I've been worried lately about what sort of effective backlash there might be from NRA members and supporters to the political drubbing they're taking after Lapierre's insane and almost comically evil speech. I wrote about my concerns in a blog post entitled Progressives Should Avoid Gun Policy Debate Devolving into Culture War.
Here on DailyKos I'll put it more bluntly. The progressive movement needs to absolutely lose the arrogant stereotypes of southerners and rural westerners and midwesterners which are so fun to invoke whenever a chance to use it arises. I find myself making the same mistake myself. I'm a 61 year old white southern male with a thick southern accent, and when some idiot Tea Partier with a southern accent is interviewed, I focus on his or her southerness rather than the idiotic contents of the works.
The first reason we need to drop it is that it interferes with attempts to bring a segment of the U.S. population into the progressive fold which should logically be part of our coalition. I don't know if you've noticed, but white southerners are not heavily represented in the 1%. Neither are rural Indianans or Kansans. It's difficult to build a case that someone should be an ally when they are being parodied as hillbillies, hicks and rednecks.
The second reason, and this is more directly relevant to the gun control issue and its potential backlash, is the the Southern Strategy kicked the ass of the progressive movement for forty years, and still has life left in it. Southerners are by their very nature fanatics. It's in our DNA. The NRA and gun manufacturers can use that to mobilize a large number of emailers, phone callers, and letter writers to frighten politicians out of their newly grown backbones on the gun control issue.
We should focus on the obvious and winnable things. Restrictions on magazine size, a ban on “cop killer” bullets which pierce body armor, more extensive restrictions on where a person can carry a loaded firearm, a resumption of research on gun violence and gun injuries by the CDC, and public availability of BATF data on the weapons used in crimes, so that there’s enough data to make informed decisions, would all be good places to start.
Sometimes I think that when progressives start unneccessarily sliding into tribal culture war politics, allowing the Right to frame it as a "them versus us" narrative, we don't even realize we're doing it.
But in this particular case we should think about it, because the stakes are high.