Last week, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA and the face of the movement against any form of gun control, testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of gun control following the horrors at Newtown, Connecticut.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) questioned LaPierre with the following:
“Mr. LaPierre, I run into some of your members in Illinois and here’s what they tell me, ‘Senator, you don’t get the Second Amendment.’ Your NRA members say, ‘You just don’t get it. It’s not just about hunting. It’s not just about sports. It’s not just about shooting targets. It’s not just about defending ourselves from criminals.’ As Ms. Trotter testified, ‘We need the firepower and the ability to protect ourselves from our government — from our government, from the police — if they knock on our doors and we need to fight back.’ Do you agree with that point of view?”
LaPierre responded, “Senator, I think without any doubt, if you look at why our Founding Fathers put [the Second Amendment] there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny.”
This line by LaPierre is interesting enough, but is compounded by an article he published in the February 2012 issue of the NRA magazine, saying, “Obama is leading our country straight to the dependence, lawlessness, unchecked government power — and the tyranny it invariably leads to — from which our Founding Fathers fled and most feared and tried to prevent from ever returning to America by writing our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. That’s what I mean when I say ‘all or nothing.’ This year’s election will literally be a struggle for the survival of freedom in America.”
Beyond the unsubtle nature of LaPierre calling the democratically elected president a tyrant that the country’s Founding Fathers would have fled or rose up against, you must also wonder what LaPierre feels is a greater threat to liberty: the inability to take on the world’s most powerful army with a semi-assault rifle, or the “unchecked power” of the executive branch to order the execution of an American citizen via drone without being charged with a crime or being found guilty of said crime.
This comes from a White Paper from the Department of Justice leaked on Monday night that shows the legal framework for the executive branch’s interpretation of the Founders’ constitution, giving the president the legal standing to order the execution of an American citizen without charging or trying a target.
The leaked paper shows that in order for the president to kill an American citizen who is not convicted or tried for any crime, in vague terms, the executive branch must simply show that the target is an imminent threat and capture of the target is infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to law of war principles.
The legal justification to execute our own citizens with drones despite the lack of any legal charge against them is undoubtedly a greater tool for a despotic tyrant running the government than his ability to take away an individual’s AR-15.
If the NRA isn’t simply a tool of the gun industry and instead is a widely misguided but nonetheless principled organization, why is it silent now as it was in the Bush years on the government’s use of extrajudicial killings?
The NRA and LaPierre himself have certainly been vocal on issues other than guns, such as election fraud, immigration and freedom of speech. The executions via drone have killed two American citizens and according to the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School, “from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 to 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.”
This is a program liberals were outspoken against during the Bush years, but they seem to have shied away from direct criticism during Obama’s presidency, even falling inward and rationalizing their team’s hypocrisy. An organization with the money and sway of the NRA could find itself in a position of not only reputable intellectual consistency, but political gain, leading congressional Republicans against the Brennan nomination for CIA director and in the process leaving a black mark on the legacy of the Democratic president.