The Single Issue Focus Of The Gun Rights Lobby: Both Their Greatest Strength And A Fatal Flaw

For as long as I can remember, the gun rights lobby in America has been laser focused on defending the Second Amendment. Not perfectly, the NRA has dropped the ball on several issues and of late seems to have completely gone off the rails, but many of the people I knew growing up had NRA stickers in their windows and for the Left they were their most intractable opponent precisely because they didn’t get sidetracked on other conservatives issues. They fought for gun rights and that was it.

Now we are at a turning point in the defense of the natural, inviolable individual right to keep and bear arms. While things are pretty good right now, with laws ebbing and flowing back and forth but generally in our way, we are in the end stage of living in a nation where Americans are free to purchase any firearm they want (other than fully automatic weapons, rifles and shotguns with barrels that are too short, etc).

The single most important issue for gun rights is not defeating red flag laws. Nor overturning magazine capacity limits. Not even nationwide concealed carry reciprocity.

Nope, the single most important issue in the gun rights debate is immigration control.

Gun rights groups like the NRA and Gun Owners Of America have a significant strength that has helped to stave off many, but not all, attempts at gun control over the years: a laser focus on a single issue. The NRA is all about the 2nd Amendment and that is about it. They don’t get caught up in other issues, just guns. It has been a pretty solid strategy by most accounts. The NRA is public enemy number one for the Left for a reason. However…..

This singular focus of pro-2nd Amendment groups will also prove to be the undoing of the 2nd Amendment in America. 

The gun lobby doesn’t play the “conservative” game of Whack-A-Mole, where conservatives chase after one new outrage popping up before charging after the newest outrage, all the while missing what is going on behind the scenes. All they do is fight for gun rights.

Many years ago, maybe in the 1960s or perhaps decades earlier, the Marxist Left in America figured out that regular Americans simply weren’t all that interested in Communism. Sure some were, mostly college professors, but too many of us like things like freedom and liberty and the promise of prosperity for working hard and we enjoyed other stuff like eating. We saw the desolation inflicted on the people of Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Cuba by the false promises of Communism and wanted nothing to do with it. The Marxists have been chipping away at us since the early part of the 20th century but that was taking way too long. So they simply decided that rather than trying to convince stubborn Whites that Communism would work this time, they would follow the musings of Bertolt Brecht in his poem Die Lösung:

Would it not in that case be simpler
for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

If the American people won’t accept Communism, they would simply replace the American people with new “Americans” that are more pliable and open to Communism.

For the last two decades, the NRA and other groups have been lobbying as if the make-up of the American people has remained static since the 1950s. It hasn’t.

Nothing reflects the American political scene and what is going to happen in November and beyond better than this simple chart. When the 2020 census results are delivered in December, I anticipate that the percentage of “Non-Hispanic Whites”, in other words White people, in America will dip below 50%. The new, non-White Americans (esp. mestizos) are already the majority of Americans under 16 and in general, the slim majority of Whites is much older.

The Second Amendment is going the way of the dinosaurs because the people who are voting in increasing numbers in America simply don’t care about foundational American principles like the right to keep and bear arms or freedom of expression. The people at the various gun lobbies either didn’t realize this or didn’t want to rock the boat. In the case of the NRA, I think the problem is a rot from within, at the very top. Most institutions have one overriding goal: self-preservation. Wayne LaPierre probably cares a lot about gun rights but he cares a lot more about Wayne LaPierre. I assume Wayne is smart enough to see the handwriting on the wall and is getting as much loot as he can before he retires somewhere in a gated community.

Everyone seems to understand what is going on and why/how except for mainstream Conservative Inc. grifters, who don’t know or more likely do know but don’t care and of course the average conservative who is convinced that they just need to fine tune the argument for conservatism and black and mestizo voters will flock to the cause.

The media doesn’t even try to hide their glee and has started to take victory laps already. The New York Times wrote a gushing piece on Virginia and even used the naughty “D” word;  demographics: What Made Virginia Change Its Mind on Guns?.

