The Ides of March for Our Lives

In which Cassius decides that Sword Control isn’t so important, after all.

Say, when was the last time you saw anti-gunners marching for “our” lives?

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Take a moment and run some phrases like “protest against gun violence” or “demonstration against lax gun laws” through your favorite search engine. Notice that, to the extent that there are any recent ones, they’re local and seriously underattended. It’s not as if there aren’t still plenty of politicians–most with a (D) after their names–who are more than happy to condemn gun ownership. It’s not as if every single American who doesn’t like the Second Amendment changed his mind. So what has changed?

The first thing we should examine isn’t the fact that the “marches for lives” have stopped. It’s when they stopped, and what they looked like before they stopped.

Back in 2022, some absolute waste of skin decided to murder a bunch of children in Uvalde, Texas. The event happened about 36 hours before the National Rifle Association held its Annual Meetings–which is required by the organization’s bylaws, and had been planned for years in advance–in Houston, Texas. There wasn’t much the NRA could do about it, given the fact that the convention center was already set up and about 70,000 people were either already there, or on their way to the show.

But March for Our Lives apparently had plenty of bandwidth. I was present at that show, and got to personally observe several dozen brand-new, sequentially numbered electric buses rolling down the street to drop off their payload of protesters. That was a couple of million dollars’ worth of fresh-from-the-show-floor mass transportation. The protesters, which numbered in the thousands, had professionally produced signs and chants they’d rehearsed. (My favorite was “NRA KKK! NRA KKK! NRA KKK!” The Black man having a cigarette next to me before he returned to the exhibit hall found that particularly amusing.)

That was a tremendous amount of money and organizational effort that turned out quickly. The U.S. military can mobilize faster, but few other organizations could hope to do so. Now, of course, we know why: Because the anti-gun demonstrations DID have the full might of the U.S. government behind them. The “grassroots” anti-gun organizations weren’t funded by the activists. Nor were they really funded by the billionaires backing them, like Bloomberg and Soros. In fact, it appears that all Bloomie and Georgie Boy ever did was provide the seed money for these groups, which then went and obtained government backing to the tune of millions of dollars from USAID.

Yes, the people gathered peacefully inside the NRA show to celebrate a Constitutionally protected right had, in fact, paid for the people standing outside to call us Nazis and Grand Dragons. But they didn’t just stand there and yell, which is of course their right to do as Americans. They tried to rush the doors of the convention hall twice, and had to be pushed back by mounted Houston cops. (None of that ever made the news, of course. Instead, we were treated to slavering, groveling coverage from the mainstream media of the protesters’ “bravery.”)

Unhinged, violent, well-funded, and well-organized. That’s what it looked like before. Now, it seems nobody’s paying protesters to swing their signs at NRA shows anymore, and therefore, signs are not being swung.

But 2022 was far from the last time we saw marches and protests against gun rights (although they did slow down). No, it’s only been about a year since the gun-grabbing non-governmental organizations like March for Our Lives stopped Marching. Just a little under a year, in fact. Ever since someone tried to assassinate then-candidate and now-president Donald J. Trump. By the time Luigi Mangione murdered the United Healthcare CEO in cold blood a few months later, it was all over for the big anti-gun demonstrations. After all, the “kind, tolerant, nonviolent” Left had finally admitted to themselves that they love gun violence more than just about anything.

Note that I said “admitted to themselves,” because the anti-gunners were literally the only people the anti-gunners were fooling. The rest of us knew perfectly well just how much they love school shootings and mass casualty events, because of their naked glee in the wake of them. It was standard operating procedure for the Brady types to put out press releases demanding gun control BEFORE THE BODIES COOLED. Now, those same people are just angry at the would-be Trump assassin for having missed.

Do I have any policy ideas or calls-to-action here? No. If a law-abiding American, regardless of race, color, or creed, wishes to own a firearm, I’m on board. The Second Amendment applies to anti-gunners, too.

But damned if I’ll teach one of them how to shoot.