The NRA Has Found Its Tyranny -- And It Is Us

Congratulations, NRA. The War Against Tyranny has begun, and you just won the first battle.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Micah Johnson, the Dallas shooter, was rebelling against what he felt was cruel and oppressive rule by the government over blacks. That's the textbook definition of tyranny. His feeling was crystallized by the shootings in St. Paul and Baton Rouge.

In a 2013 poll, 65% of American adults thought the purpose of the Second Amendment was to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny. This belief is exploited by the NRA and its supporters in Congress as it fights for unfettered access to guns for all.

So the tyranny-fearing Johnson was precisely the type of person the NRA wanted to empower with a Russian-made SKS so he could fight his personal tyranny.

The NRA never limited the type of tyranny the guns were to be used against. It's not just the land-grabbing Bureau of Land Management or the confiscatory tax man of the IRS or the jackbooted thugs flying in black helicopters. It's also cops and family-men named Patrick, and Lorne, and two men named Michael from the Dallas Police Department and a guy named Brent from Dallas Area Regional Transit.

Ten years ago a compliant Supreme Court ignored the requirement of a militia in blessing a nation of weapons. At least with a militia, the definition of tyranny wouldn't be an individual decision.

So the NRA got its guns. And its dogmatic resistance to any meaningful gun control let one deranged guy stand up against tyranny by killing cops protecting marchers ironically protesting Johnson's own tyranny. With any luck, it'll be another week or two until someone else sees his tyranny in EPA environmental regulations or a Department of Education school lunch program and shoots another one or two or twelve or fifty of our neighbors.

So congratulations, NRA. The War Against Tyranny has begun, and you just won the first battle.

The title of this article is an homage to a 1979 Pogo cartoon by Walt Kelly which read: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot