Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
"Hispanics promised Obama will act on immigration by year's end," The Washington Times reported Wednesday.
"The question of executive action, my friends, is a 'when' question," Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez promised attendees at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute convention.
"He said Mr. Obama shares their values, despite having repeatedly put off thorny decisions on immigration," The Times report continued.
That's evident from the "Look Who's Coming to CHCI's 37th Annual Awards Gala" announcement.
"President Barack Obama will address the largest Latino gathering in the country at CHCI's 37th Annual Awards Gala on Thursday, October 2, 2014 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center," the ethnocentric politics group advertised. "This will be the fifth year that President Obama has addressed the CHCI Awards Gala, going back to when he was a presidential candidate in 2008.
So why is Gun Owners of America still the only gun group speaking out on the danger to gun owners?
"Immigration reform could be a bonanza for Democrats [and] cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily," GOA quoted Politico in a 2013 alert to its members. "We predict that ... California-style gun control could become a very real possibility in this country!"
That's because those pushing for "reform have made no secret of amnesty being more than a work and residency permit. Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson has flat out declared the millions of people in this country illegally have "earned the right to be citizens." Pew Research Center has demonstrated approximately eight times more Latinos identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans, numbers corroborated by an Associated Press report that notes "[N]ationally, Latinos overwhelmingly support Democrats."
In fairness, Obama did promise (threaten?) that he intended to fundamentally transform America. And lest gun owners need any more evidence than their own eyes and the misdeeds of the Democratic leadership, and the record of what the party has done or tried to do to gun rights in every "blue" state where they dominate, one need only look at their national party platform:
We can focus on effective enforcement of existing laws, especially strengthening our background check system, and we can work together to enact commonsense improvements—like reinstating the assault weapons ban and closing the gun show loophole...
Elections are typically won or lost by a few percentage points. Adding millions of new Democrats would not only provide the margins needed to pass new edicts, but recent court gains could be reversed by ensuring confirmation of anti-gun nominees to the federal courts, and by a simple one-vote shift in the makeup of the Supreme Court.
And Republicans are hardly guiltless, by the way. Far from it. Many GOP politicians in the pockets of special business interests are pushing for consequences-be-damned "immigration reform," and their establishment leadership has been doing its utmost to marginalize and destroy conservatives and Tea Party candidates. The "moderates" may at times, or even for the most part, vote the correct way on gun bills - but if they then turn around and encourage conditions that will relegate their "pro-gun" votes to a losing minority, the ones who ultimately lose will be gun owners who supported them because they were counting on them actually being sincere.
That would change if politicians were graded for their position on amnesty as a directly-related gun rights issue. NRA, the big dog in the fight, not only knows about the numbers and the potentials, they have actually removed the "single issue" excuse from the reasons why they continue to show deliberate indifference. The group's new multi-million dollar advertising campaign on tangentially-related values issues, as well as earlier efforts against so-called "campaign finance reform," show the leadership is capable of embracing and championing associated issues. Indeed, NRA Bylaws actually mandate that its directors and paid staff "...promote public safety, law and order, and the national defense."
The other big group, the Second Amendment Foundation, along with its affiliate, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, has also remained silent. Last weekend's Gun Rights Policy Conference Resolutions Committee asked attendees to submit their ideas for presentation to members for adoption. The committee declined to read my submission for consideration:
As all credible polling shows illegal immigration amnesty will result in millions of new Democrat voters, and as that party is overwhelmingly anti-gun, and as Gun Owners of America is the only Second Amendment advocacy group recognizing and warning gun owners this will result in more gun laws and a shift in the Supreme Court, this organization acknowledges the issue as being inextricably tied in with the ongoing and future threats against gun rights.
Rejecting it, while personally disappointing, was within their right. While I disagree, this is not being related to disparage the organization or the conference, both of which I deeply appreciate. Whether the conference was the appropriate forum for such a resolution is admittedly debatable but what's telling is that none of the assumptions it made were argued against. Reasons given for turning it down included it doesn't incorporate the problem of getting legal immigrants to embrace freedom values. That's a legitimate insight, and it shows how such a resolution could be amended and improved. But without actually then taking steps to craft and adopt a comprehensive position, the net result is the influential group will do nothing, and none of the dangers to gun owners will be mitigated.
How to encourage NRA and SAF to get on board remains a quandary. But the national gun groups don't bear total responsibility for allowing things to go unattended within the gun rights community. Most major state groups have also been mum, and encouraged their members to support politicians who are either purposefully or unwittingly selling them out in the long term. Part of that, no doubt, is because by and large, the gun rights activist grassroots and the majority of "gun bloggers" have not demanded a position be taken by the organizations they finance. As an aggregate, that makes it fair to ask if gun owners and their "leaders" just don't realize the shape of things to come, or to wonder if there may be some other reason for the deliberate silence.
I say "deliberate" because the few lonely voices echoing the warnings can't make themselves heard without those who hear them acting as amplifiers, and that hasn't happened. That means those hearing the message don't agree, don't believe, don't know or don't care.
Will that change? Is it,as Labor Secretary Perez notes, a question of "when," and will that prove to be too late, or is it a question of "if"...?
Is it a question of "forget it, it's never going to happen"...?