OPINION:
All presidents want to leave a lasting imprint on history, a legacy, with a record of their wise words and good deeds. Sometimes a president with a spotty record comes along and tries to fake a good legacy, which can be difficult since what a president does speaks so loud that no one can hear what he says. Barack Obama is trying to write such a legacy with executive orders.
In his final year in the White House the president is making the Second Amendment a target of what he imagines is greatest opportunity. If he can cripple that amendment he can disarm America. But he is running against a harsher reality than a president’s protected life in the White House. Americans who have no such protection are nevertheless eager to make themselves and their families safer and more secure, and they’re arming themselves.
Beginning on New Year’s Day, Texas joins 44 other states in allowing gun owners with a permit to carry a concealed weapon to bear their arms openly. Private businesses may still decide whether to allow open carry on their premises, but even some churches, where guns are routinely banned, will allow worshippers to carry their guns with their Bibles to worship. The message to the likes of Dylann Roof, the crazed young man who turned a worship service into a massacre in a church in Charleston, S.C., is that there will be no more sitting ducks in the pews.
The rash of mass shootings on college campuses has demonstrated that gun-free zones can become free-fire zones. In response, eight states have enacted laws to enable faculty and students and faculty to carry concealed guns on campus. The growing trend could prevent tragedies, such as the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007. Hundreds of weapons-trained ROTC cadets might have prevented that one, but university policy insisted the cadets be unarmed.
The easily frightened won’t surrender easily to reason. In December, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring rescinded Virginia’s concealed carry reciprocity with 25 states, meaning visitors with concealed-carry permits in their home states would be subject to prosecution if they carry a gun while in Virginia. In response, Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly propose a law to prohibit Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, arming his bodyguards. Their message is clear: What’s good for a goose is good for a governor.
The easily frightened want government confiscation of what they call “weapons of war.” The New York Times, which never misses an opportunity to express its disdain for the Second Amendment, speaks to such folks. “It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment,” the newspaper said in an editorial the other day. “No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.” That’s an iteration of the high school debate club argument that freedom of speech doesn’t grant the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater. Of course it doesn’t, but confiscating weapons from the law-abiding would be more akin to closing the theater on the chance that an innocent ticket-buyer might have a legal gun. Neither the president nor his media cohort have persuaded Americans they are safer when disarmed.
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