OPINION:
Feeling good about themselves, and not self-preservation, is the first instinct that drives a lot of unwary politicians on the left. Last week Attorney General Mark Herring of Virginia announced that the commonwealth would no longer grant reciprocity to residents of 25 other states who are allowed by their states to carry a concealed gun.
Echoing the words of President Obama, Mr. Herring said his prohibition is a “commonsense step” to prevent “gun violence” in Virginia. Neither he nor any other law enforcement agency can cite a single example of someone with a “concealed carry” permit from another state who has been cited, arrested or convicted of a gun-related crime in Virginia.
But the attorney general isn’t actually trying to protect anyone from “gun violence” by visitors licensed at home to pack a little defensive heat, since there was no evidence of such violence, but he felt entitled to pleasure himself by sticking a thumb in the eye of gun owners and win plaudits from a president, approval of the frightened masses, and the praise of editorialists cowering in certain places in both east and west who are rendered prostrate by the sound of guns.
Like liberals everywhere, Mr. Herring and Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, argue that the ends justify the means, the ends being the disarming of America, and boast that they know better than the men and women who elect legislators, who almost invariably oppose nibbling at the Second Amendment. If the elected members of the Virginia legislature get in their way, Mr. Herring and his like-minded infringers on the Constitution regard it as their duty to ignore the popular will and indulge their own fears. It’s shameful and anti-democratic, but it’s increasingly the big-D Democratic way of government. Mr. Herring, who apparently had a childhood deprived of learning to shoot responsibly, is afraid of guns and doesn’t very much like people who aren’t.
In 1994, Bill Clinton, the new president, had a similar bad idea. He, too, decided to assault the Second Amendment. One of Jimmy Carter’s top aides, who had been there and done that, urged Mr. Clinton to think hard before acting, because the political consequences of trying to disarm America would be devastating. Jody Powell sent a memo to Mr. Clinton arguing that “the [National Rifle Association] is effective primarily because it is largely right when it claims that most gun control laws hurt the law-abiding while having little or no impact on violence or criminals.”
George Stephanopoulous, then an aide to Mr. Clinton, received the Powell memo and forwarded it to his boss with a notation in the margin that he agreed with Jody Powell. Mr. Clinton didn’t listen, made the assault, and the result was not more gun control, but Republican control of Congress, and six years later, the election of a Republican president sympathetic to gun owners and their constitutional rights.
Messrs. Herring and McAuliffe should take the Clinton example to heart, as an example of how voters can demolish an arrogant and mule-headed politician with a gun without anyone ever pulling a trigger.
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