Google “Organizing for Action” (OFA), supposedly a non-partisan, grassroots group, and you get www.barackobama.com. Likewise, click on the preceding link, and it takes you to the Organizing for Action website. Despite OFA’s innocuous-sounding name, the Chicago-based group is an arm of the Obama political machine, the successor to a similar Obama store-front put together after his 2008 election, Organizing for America. Whatever the group’s name happens to be at a given moment, fulfilling the president’s goal of “fundamentally transforming America” remains its mission.
On Monday, Obama’s current operation sent an email to supporters urging them to hold events advocating gun control on December 14, the one-year anniversary of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg’s euphemistically-named group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, along with Moms Demand Action, are releasing a 60-second version and a 30-second version of a TV ad portraying a person approaching an elementary school with a duffel bag, as students observe a moment of silence for the victims who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary. The obvious implication is that the gun control laws that one or both groups support could prevent the type of crime committed at Sandy Hook.
Concurrently, Vice-President Joe Biden sent an email encouraging organizers of the OFA events to center them on support for a “universal background checks” law that would prohibit private sales of firearms without a background check and for increasing penalties for illegal gun trafficking.
Dovetailing with the Bloomberg ads, Biden implied that imposing “universal checks” and increasing trafficking penalties would prevent terrible crimes like those committed at Sandy Hook; in the Aurora, Colorado, theater; in the Sikh temple in Oak Park, Wisconsin; and at Virginia Tech University.
Like so much of what underlies the gun prohibition movement, the premise behind Bloomberg’s ad and Biden’s message is simply not true. In each of the crimes the gun control supporters point to, the guns involved were bought legally, from a firearm dealer, with a background check. No trafficking was involved. And the guns used in the Sandy Hook murders were stolen from their lawful owner, who was also murdered by the perpetrator.
Obama and Biden are additionally claiming that Obama’s 23 executive actions, announced earlier this year, have helped “make sure our families and communities are safe.” But there’s no evidence to support that claim. Furthermore, even before the “actions” were announced, America’s murder rate had fallen to lower than any time since 1963, and its total violent crime rate had fallen to lower than any time since 1970.
Obama and Bloomberg are pulling out the stops, knowing that support for gun control–which rose in the days after Sandy Hook–is waning. Not only was the Obama gun control agenda defeated in the Senate last spring, a new CNN poll shows that support for gun control has dropped by six points since January, and a majority of Americans now oppose stricter gun laws.
For proponents of the Second Amendment, things are moving in the right direction. Yet the president, with the assistance of America’s most meddlesome billionaire, remains determined to push his gun control agenda and will exploit any occasion, no matter how crassly, to promote it. It’s going to be a long three years that will require your eternal vigilance and increased activism as we work to make Americans safer by ensuring enforcement of gun laws, by reforming our mental health system, by working to prevent the inevitable assaults on our liberty, and by electing pro-Second Amendment lawmakers to office in next year’s elections.
