My dad owned a liquor store. He was in the military during the ’50s in the Korean War, and was a little
tol Hill. True, more than half the members of Congress have earned an A rating from the NRA. But how many of them will still have that mark, after their constituents see a steady stream of campaign- style speechifying by the president, complete with fresh-faced school children smiling nervously in the background? At a national news conference unveiling his executive actions, Obama made it plain he is all in against guns. “I will put everything I’ve got into this,” he said. To back it up, the Obama cam-
paign announced that unlike in 2008, when Obama’s Organizing for America campaign machine was handed over to the Demo- cratic National Committee, his 2012 infrastructure, Organizing for Action, would instead be con- verted into a nonprofi t advocacy group. That would leave it free to raise unlimited funds, and to yank the American body politic as far left as possible. The fi rst target on its agenda: guns. James J. Baker,
the head of the federal aff airs divi- sion at the NRA’s Institute for Leg- islative Action, called the Obama administration’s anti-gun push “a new and more concerted eff ort.” Predictably, throngs of citizens
bit on the liberal side . . . he never wanted to keep a gun in the store. Well, one morning my dad opened up at 7. He didn’t have anybody due in until 8, so he was there by himself. A guy came in, pulled a gun, walked him into the back room, told him
to turn around and face the wall. A customer came in, and the guy panicked and ran out of there. Well, they caught the fellow, and the detective that came out to interview my dad told him the guy had just been released from state prison; there was a very good chance that he was going to shoot my dad so there would be no witnesses. After that, my dad used to keep a little .38 snub nose under his shirt on his belt.”
— Bruce Colodny California attorney and gun-law expert
Keene shot back on CNN’s State of the Union: “The two people who are selling so-called assault rifl es are [California anti-gun] Sen. Fein- stein and President Obama, not us. They’re the ones that are scaring American gun owners.” At the Gun Appreciation Day
“Newtown changed everything.”
— Joe Scarborough MSNBC Host
on Jan. 19, tens of thousands of gun owners marched on state capi- tols nationwide. Among the signs they waved: “The Second Amend- ment Protects The First,” “Ban Ignorance Not Guns,” and “God Giveth Freedom, Government Taketh Away.” As Obama’s no-holds-barred mindset against fi rearms emerged, the NRA’s initial bravado, in which it suggested that an assault-weap-
ons ban would never see the light of day, appeared to ebb. “All bets are off when the presi-
around the country, fearful of being outfl anked by the increas- ingly bold gun opponents in Wash- ington, began queuing to stock up on guns and ammunition. Almost overnight, the NRA’s member- ship ranks swelled by more than 200,000 to 4.5 million members. When President Obama
accused the gun lobby of ginning up fear, NRA President David
dent really goes to work on one of these things,” Keene says in an exclusive Newsmax interview. “You never know when you’re doing battle with a president, whether it’s going to come out the way it should.” This was the political caldron
Jeff rey Scott Shapiro ventured into in January. A longtime gun-rights foe, Shapiro emerged as perhaps the nation’s most unlikely Sec-
ond Amendment champion in the nation. Shapiro, who’d never owned a gun, had for years rel- ished putting gun violators behind bars as a prosecuting attorney in gun-averse Washington, D.C. He served as a criminal prosecutor in D.C. from 2007 to 2009, and had been involved in dozens of gun-law prosecutions there. D.C.’s history against gun rights
is legendary. Its Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 required all fi rearms to be kept “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.” It took the landmark Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, with Justice Antonin Scalia delivering the opinion, to protect Second Amendment rights. Before the case, it was virtually
against the law for residents to use a gun in self-defense. “It was a very strange part of the law,” Shap- iro says. “It was almost Orwellian, because it’s kind of double-think when you have two contradictory ideas. It was like, OK, you can have the gun but you can’t unlock the trigger lock and you have to keep it disassembled. So it was kind of like a tease. It’s creating the impression that there wasn’t a total ban on fi rearms, when in fact there was.” Shapiro witnessed fi rsthand
how the anti-gun crusaders in the government appeared to try to
MARCH 2013 | NEWSMAX 49
BULLET/ISTOCKPHOTO/THINKSTOCK / COLODNY/COURTESY OF THE LAW OFFICES OF BRUCE COLODNY
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