Campaign Action
The primary reason the United States does not have common-sense laws seeking to prevent would-be domestic terrorists from obtaining the weapons of mass murder is because the domestic terrorism lobby remains one of the most powerful forces in American politics.
Attention is being thrust back on the gun lobby as lawmakers give gun control measures a fresh look in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting – the deadliest in modern U.S. history. Gun rights groups overwhelmingly support GOP candidates, contributing $5.9 million into Republican campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, compared with $106,000 to those of Democrats. It’s also the most money gun lobbyists have given in a campaign year since at least 1990.
The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks money in politics, found that in 2016 more than half of the members of the House of Representatives — or 232 of the 435 — received money from gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America. That money went disproportionately to Republicans. Only nine Democrats received campaign contributions from these groups.
The National Rifle Association, in their magazines and videos and in the speeches of their primary spokescreatures, is not shy about the reasons they believe their members need guns. It is not for sport or for hunting: it is because on some particular future day, their members may need to murder other human beings and the nation needs to provide them the necessary tools when that day comes. It may be due to a "societal collapse", in which members of the "inner cities" come to good, wholesome neighborhoods to loot or pillage and you need to murder them. It may be because ISIS may appear at any moment in your hometown, and in such numbers that the federal government cannot muster a response but Joe and Bob from down the street, who have stocked tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition between them, will push back the terrorist group and reclaim the cul-de-sac.
It may be, according to their own suppositions, because a day may come when it is time to murder members of the federal government. This is typically phrased with references to the tree of liberty and the supposition that some named politician or government agency is teetering on the brink of dictatorship, a dictatorship that can only be forestalled by the members of their organization executing whichever target of opportunity presents itself at the time. The target is left to the discretion of each individual member: After each incident in which an anti-government crackpot murders police officers, federal workers, or members of a religious or ethnic minority, the National Rifle Association first remains silent, then allows that these particular murders were not the ones the group's magazines and videos and spokescreatures had been advocating for, then presses lawmakers to do nothing to prevent identical murders in the future because the tree of liberty may, in another year, or five, or ten, need an apocalyptic soaking and the actions of those "good" murderers may be justified that next time around.
And the Gun Owners of America is a group founded because its leader believed the National Rifle Association had gone too soft.
That they can make these arguments to the nation's elected leaders and have a nontrivial number of those elected leaders themselves parrot the claim that at some point, some future person who sits in the same office and uses the same desk may need murdering is evidence of how deep-seated his notion of justifiable terrorism continues to be inside our own nation. There were some who believed the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a good thing, because in the eyes of his opponents he was both malevolent and threatening the very fabric of our society. There were those that believed the Kennedy assassination was a good thing, because he espoused this or that preference that their own ideology found distasteful. We have not yet outgrown the notion that acts of domestic terrorism, whether the bombing of medical clinics or lynching of black troublemakers, may sometimes be "necessary" in order to curtail rights that one or another ideological group disapproves of, and which the government is not in their minds properly curtailing themselves. There are plenty of Americans alive today who witnessed those past acts, and approved of them.
Six million dollars in donation cash does not seem like it would be enough to purchase a Congress, but an exhaustive look at favored politicians' responses to each new mass murder appears to demonstrate that aggressive inaction is a cheap purchase indeed. A few thousand dollars might limit a congressman’s response to thoughts and prayers; a few tens of thousands will get you an influential leader willing to personally help bury any more substantive talk of action with talk of freedom and it not being the right time for public complaints.
Not because American sportsmen need their guns or hunters need a particular kind of accessory or ammunition, mind you. But because it may someday be necessary to murder large numbers of other Americans, not just a handful but a great number, all at once, and quickly, and each individual would-be hero or terrorist must be personally allowed to make the decision on when that day should come and be granted whichever tools they might desire to best carry it out. That is what the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America take to television screens to proclaim. They are not subtle about it.