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发帖数: 29846 | 1 A grassroots effort delivered an unprecedented blow to gun-control advocates.
By Charles C. W. Cooke
Colorado Springs — Despite the media’s insistence that the Colorado
recalls were the first skirmish in a new proxy war between the National
Rifle Association and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the simple truth is
that Tuesday’s stunning elections were prompted and won by forces on the
ground. At the Stargazers Theatre last night, I sat with those forces as a
famous victory unfolded. Speaking after Senator Morse conceded, the recall’
s founder, Tim Knight, told the crowd that “you must own your freedom in
order to protect and pass it on to your children.” He has spent the last
few months doing just that.
Guns are a notoriously touchy subject in America — a supercharged third
rail, if you will. But so too is the notion of accountability. The country
was founded, after all, by men with guns grumbling about the nature of their
political representation. It was in this proud tradition that the
disgruntled banded together in Colorado to try to recall two sitting state
senators who had not just voted to pass new restrictions on the right to
keep and bear arms, but had steadfastly refused to listen to the opposition.
The new gun laws, locals in both Colorado Springs and Pueblo told me
repeatedly, were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Their more
fundamental message: “Listen to me, goddamnit!”
Recall advocates in Colorado Springs were lucky that John Morse elected to
make himself unpopular with almost every conceivable group. “There’s
something for everyone with John Morse,” Luke Wagner of the Basic Freedom
Defense Fund told me. Indeed. Morse irritated not just gun owners, but also
the legalize-marijuana movement, rural Coloradans, independent taxpayers,
and women’s advocacy groups. To his surprise, Morse’s imperious behavior
awoke a parade of formerly apolitical Coloradans, many of whom were dismayed
by the manner in which they had been treated by a group of politicians who
had, in the words of Victor Head, the 29-year-old plumber and political
novice who beat Michael Bloomberg’s machine, “made their minds up already.”
In Pueblo, Angela Giron could perhaps have avoided her own downfall. Despite
her unpopular vote to expand federal background checks to all private sales
and to limit magazines to 15 rounds, had she condescended to listen to her
constituents she might never have had to face a recall. Instead, she closed
doors in the faces of Victor Head and his friends. Now, Giron and Morse are
gone. When in the course of human events, and all that jazz . . .
The national implications of this are significant. When Bill Clinton signed
the 1994 “assault weapons” ban, he didn’t just lose the House, he also
lost the argument for 20 years. Colorado was supposed to be the blueprint
for other “purple” states. If gun control could be done here, then why not
in Pennsylvania, or Nevada — or even Texas? Now, it will presumably be
difficult to convince state legislatures in other parts of the country to
touch the question of guns. Privately, defenders of Morse have shared with
me that, while they wanted their man to win, they wish he hadn’t put the
Democratic party in this position. This is wise. Gun control rarely works
out well for the party.
What the voters’ decision didn’t do was to repeal the laws that spurred
the recall. Those remain on the books, although the legislature is now
unlikely to add to them in a hurry. (Democrats now enjoy only a one-vote
advantage in the senate.) Meanwhile, the measures are subject to a legal
challenge initiated by the 55 of the state’s 64 elected sheriffs and filed
by the Independence Institute, a local conservative think tank.
Conservatives quietly hope that the laws will eventually find themselves
being judged by the Supreme Court.
“We’ve gained notoriety and caused much anxiety,” sang Tom Lehrer in “
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” “They call it impiety, and lack of
propriety, and quite a variety of unpleasant names.” So too maligned were
the parade of little groups that sprung up to fight the government. Women
who testified — some of them, like Kimberly Weeks and Amanda Collins,
victims of rape — were cruelly rebuffed; genuine advocates, like the six
men who founded the Basic Freedom Defense Fund, were dismissed erroneously
as “AstroTurf”; and the plucky little guerrilla group, Pueblo Freedom and
Rights, which was started by three formerly apolitical blue-collar
twentysomethings, was described variously, its founder, Victor Head told me,
as being made up of “peons” and “nuts,” and guilty of representing “
amateur hour.”
Nevertheless, by the end of the process, so anxious were the opponents of
the recall that they felt compelled to rely heavily on Michael Bloomberg,
who sent $350,000 to Colorado to fight the threat; members of Obama’s
ground team were brought in to boost turnout, and even former president Bill
Clinton was wheeled in at the last minute to try to tip the scales.
None of it worked. This was the recall that never supposed to happen — let
alone be successful. The nine men who set the ball rolling weren’t supposed
to be capable of organizing a town hall, let alone taking down the state-
senate president. And yet they did it. Victor Head, a plumber who had never
been politically active, took down a senator in a district that went
Democratic in 2012 by ten points; a group of six concerned men from the AR15
.com chat room removed the state’s top-ranking legislator. “We are a quiet
people,” recall founder Tim Knight told his victorious friends when the
results became known at the Stargazers Theater. “You may be tempted to
ignore us. Clearly, that would be a mistake.”
Critics of what is colloquially described as the “gun lobby” have imagined
a bogeyman that doesn’t exist, imputed false motives to earnest forces,
and worried about the influence of outside money that was more than
outmatched by opponents. Many were the headlines that set up yesterday’s
vote as a “test of the strength of the NRA.” But the truth remains that
the power that the defenders of the Second Amendment enjoy lies in the
appeal of the Second Amendment itself — and, too, in that peculiar American
genius for liberty and democracy. “Join or Die” says the famous flag.
Here, enough people did to make a difference. The cheers that erupted around
the theatre when Morse and Giron conceded were, as much as anything, cheers
of relief. “People keep saying to me that it doesn’t matter if we lose,”
one woman told me. “But I’ve lost my husband for the last two months. It
matters!”
“Amateur hour?” Perhaps. But, as is proper in a republic, the amateurs
were victorious.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer for National Review. |
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