“I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”
Man, the gun nuts pounce on quotes like this one. “It’s not a machine gun!” Would be the first predictably limp protest, because, yeah, gun nuts are that predictable. They’d rather have a contest to see who is more awesome by challenging liberals to correctly state what the “AR” in “AR15” stands for than have an actual dialogue about preventing gun deaths in the only nation on planet Earth that has this problem.
Next, they’d surely call whoever made such a statement a “gun grabber” or a “libtard” and mindlessly demonize them as emblematic of everything wrong with America.
Dana Loesch would take to Twitter and YouTube to bark and bray, lips sneered, about how such quotations from the “far left” are a call to arms in some mythic end times revolution in which the only defense is, you guessed it—more guns! More guns! More guns! Always MOAR GUNS!
NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre would stand at a podium and raise an 18th century musket over his head and yell some pithy shit like “…my cold dead hands!” or, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants!”…clearly attributing the aforementioned quote to the latter.
Crowds of gun nuts would mobilize against the “fringe leftist” who uttered the objectionable quote, dismissing it as something George Soros paid him to say, and they’d taunt and dare him to “come and take it!” as they waved their Gadsden flags like nine year olds playing Fort in their back yards.
But here’s the funny thing. The quote wasn’t uttered by Emma Gonzalez, or David Hogg, or any of the other Parkland shooting survivors. It wasn’t said by Michael Moore, or Rachel Maddow, or Barack Obama, or any of the other “most hated list” of communist, socialist, leftists the gun nut right despises.
The quote belongs to Ronald Wilson Reagan, patron saint of the modern republican party.
He followed up that doozy by signing his name under this formal declaration directed at the US House of Representatives:
“While we recognize that assault weapon legislation will not stop all assault weapon crime, statistics prove that we can dry up the supply of these guns, making them less accessible to criminals. We urge you to listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of these weapons."
Fucking lib snowflake, that Reagan, amirite?
That wasn’t ancient history either, it was penned in 1994, and Reagan’s support helped pass substantive laws like the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban that, from 1994-2004, substantially stopped mass killings (the only mass school shooting over that span of time was Columbine, in which two perpetrators used a collection of both guns and bombs). Also, funny thing: nobody really accused Reagan of being a gun grabbing enemy of America and the Second Amendment. Hmm.
The only things that have changed since Reagan went on the record with these comments are the NRA’s ability to leverage right wing media’s propaganda machine, the amount of dollars with which they have to buy off politicians, and the availability of a social media infrastructure that helps turn their followers into obedient and subservient sheep. It's been a rapid and vapid descent through the looking glass.
Reagan didn’t get a lot right during his eight years at the helm, but he did understand the need for gun control—he, himself, having been a victim of senseless gun violence. The nosedive of ignorance and hypocrisy the NRA and the conservative right have championed since that time has been stupefying. And our kids have been paying the price.