From America’s 1st Freedom: https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2016/12/30/change-the-culture/
Friday, December 30, 2016
Excerpted from the new book Shall Not Be Infringed—The New Assaults On Your Second Amendment by former NRA President David A. Keene and Thomas L. Mason
This feature appears in the January ‘17 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
The real goal of the gun control advocacy community and the politicians they support is to change what they like to call the “American gun culture.” They want to make the shooting sports, self-defense and gun ownership as socially unacceptable as smoking. Sometimes they even admit this is their real goal.
In 1995, while former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was serving as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, he spoke to the Women’s National Democratic Club. C-SPAN 2’s tape of this event shows Holder marveling at the change in attitudes toward smoking that has been engineered over the years and urging gun-controllers to learn about how that change occurred. “You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But, over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.”
Holder said what worked with smokers could work with gun owners, if we “really brainwash people to think about guns in a vastly different way.” He said the goal had to be to make people “ashamed” to own guns. Speaking about a legal activity and as an attorney for the law, the future attorney general asserted, “What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that’s not acceptable. It’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”
On Dec. 22, 2015, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a leading legislative gun control advocate even before his election as the commonwealth’s attorney general, announced that he was canceling Virginia’s reciprocity agreements with some 25 other states on the grounds that their concealed-carry permit requirements were not as tough as those imposed by the commonwealth. Herring even admitted at the time that this was part of a national effort to find ways to bypass the legislature’s hostility to gun control measures. This change, had it been implemented, would have made it illegal for some 6.3 million citizens from the affected states to visit or travel through Virginia with a concealed firearm. South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming immediately announced, in retaliation, that they would no longer honor Virginia’s 420,000 concealed-carry permits.
At the press conference announcing his decision, Herring was asked by a Washington Post reporter if he or his office could name a single crime committed in Virginia by an out-of-state concealed-carry permit holder that would have been prevented had he acted earlier. The answer: a simple “No.” The commonwealth of Virginia’s top elected law enforcement official was announcing a “solution” to a nonexistent problem and was willing, in the process, to impose a burden on almost 7 million American gun owners. His announcement had far less to do with a concern for the safety of Virginia citizens than it did with his hostility to gun ownership and desire to help “change the culture.”
Continue reading at: https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2016/12/30/change-the-culture/
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