United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- Almost two decades ago, there was a book that was pretty much boasting how Democrats would have an enduring majority. How is that working out? Well, if some of their strategists are to be believed, it isn’t. How has that happened? We can speculate on a lot of the reasons why, but there is one thing that Second Amendment supporters should keep in mind: There are no guarantees or sure things.
This should be kept in mind by Second Amendment supporters. There are those who think that the upcoming Supreme Court case will be the silver bullet that ends the threat that anti-Second Amendment extremists pose to our rights. Spoiler alert: It isn’t, and nor will the multiple cases working their way up from Roger Benitez’s court.
Why is that the case? Sometimes, we are at the mercy of events.
A mass shooting, particularly in a school, can send us on the defensive and lead to new recruits for anti-Second Amendment groups. See what happened after Parkland. That shooting didn’t just lead to a lot of new recruits, it also led to corporate boycotts of pro-Second Amendment groups. In 2020, the pandemic and the riots after the death of George Floyd caused major changes in the Second Amendment landscape.
And anti-Second Amendment extremists opened up a new front. We know now that some of the corporate boycotts were coerced by Andrew Cuomo, who leveraged financial regulations to attack the NRA. In a similar vein, Silicon Valley censorship is a huge threat to our ability to make the case. Corporate gun control, including financial blacklisting, is a major threat that many Second Amendment supporters have to start addressing.
In a similar vein, we never know what other issues will dominate the attention of Americans. In 2018, health care was a massive issue and it put anti-Second Amendment extremists in control of the House of Representatives. In 2021, the Virginia gubernatorial race has been dominated by the issue of education and what is taught in our schools – an issue of importance to Second Amendment supporters.
Thirty years ago, if you asked Second Amendment supporters if they thought their ban would financially deplatform them, they’d probably think you were crazy. Social media wasn’t even a glimmer in the eye of Mark Zuckerberg and others. Twenty years ago, the biggest threat to the Second Amendment wasn’t legislation, it was litigation from big-city mayors who sought to make an end run around the legislative process. Ten years ago, the litigation threat was gone, and the Heller and McDonald rulings were thought to be “silver bullets” against gun bans, and the biggest issue was the ATF walking guns to drug cartels.
Second Amendment supporters have lots of work to do, but these days the fight for our rights is a full-spectrum battle.
In a very real sense, our danger may be less from the halls of government, and more from corporate boardrooms. It doesn’t make defeating anti-Second Amendment extremists via the ballot box at the federal, state, and local level as soon as possible any less important, but Second Amendment supporters must recognize that things will be unpredictable.
About Harold Hutchison
Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.