Opinion

Gun owners enter the fight of our lives

Chris Cox Executive Director, NRA's Institute for Legislative Action
Font Size:

The NRA has been saying all along that Barack Obama would unleash an assault on our Second Amendment freedoms if he won a second term. It sure didn’t take long for him to prove us right.

Just hours after Obama won re-election last Tuesday, his administration endorsed a new effort by the global gun grabbers at the United Nations to draft a gun ban treaty early next year. The official starting point for the new talks is last year’s failed draft, which contains provisions that threaten our sovereign right to keep and bear arms through an international gun registration scheme.

And not long after Obama floated the idea of banning semi-automatic firearms, we learned that California Senator Dianne Feinstein was working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to draft new legislation that would ban semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and handguns, so-called “high capacity” magazines, and rifles and shotguns with pistol grips. Reportedly, Feinstein wants to make it illegal not just to sell your guns and magazines, but to leave them behind in your will.

Not surprisingly, the lights had hardly gone out at Obama’s victory celebration last week when gun-hating New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with his pollster, Frank Luntz, were conducting push polls to promote government control over every firearm transfer — including between fathers and sons, and grandfathers and grandsons.

In Bloomberg’s world, a child wouldn’t be able to tear the wrapping paper off his first .22 rifle on Christmas morning unless Santa Claus had first cleared it with Obama’s bureaucrats.

I know a lot of folks are still down about last week’s presidential election. It’s puzzling how so many Americans can tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track, then vote to keep the same guy driving the train.

But this isn’t the first time in history when gun owners and NRA members have faced a difficult challenge, and it won’t be the first time we’ve risen to the occasion and come out victorious. The Second Amendment wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for the courage of tens of millions of gun owners and freedom-loving Americans across our nation, and throughout our history.

As long as dedicated patriots continue to band together and fight as though freedom itself is on the line — because it is — we will defend the Second Amendment in Obama’s second term and save it for generations to come.

For gun owners, the next four years won’t just be the fight of our lives, it will be a fight for the future of our nation. We’re ready to lead the charge.

Chris W. Cox is the Executive Director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization’s chief lobbyist.