While the article starts off with an interview of Lisette Johnson, apparently a prototypical suburban woman who was shot by her estranged husband (and there is no word as to how the new gun control laws would have prevented this shooting) and became a Democrat, the article makes multiple mentions of demographic changes that are turning Virginia from a reasonably solid “red state” that respected the 2nd Amendment to a now likely permanently “blue state” that has become Ground Zero in the fight over gun rights in America. From the article:

At the root of this district’s — and Virginia’s — political transition is a slow-moving demographic change, a new kind of suburbanization that is sweeping through national politics. From Atlanta to Houston, this pattern is repeating itself — suburban housing developments gobbling up rural areas and farmland and lifting Democrats to power.

They cleverly spin this as a suburban vs. rural thing but that is not the whole story. Certainly as rural Whites have smaller families and more and more people who are already mostly inclined to vote Democrat move to fill the insatiable appetite of the Federal behemoth for more surly paper-pushers, they White population has changed from a rural, Southern people to a more cosmopolitan, global minded people. The Wikipedia page for Virginia has this to say:

The state’s most populous ethnic group, Non-Hispanic White, has declined as a proportion of population from 76% in 1990 to 62% in 2018, as other ethnicities have increased.

That is a pretty precipitous decline. More from Wikipedia:

More recent immigration in the late 20th century and early 21st century has resulted in new communities of Hispanics and Asians. As of 2018, 9.4% of Virginians are Hispanic or Latino (of any race), and 6.8% are Asian. The state’s Hispanic population rose by 92% from 2000 to 2010, with two-thirds of Hispanics in the state living in Northern Virginia.

In just ten years the Hispanic population nearly doubled and as we know, Hispanics in general vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Texas, considered by many to be the most stalwart red state, full of conservatives and a reliable counterweight to permanantly blue California, the real story is far more disturbing. While Republicans have just assumed Texas will always stay reliably conservative, it is also shifting rapidly.

Bankrolled Anti-Gun Propaganda Aims to Turn Texas Blue with Boost from Demographics

What the gun-grab groups and the Democrats they’re fronting for are counting on is one of the same key factors that turned Virginia blue: Changing demographics…..

….The same holds true for Texas. While the mix of newcomers differs somewhat, their political similarities are remolding the electorate with two main groups bringing about what Barack Obama pegged “a fundamental transformation.”

California once elected Ronald Reagan as Governor. Now it isn’t even worth running a Republican for statewide offices. The image of Texas as the home of the White evangelical conservative isn’t true and hasn’t been for a while.

While this chart seems to show Whites with a comfortable, if declining majority, you will notice that all “White” people are lumped together and that according to Wikipedia, White Texans are already a distinct minority in their state:

According to the 2010 United States census, the racial composition of Texas was the following:

White American 70.4 percent (Non-Hispanic Whites 45.3 percent)

What this attempt at obfuscation hides is that White Texans were already at 45% of the state’s population in 2010 and the last 10 years have accelerated the process of displacement. Look at births in Texas:

For at least those five years, mestizo births dramatically outpaced White births. I can assume the same was true for many years prior to 2013 and also in the years since 2018.

Texans on social media love to brag that what happened to California isn’t going to happen in Texas. Guess what cowboy, it already happened.

Georgia is another example. The state of Georgia is also experiencing the “slow-moving demographic change”. Actually it isn’t really all that slow….

The 2010 population of Georgia claims that 59.7% of Georgians are “White” but the main wikipedia article for demographics in Georgia points out that the actual White population in Georgia is already only 56%, the rest being “White Hispanic”, a category that is useful for obfuscating the prevalence of non-White criminal behavior. Trump will have a tough time carrying Georgia again this fall.

The third largest state by population is Florida and there as well we see the White population teetering on the edge of dropping below 50% while the mestizo population is skyrocketing, and the black population also is on the increase….

