The Elections of 2012: How Will We Stem the Gun-Ban Tide?

By Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President

The Coming Storm: Part III

Remember the tidal wave that devastated Indonesia seven years ago?

While Americans sat down to Christmas dinner, an earthquake off Sumatra sent a tsunami racing across the ocean faster than a 747, and carrying more energy than 1,500 Hiroshima bombs.

As the wave approached the coast, it slowed and rose into a wall of water that was 100 feet high in some places. It then plowed inland like a derailed train, bulldozing villages, flattening forests, drowning, destroying and washing away everything.

The Indonesians never saw it coming, so they weren’t able to act to save themselves. By the time they tried, disaster was upon them. As a result, nearly 250,000 men, women and children who might have been saved—if only they had taken action in time—were killed.

Today in the United States, just as in Indonesia, too many Americans don’t see—or don’t recognize—the tidal wave that’s bearing down on our nation and our freedoms.

If we don’t warn our fellow Americans in time, disaster could be upon us on Election Day—just nine short months from now.

That’s why I wrote to you last November and again this month, calling on you to help alert, educate and mobilize the American people to defeat Barack Obama before he dismantles our Second Amendment freedom—and all of our freedoms as Americans—completely and forever.

If, like thousands of other informed, active and patriotic Americans, you already responded to my letter, I thank you. If not, I urge you to renew or upgrade your NRA membership or make a contribution toward defending freedom now.

We’re running out of time. That’s why NRA is “All In” for the 2012 election, and why you must be “All In” with the NRA.

Most Important Election In U.S. History

It might seem like a stretch to compare an election to one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.

This year’s election could prove the most disastrous in the history of this country. Why? Because this election will decide whether Americans remain free. 

There’s no simpler, more accurate or exact way to say it—it’s all or nothing. 

Either we defeat Barack Obama and retain all the benefits of our pro-gun victories over the past 30 years—from the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, to the Right-to-Carry revolution, Castle Doctrine, hunter protection and landmark victories in the U.S. Supreme Court—or we lose this election and lose it all. 

Everything you and I, and gun owners across America have fought to achieve over the past three decades could be lost as a result of just one presidential election. It’s not just firearm freedom that’s endangered—all of our freedoms are on the line.

In so many ways, Obama is leading our country straight to the dependence, lawlessness, unchecked government power—and the tyranny it invariably leads to—from which our Founding Fathers fled, and most feared and tried to prevent from ever returning to America by writing our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

That’s what I mean when I say “all or nothing.” This year’s election will literally be a struggle for the survival of freedom in America. And America’s first freedom—your Second Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms—is very likely the first that will fall as a result of Obama’s re-election. After all, Obama has spent his entire career seeking to effectively eliminate your Right to Keep and Bear Arms. History proves it.

Obama’s Secret War On Second Amendment Freedom

Obama won’t admit his anti-gun agenda, but his record speaks for itself.

Within a week of his election to the White House in 2008, Obama’s “transition team” posted several elements of his gun-ban agenda on the Internet—at change.gov—but then abruptly deleted the web page.

Since then, whenever the Obama administration has dropped its guard and revealed its true intent to ban firearms, it has quickly backed down to restore a facade of sanity.

For example, in 2009, less than a month after he was confirmed as attorney general, Eric Holder admitted that his boss wanted to ban your semi-automatic firearms. Then he quickly backed off.

In 2010, top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency told anti-hunting activists the agency had the power to impose a ban on your lead ammunition. Then they quickly backed off.

In 2011, the Department of Interior announced that it was considering bans to stop you from target shooting on public lands. Then it quickly backed off.

The motive behind this madness is clear. Obama and company are engaged in a conspiracy of public deception intended to:

1. Lull gun owners into a false sense of security to decimate the ranks of groups like the NRA and neutralize gun owners as a political force in elections and, thereby;
    
2. Win re-election to a second term in the White House, at which point they will be immune from elections and free to consolidate and misuse their ever-increasing power to;
    
3. Excise the Second Amendment from our Bill of Rights forever through legislation, litigation, regulation, executive orders, judicial fiat, international treaties and every lever of unchecked power that they can wrest from all three branches of government.

And the key to their success lies in keeping gun owners like you in the dark. Make no mistake: Barack Obama has spent his entire political career engaged in a stealthy assault on your Right to Keep and Bear Arms:

• 1996: Obama endorsed a total ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of all handguns. 

• 1998: Obama endorsed a ban on the sale or transfer of all semi-automatic firearms.

• 1999: Obama supported a 500 percent increase in federal taxes on ammunition.

• 2003: Obama voted to ban single-shot, over-under and side-by-side shotguns.

• 2004: Obama said the right to carry should be banned nationwide.

Obama even said you shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun in your home for self-defense!

It’s true: Before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Washington, D.C.’s ban on firearms in the home for self-defense, Obama had the gall to say that the ban was constitutional.

