My dear uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was cut down by an assassin’s bullet. His mother, my grandmother, Mama King, was also shot, in our church. However, my father was killed under
cratic district north of San Fran- cisco, he was greeted by a number of gun-rights faithful who warned of a looming civil war. “I submit to you that what is
going on here is the fi rst assault on private gun ownership,” warned country-music legend Charlie Daniels. Not to be outdone, rocker and
NRA board member Ted Nugent stated in an exclusive Newsmax interview: “We the people are responding, we’re communicating with our elected offi cials, and we will not allow our right to keep and bear arms to be infringed.” Contributing to the sparks over
the gun debate was the pillorying endured by NRA Executive Direc- tor Wayne LaPierre, after he urged stationing an armed police offi cer or guard in every school in Ameri- ca, in order to protect students. “It’s outrageous and unsettling
that the NRA would choose to address gun violence not by tak- ing assault weapons off our streets, but by adding more guns to our schools,” howled Chicago mayor, and former Obama chief of staff , Rahm Emanuel, adding, “That is not the right answer for our soci- ety, our schools, and most impor- tantly our children.” Emanuel did not address how
LaPierre’s “outrageous” proposal might impact a crime wave in the Windy City — whose restrictive gun laws rival those in D.C. — that saw homicides jump to 513 in 2012. That marked a 15 percent jump
in a single year. “There was noth- ing wrong with what Wayne said at the news conference the week after Newtown,” says Richard Feldman, president of Independent Firearm Owners Association. Feldman is a maverick lobbyist who describes himself as a “strong
supporter of what the NRA stands for.” As executive director of the American Shooting Sports Coun- cil, he defi ed gun-rights orthodoxy by standing beside former Presi- dent Bill Clinton in the Rose Gar- den to announce a plan for putting child safety locks on handguns. In an indication Obama may
not be able to divide gun-rights advocates the way he has Con- gress, Feldman rushed to LaPi- erre’s defense, noting that Demo- cratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of Cali- fornia that same week voiced sup- port for spending federal dollars to send the National Guard to protect schools.
“Nobody went apoplectic about
Sen. Boxer making that recommen- dation,” Feldman tells Newsmax. “But when Wayne LaPierre said it, everyone goes bananas, because they were waiting to attack the
NRA. That’s the nature of politics sometimes.”
T
o heartland conserva- tives, the struggle over gun rights transcends fi rearms. The real issue,
many of them say, is that the gun grabbers despise their values. Once the guns are out of the way, they fear, their other values will come under attack as well. Novelist Justin Cronin, who
describes himself as a New Eng- land liberal transplanted to Texas, wrote an illuminating New York Times Op-Ed in this regard. He observed that his Facebook
feed had been fi lled with posts from friends in the Northeast call- ing gun owners “a bunch of inbred rednecks.” That “doesn’t do much to advance rational discussion,” he noted. Keene put it this way: “Part
MARCH 2013 | NEWSMAX 53
very suspicious circumstances in the same civil rights movement and no gun was involved . . . There are many ways that people can use violence. My uncle called it man’s inhumanity to man. So, rather than giving all of
our eff ort to gun control, we need to start looking at the hearts of the people and even consider when you do things like taking prayer out of schools, like they did in 1963, or just cut off all eff orts to give people value systems, and morals and values that we used to have, like my uncle said in rediscovering lost values, then that’s where our eff orts should be.”
— Dr. Alveda King niece, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
KING/AP IMAGES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92