How exactly does Trump get re-elected when he stands to lose states like Florida while gaining no states with even close to the same level of population, if he even pulls that off? See: Do The Math for more on Florida.

Now then, if you ask your average high profile BoomerCon, they will tell you that mestizos are “natural conservatives” because of their emphasis on family, Roman Catholic upbringing, “entrepreneurial spirit”, etc. and etc. Republicans just need to say some Spanish phrases in campaign events, run some “Latino outreach” and not talk at all about illegal aliens and the mestizos will vote Republican in droves. As it turns out, that is a load of hooey. Mestizos vote around 2-1 for Democrats and always will. Likely that ratio will turn even more unfavorable because the Hispanics who do vote Republican, notably Cubans, are decreasing as a percentage of the Hispanic vote.

The same is true for almost every state in the union. Even in my staunchly conservative state of Indiana, mestizos are the fastest growing group and while the state is overwhelmingly White, over a quarter of children under one are non-White.

Mexicans are not sneaking into the United States because they want to escape socialism and join a more conservative society. They leave Mexico (or El Salvador or Guatemala) because Mexico is full of Mexicans and come here because America is not, at least not yet. They don’t love our freedom, they love our free stuff, they love the relative safety compared to where they came from and they love the chance to make more money. They have no appreciation or gratitude toward those who built America into the kind of place they want to come to and no interest in adopting and upholding our values.

Polling during the Democrat primaries shows that not only are mestizos overwhelmingly Democrats, their preferred candidate is Bernie Sanders. Blacks like Joe Biden but the mestizo voters in the Democrat party love them some socialism. Bernie Sanders convincingly won the Nevada caucus on February 22nd and mestizo voters were the reason his win was so enormous.

California’s primary was just a few weeks after Nevada with 416 delegates up for grabs and California has a huge mestizo population. No surprise, Bernie Sanders won handily in California and pulled in a whopping percentage of the mestizo vote, doubling Joe Biden:

Sanders lost Texas as the race was pretty much over at that point but still pulled in 40% of the mestizo vote, 13% more than Biden, and he had a huge margin in the growing Asian voting block, 48% to 14%. Asians are another growing demographic and they are also overwhelmingly Democratic voters, even though you would think that they would be another group of “natural conservatives”. Again, black voters inexplicably love Joe “You ain’t black” Biden but mestizos seem less than enthusiastic about him but they will still vote for him.

Everyone paying attention already knows that mestizos are far Left voters. On February 20th, Pew Research ran a story about mestizo voters being far more to the Left than many people realized:

Latino voters favor raising minimum wage, government involvement in health care, stricter gun laws

There was a critical paragraph in the story:

A record 32 million Latinos are projected to be eligible to vote in November’s general election, exceeding the number of black eligible voters for the first time. About 62% of Latino registered voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 34% affiliate with or lean to the Republican Party.

It will be interesting to see the Democrats shift as their voting base grows more and more mestizo and the number of black voters relative to mestizos shrinks. The average black voter is about to discover that black Lives only matter when Democrats need their votes.

Mestizo attitudes mirror their loyalty to the Democrats. The poll that really jumped out at me was this one:

What that means for the future of the 2nd Amendment in a nation that is becoming majority-minority is pretty grim. Every three million new mestizo voters is a net one million voters who want more gun control and even if they aren’t really concerned with it, will agree to more gun control if that is what it takes to get more free stuff. Honestly I don’t think the average mestizo voter cares about gun rights or gun control, but they know that supporting gun control is the price of admission for the stuff they do want.

As mestizos eclipse White voters, there will be no chance of the 2nd Amendment, or the Constitution as a whole in any recognizable sense, surviving. Already the Constitution is mostly an impotent relic as it only means what any given judge or justice says it means.

Gun rights groups have been waging a fighting retreat for years, winning lots of battles and skirmishes along the way but are just now discovering that they lost the real war decades ago.