Watching the results coming in on election night, I was both proud and humbled to see the power of your votes adding up to huge victories for freedom all across America. Your diligence, hard work, contributions, courage, and commitment made the difference. Using the ballot box to change the direction of our nation. You saved our country.
Each of you–the men and women who are the NRA–carried the day with the election of a resoundingly pro-Second Amendment U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. Through your individual leadership, millions of gun owners across the nation made their voices heard sending an unmistakable message: stop President Barack Obama’s destruction of our liberty and restore our Constitution.
Our message of liberty resonated with other voters in hotly contested state races where pro-Second Amendment candidates for governor and state legislative offices prevailed. You delivered historic gains for the Second Amendment. Speaking for our great association, I send you our heartfelt thanks, respect, and our utmost gratitude.
In race after race, all over the country, gun owners put pro-liberty candidates over the top. What you accomplished as leaders of our freedom movement changed the history and course of the nation.
But we cannot stop now. With our like-minded friends holding the majorities in Congress, there is much work to do to regain lost freedom.
But nothing has changed with the Obama White House.
The president vows to continue his reckless abuse of executive power to steal, diminish and destroy our rights to free speech, free assembly, and the right to keep and bear arms.
In his petulant press conference the day after the massive coast-to-coast rebuke to his policies by voters, Barack Obama proved he is incapable of accepting defeat. He refused to recognize reality. He will not change direction. And that makes his White House and administration even more dangerous to our cause.
The day after the biggest election rout in the nation’s history, Obama said he “couldn’t read the tea leaves,” as if there were something subtle in the message from voters.
Indeed, it was the strongest message sent to a president in modern times. It was a stomping, a drubbing, a shellacking, a repudiation. But his utterly detached, arrogant public reaction was truly Orwellian. “To everyone who voted,” he said, “I hear you.” In the next breath, he added, “To two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate, I hear you, too.”
As we’ve always said, in politics the person with the biggest number wins. So in the real world, with real votes, we won.
But in Obama’s mind, our votes didn’t count. His words were stunning. In Obama-speak, those who stayed home from the polls gave him the vote of confidence he craves.
A headline in the Daily Caller tells the story of what lies ahead: “Obama Rejects Election Results, Promised More Of The Same.”
Toward the salvation of our great nation, the Congress has changed dramatically, but President Obama’s grip over rogue agencies has not. We must keep the pressure on Congress to curb Obama’s continued abuse of power. We must always expose that abuse to fellow citizens.
If I were a betting man, the odds are that Obama’s White House and Justice Department will double down on their gun-control agenda by edict. That means more illegal spending of our tax dollars to fund bogus gun-ban propaganda by the Centers for Disease Control; new back-door schemes to push gun control; more efforts to keep our borders open to cartel criminals; and even more widespread refusal to enforce federal criminal law.
To fight back, NRA must become stronger in the two-year window we have ahead of the 2016 presidential elections. We must recruit thousands upon thousands of new members to preserve the freedom we’ve spent all our lives to protect. Only through continued growth and new strength can we maintain our grassroots effectiveness and our nation’s freedom.
With Harry Reid’s iron-fisted rule in the Senate gone, we have an opportunity to take back lost ground and to accomplish some long-term goals to ensure the rights of peaceable good citizens are not trampled–such as passing the national right-to-carry reciprocity law.
Enactment of that law will secure equal-rights for all law-abiding Americans. We must end the kind of Alice-in-Wonderland injustice that almost put hard-working, single mom Shaneen Allen in prison for three years for innocently crossing into New Jersey with her legal Pennsylvania concealed carry firearm.
Given the new pro-Second Amendment Senate, under the leadership of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., we can help stop the Obama/Reid court-packing scheme to fill the federal judiciary with judges who neither respect the Constitution nor the rights of individual Americans. With Obama’s lifetime court appointees, his contempt for the rights of gun owners will live long into the future and cement his legacy.
And then there is the U.S. Supreme Court where it is virtually certain that Obama will have the opportunity to appoint at least one justice, leading to a monumental confirmation battle in the U.S. Senate.
And without doubt, we must be ready for the 2016 presidential election that could solidify our gains or inflict unimaginable harm and destroy the freedoms we cherish.
You can be certain that billionaire gun-banners like Michael Bloomberg, and their enablers in big-media, are plotting and planning right now how to undo the gains of hard-working individual citizens that we just achieved at the ballot box.
In this new year, more than ever, we must remain strong. The NRA must grow and we must prepare for the coming elections. With your help, we must make it clear to every politician running for president that if you stand against freedom we will make sure you never win the White House. That’s our promise and our continued pledge to freedom in keeping America the greatest country on earth.
Wayne’s column appears in the NRA publications American Rifleman, American Hunter and America’s First Freedom. Click here to get a discounted NRA Annual Membership for only $25 a year complete with your choice of magazine delivered to your door.