A Curious Silence

Not long ago I was flipping through the NRA's political journal, America's First Freedom, which I get as a member of the NRA. The issue I had in hand was the October issue, and in his column Wayne LaPierre was beating the anti-Democrat drum, raising the alarm about how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would screw the American gun owner and the gun industry to the wall if they managed to get elected. All the standard bugaboos were brought up -- licensing, registration, reinstatement of the semi-auto ban and the rolling back of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
Now, all of those are certainly viable threats, of which we all should be ever mindful. But reading LaPierre's column, I noticed no mention of anyone on the Republican side. Which to me was a little bit off, because as you know, at least one candidate on the GOP side supports at least licensing and registration, and this candidate was one of the big-city mayors -- in fact, the ONLY Republican mayor -- to file suit against several firearm manufacturers for allegedly "flooding the streets with guns." No, that's not an actual Giuliani quote as far as I remember, but it quite accurately summed up his philosophy when he was in the driver's seat in New York. And anyone who reads Bruce at No Looking Backwards knows Mitt Romney's just as bad, notwithstanding his lifetime membership in the NRA. (More knowledgeable folks than myself have said that the NRA is violating its own bylaws for not expelling folks like Romney and Michael Moore, but that's another post altogether.)
What's more, LaPierre made noises about planned Democratic infringements on the First Amendment as well, but again, absolutely no mention of anyone on the Republican side. Which is astonishing to me, considering the fact that a certain Republican senator running for president has his name on the biggest infringement of the First Amendment ever to come down the pike. Many people say the RKBA shouldn't be a partisan issue, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. And the NRA is making that goal of the RKBA not being a partisan issue that much harder with its silence regarding the biggest faults of the front-runners on the GOP side of the aisle. We need a bipartisan consensus to keep our rights, not a bipartisan consensus to take more of them away, and that last thing is exactly what we would get if the Republican candidates LaPierre did not mention in his column were elected. Romney and Giuliani are every bit as bad as Clinton and Obama on the issue, and they deserve to be called out on it. The NRA is severely undermining its credibility by not doing that. It won't be anything but bad if the NRA is seen to be little more than shills for the Republicans, and seeing things like what Wayne LaPierre wrote in his column does nothing to dispel that notion. We deserve better.