The Last Gun by Tom Diaz

AFTERWORD
    Only weeks after the manuscript for this book was sent to the publisher, Americans voted in what Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s chief executive officer and executive vice president, predicted would be “the most dangerous and decisive election of our lives.” He asserted, “This election will decide not only the destiny of our Second Amendment rights, but everything that’s good and right about America.”
    LaPierre was right. The 2012 election was decisive. Voters all over America decisively rejected the NRA. They decisively rejected its angry worldview. And they decisively rejected all but a forlorn handful of the candidates that the NRA backed. President Barack Obama—whom LaPierre and the NRA political machine vociferously vowed to defeat—was elected to a second term. Mitt Romney’s penitent pilgrimage to the NRA’s 2012 convention did him no good. In fact, it arguably worked against him, as an example of his alleged tendency to flip-flop on issues.
    Beyond Romney, the NRA’s endorsement was decisively an electoral kiss of death. In six of the seven Senate races where the NRA spent more than $100,000, its candidate lost. Even though most incumbent House members who ran kept their seats, of those who lost their reelection bids, over two-thirds were endorsed by the NRA, whose paper tiger was once again shown to be a tissue pussycat.
    The election of November 6, 2012, cast a historic shadow on the shrinking pool of aging white men who are the core of the NRA and the conservative coalition to which it has attached itself. Americans do not believe that the coalition’s obsession withrace, ethnicity, guns, and violence defines what is right and good about this country. On the contrary, the election decisively validated the long-term trends cited in this book.
    The urgency of the need for change was tragically underscored on December 14, 2012, when a young man named Adam Lanza walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut—home of the National Shooting Sports Foundation—and shot to death twenty first graders and six school employees with a 223 caliber Bushmaster semiautomatic assault rifle. He then used a handgun to kill himself. Lanza had earlier killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, with a 22 caliber rifle.
    Horrified by the sheer madness of this slaughter, many expected that the gun industry and its lobby would at last see the need for sensible gun legislation. That hope was dashed—and the intransigence of the gun lobby exposed—on Friday, December 21, when the NRA’s leadership emerged in Washington, D.C., after a week of silence. In a defiant broadside, Wayne LaPierre blamed the news media, the film industry, and video games—in short, everything but guns—for causing America’s gun violence problem.
    The landmark election and the horror of Newtown challenge progressive leaders and policy makers as they have never been challenged before. They must act decisively to address the underlying causes of gun violence in America described in the preceding pages. If they do not, they likely and rightly will be swept aside in favor of new leadership.
    This much is certain: the gun industry will dig in as it has always done, and continue to profit from fear and violence—until the very last gun.
    January 6, 2013