow Machine
Racer, and Charlton the late Actor.
Wheeler, long a staple of the acoustic music scene in the
northeast, smacks gun culture around in ways that would amuse
even “seven Spanish angels at the altar of the Son, who were
praying for the lovers in the Valley of the Gun.” She can often
be counted on to shift gears in her live sets by launching into a
look at how bitter gun-clingers prepare for a road trip.
The Wheeler song I’m thinking of depends on the image of a family
vehicle idling in some driveway while a matriarch offers sage
advice to relatives taking a last look around their property.
When the song was written, the matriarch was probably modeled on
Irene “Granny Clampett” Ryan of The Beverly Hillbillies.
These days, the lyrics fit Sarah Palin. The advice that Wheeler
belts out with all the toe-tapping sarcasm she can muster? “Don’t
forget the guns; you know exactly what I mean. Bring the pistol;
bring the Uzi, and the old AR-15. We don’t look for trouble, but,
by golly, if we’re in it, it’s nice to know we’re free to blow
nine hundred rounds a minute!”
SAY ONE THING for songwriter Wheeler: even being satirical, she
understands the concept of defensive gun use. The same cannot be
said for Barack Obama, whose “Obama for America” website confines
discussion of gun issues to a “Plan to Support the Rights and
Traditions of Sportsmen.” The plan evinces a desire to “protect
the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to
purchase, own, transport, and use guns,” but ignores substantive
Second Amendment discussion to focus on things like the
conserving wetlands and providing unspecified tax incentives for
conservation easements on private land.
Attempts to paint Obama as a groupie for a band called Bill Ayers
and the Unrepentant Socialists have educated conservatives to
some of what this particular community organizer did for the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Foundation, but his
eight-year affiliation with the Joyce Foundation remains
relatively unknown. In an open letter released October 15, gun
rights lobbyist and Illinois State Rifle Association Executive
Director Richard Pearson writes that “in all my years in
the Capitol I have never met a legislator who harbors more
contempt for the law-abiding firearm owner than does Barack
Obama.”
As a board member of the Joyce Foundation between 1994 and 2002,
Pearson writes, “Barack Obama wrote checks for tens of millions
of dollars to extremist gun control organizations such as the
Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence and the Violence Policy
Center.”
A story
by reporter Kenneth P. Vogel supports Pearson’s claims,
confirming that recipients of Joyce Foundation “gun violence”
grants totaling $21 million in the Obama years included groups
that “funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the
Second Amendment does not protect individual gun owners’ rights,”
as well as “two groups that advocated handgun bans.”
Combine that history with Obama’s ill-considered fondness for
judges who demonstrate empathy above all else, and his cockamamie
idea that strict adherence to limited government is a flaw in the
Constitution, and what you have might be the perfect rebuttal to
any campaign operatives trying to waste your time with
last-minute canvassing for the Democratic ticket, namely, “this
conversation isn’t helping my kids.”
If you’re feeling puckish, you might also voice support for
concealed-carry laws, or ask why so much of the Bill of Rights
seems to be above Barack Obama’s pay grade.
