By Brandon Moseley
Alabama Political Reporter
National Rifleman’s Association President David Keene told Newsmax TV, “The greatest accomplishment of the believers of the Second Amendment today over a decade ago or more is that guns are cool,” he said. “That wasn’t the case before.”
Keene recounted a conversation with a congressional intern. According to Keene the intern said, “Mr. Keene, you don’t know how right you are. My sorority, every Friday, we all go out to the range to shoot.” Keense said that he replied, “And I said, ‘Young lady, 45 years ago, if I tried to ask out a girl to go to the range and shoot with me, I wouldn’t have gotten that date.’ This is a different America than we’ve had before.”
Keene said that the gun battle has tilted heavily in favor of gun rights. Keene said, “We came to a sort of consensus in this country that Americans do have the right to keep and bear arms, that good people should not be denied access to firearms, that the shooting sports are important and that bad people, we should try to prevent them from getting guns. … The problem is you can’t prevent evil and you can’t prevent insanity, and that’s a difficulty that a modern society has to contend with in a whole lot of different areas. But there is a consensus. There is no need to have a debate.”
Keene said that the United Nations effort to enact a global small arms ban have been delayed for at least five years. Keene warned that, “in the next decade, the liberals who have been unable to accomplish their goals here on the question of Second Amendment rights and in other areas, are going to try to do so internationally.”
Keene said that President Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eisenhower were all lifetime NRA members. In 1968 the Lyndon Johnson’s administration broke with tradition and proposed a gun control law. Since then, “the Democratic Party has been quite properly seen as being anti-Second Amendment.”
Keene said that President Barack Obama did not use the movie shooting tragedy in Colorado to push for new gun laws because he knows it is a losing proposition electorally. Keene said, “He (Obama) doesn’t want a head-on fight with American’s gun owners and Second Amendment supporters prior to the November election. It’s after that election that we’re worried about.”
President Keene said that Gov. Mitt Romney is very strongly committed to Second Amendment issues and excused his signing of gun control legislation because he had little choice but to support gun control legislation as governor of Massachusetts due to the Democrats controlled the Massachusetts legislature. Keense said, “Mitt Romney had a legislature in which he had 28 percent support. It was in the hands of the other party, it was in the hands of liberals. And what happened when that bill came up to him, the NRA and others worked with him to put on a bunch of amendments that actually helped gun owners in Massachusetts and then said, ‘Go ahead and sign because if you veto it, they’re just going to override a veto anyway and you’re going to get something much worse.’”
This article is based on original reporting by Henry J. Reske and John Bachman.
