Gun Nuts in a Rut (NY Times)

[jpak]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/gun-nuts-in-a-rut/

PHOENIX — When it became clear in the early fall of 2008 that Barack Obama, son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, would be the 44th President of the United States, many citizens rushed to their gun shops, stocked up on ammo and camo, and tried to fortify their nests with all manner of lethal weapons.

Though he had said nothing about gun control in the campaign, Obama, to a certain kind of person, appeared to be a grave threat to the Second Amendment. He was urban — Chicago, not the kind of place where a man could shoot a coyote with a laser-sighted Ruger while on his daily jog, as Gov. Rick Perry claims to have done. He was professorial, with scholastic braising at that home of confiscatory consensus, Harvard. And he’d made that statement about rural people clinging to guns and religion.

Into the early months of the Obama presidency gun sales went though the roof. A nation of at least 200 million firearms reached for ever more, in a hurry and a frenzy.

And then, nothing. No legislation. No speeches about the ubiquity of guns in the most violent of Western democracies. Obama actually increased gun rights, signing a bill with a rider that allows people to pack loaded and concealed heat in national parks. Even after the slaughter in Tucson in January of 2011, when six people were killed and 13 wounded, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in a madman’s spree, Obama did nothing to keep guns out of the hands of those at the margins of sanity.

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