NRA Barks at Donald Trump’s ‘Second Amendment’ Dog Whistle
The NRA understood loud and clear, tweeting its agreement with what Trump said and launching a $3 million anti-Clinton ad campaign on the same themes, combining false claims about Clinton with the fear that America is falling apart so that citizens must take up arms to defend themselves.
That’s what one of his supporters recently said on C-SPAN.
“Since we do have firearms, it might, if it comes down to it, be us having to defend our rights with those guns, just as the revolutionaries did in the Revolutionary War,”
Raw Story reported. It’s a theme commonplace throughout the far-right, from Timothy McVeigh in 1995 to the Ammon Bundy in 2016.
What Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics” is increasingly found in the mainstream right as well. Obamacare is fascism, Hitler backed gun control, Muslims are plotting to implement Sharia Law across the United States, Black Lives Matter is a militant Black Panther army, crime is spiraling out of control, terrorists are coming to kill you. Threats are everywhere, and just as the threat level is increasing, Democrats taking your guns away. These are messages no longer confined to the fringes, but regularly opined on Fox News.
All of these themes are part of what my colleague John Avlon has called a “Reconstruction Fantasia”: a symphony of fear that imagines white Americans today in the role of white Southerners in the 1870s, subjugated by an “elite” coastal government that is hostile to their values and hell-bent on disarming and destroying them.
The Reconstruction Fantasia plays to white fears and male fears that are, themselves, partly based on reality, as America slowly becomes less dominated by whites and by men. But it quickly turns to fantasy, as these changes are attributed not to demographic and social shifts, but to sinister conspiracies and fascistic governments.
None of this is true, of course. Secretary Clinton and President Obama have said many times that they respect private gun ownership and have
no intention of confiscating guns. The number of Americans
killed by Islamist terrorists in the last decade (78) is dwarfed by the number killed by handgun violence and accidents (132,349). And violent crime has been
declining for years.