It’s All About the Children: What anti-NRA Democrats Can Learn from the GOP’s approach to the national debt in the 1990s.
In the mid-1990s Newt Gingrich’s GOP captured a big chunk of the “moderate Independent” vote by imploring parents to prioritize the needs of “their children.” The national debt, Gingrich claimed, was saddling “our children” with an unsustainable burden, and it was the parents’ duty to relieve that burden by cutting spending for everything but the military.
In practice, the GOP has never lived up to its word…ballooning the deficit every time they’ve had control of the federal government (like now). But this anti-debt, pro-child messaging worked as electoral politics — we must cut spending (much of which is spent on children, ironically enough) in the name of helping the children, said the 1990s GOP, and many voters agreed.
It’s starting to feel like our current epidemic of NRA-enabled school shootings has created an opening for a more beneficent way to revisit this sort of “do it for the children” political messaging. For the sake of our children, we need to destroy the political influence of the NRA and defeat any legislators who take their money and support their radical, death-dealing agenda. The children and parents of Parkland have spoken eloquently to this. One desperate, pleading, despondent voice after another has said “it is time for the people in power to ‘do something’ to try to staunch the bleeding from our schools.” If it’s the NRA that stands in the way of any such effort, then they need to be politically neutralized.
No gun control measure will be 100% effective, just as no safety features on a car will ever entirely prevent traffic fatalities. But if we followed that defeatist logic we wouldn’t have seat belts or air bags or anti-lock brakes or a million things that have saved tens of thousands of lives. There are a host of things legislators can do that would be “something,” that might make a difference and prevent the deaths of “our children.”
The politics of this is pretty straightforward…the polls are decidedly on the side of “common sense” gun control and have been for years. If the GOP goes to the mat to defend the 2nd Amendment fundamentalism of their NRA funders, then perhaps we will finally be able to excise the NRA from our political system by prying it out of the cold, dead hands of the GOP. The GOP will be better off for it. The NRA can go back to being an organization that trains people how to use guns safely. And our children can go to school with a bit less fear that their lives might end in a hail of bullets that could have been prevented.