Worse yet, when the Illinois legislature voted on a bill that would exempt residents from prosecution for violating a local handgun ban if they used their handguns for self-defense in their own homes, Obama voted against the bill!

Once in the White House, Obama filled his cabinet with the most rabid anti-gun and radical anti-hunting extremists ever seen in Washington.

When he was Bill Clinton’s “gun czar” in 1998, Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge for a massive new ban on imported semi-auto rifles. One of his henchmen bragged at the time, “We’re bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns.”

Obama’s “regulation czar” Cass Sunstein is an animal “rights” zealot who believes hunting should be outlawed and animals should have the “right” to file lawsuits.

Attorney General Eric Holder was the Clinton administration’s point man on gun control, and he filed a “friend of the court” brief in the Supreme Court’s historic Heller case claiming that you have no individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms!

That’s just the beginning.

As soon as he had the chance, President Obama set about stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with anti-gun justices he could trust to reverse our monumental victories in the Heller and McDonald cases.

Judging from their anti-gun histories, it appears that’s exactly what Obama’s nominees—Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—will do. They are among the most rabidly anti-gun U.S. Supreme Court justices in American history.

I could fill 10 more pages detailing how Barack Obama has positioned his chess men to deliver the death blow to your Right to Keep and Bear Arms, but my point is this: Our freedoms cannot and will not survive four more years of Obama.

Last Rites For America’s First Freedom?

If he wins a second term in the White House, Obama will be free to wage his war on your Right to Keep and Bear Arms openly and with impunity. Before his second term is finished, he’ll very likely get to choose at least three more U.S. Supreme Court justices. 

Voting with anti-gun Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, three new justices will command an anti-gun majority on the Court for the rest of their lives. Who might Obama choose for his next U.S. Supreme Court nominees? 

For a clue, just look at those Obama has been grooming for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia—the traditional stepping-stone to the U.S. Supreme Court:

1. Caitlin Halligan, whose nomination was blocked in the senate last December, was New York state’s lead government lawyer in 2001 when she tried to bankrupt America’s firearm industry through baseless, politically motivated lawsuits. Both inside and outside the courtroom, Halligan strongly supported that litigation. She filed briefs in federal court arguing that the law protecting America’s firearm industry from frivolous lawsuits was unconstitutional. And in a 2003 speech, she called for “handgun manufacturers [to be held] liable for criminal acts committed with handguns.”
    
2. Debo Adegbile, who Obama has reportedly been quietly moving toward the vestibule of the U.S. Supreme Court, is also an anti-gun zealot. As director of litigation for the naacp Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., Adegbile co-authored an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court’s gun-ban case, District of Columbia v. Heller. Among other things, Adegbile’s brief argued that:“... the right protected by the Second Amendment is one that exists only in the context of a lawfully organized militia.

“The drafters of the Second Amendment surely did not intend to protect an individual’s right to ‘keep and bear’ only the deadliest weapons technologically possible in a given era.”

If Obama wins re-election, expect more gun-banning, freedom-destroying treaties coming from the United Nations with Obama’s full support.

He’s already called on the Senate to ratify the Organization of American States firearms treaty known as CIFTA, which would force you to register every firearm and round of ammunition you own in an international database.

And now that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has voiced Obama’s support for the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty—reversing the official U.S. position—you can bet he’ll sign that treaty the first chance he gets, too.

If Obama wins re-election, expect four more years of the same arrogance, overreach, contempt and corruption of the rule of law that have characterized this administration since Inauguration Day 2009.

Expect more orders, like the gun-registration scheme the Obama administration unilaterally imposed in four Southwestern states last year—all without congressional legislation or approval. If Obama wins re-election, expect it in all 50 states.

As Obama recently decreed, “We can no longer wait for Congress. ... Where Congress won’t act, I will.”

So expect more administration regulations and rules that let Obama make an end-run around the legislative process through schemes like those laid out in New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Blueprint for Federal Action,” a 40-point gun-control package designed to be enacted by the president alone, without approval from anyone.

Expect more administration-created “problems” to be solved by the administration’s gun-ban “solutions,” like the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” operation, which supplied Mexico’s drug cartels with thousands of illegal guns that were later linked to the murders of at least one U.S. law enforcement officer and 300 people in Mexico.

It’s All Or Nothing, Now Or Never: All In

Make no mistake, a second term for Barack Obama would spell disaster not just for firearm freedom, but for all the freedoms we enjoy as Americans.  I know that as an informed, involved and active NRA member, you know that. 

But far too many Americans don’t see the danger. And if we don’t alert them to take action now, a tsunami of almost unimaginable destructiveness could crush and wash away our freedoms on Election Day, just nine months from now.

That’s why I urge you to help the NRA alert the American people to take action before it’s too late. See the sidebar below for more details on what you can do. Together, if we act in time, we must, we can and we will save our nation. Be “All In” with the NRA.