News of Hillary Clinton's official entry into the 2016 White House race fell like a divine revelation upon Nashville's Music City Center this weekend, where more than 70,000 members of the National Rifle Association had gathered for the annual meeting of the nation's largest and most powerful gun organization. After years of warning that President Barack Obama is coming for America's guns, the NRA eagerly embraced a new target, directing its doomsday predictions toward the new Democratic presidential candidate.
NRA Executive Vice President and leading gun-rights agitator Wayne LaPierre gleefully led the charge, with a 20-minute speech devoted almost entirely to deranged, almost poetic Clinton-bashing.
"She's been coming after us for decades, degrading law-abiding gun owners all over this country and trying to dismantle our Second Amendment freedoms," he told a packed auditorium Friday. "Gun bans, magazine bans, import bans, federal licensing and registration of every gun and gun owner in America. Hillary Clinton hasn't met a gun-control bill that she couldn't support. She even used the White House to run Rosie O'Donnell's so-called 'Million Mom March!'"
He was just getting warmed up. "Whitewater-gate, Cattle-gate, Gennifer Flowers–gate," he chanted, ticking off Clinton scandals, some long forgotten by most of the general public. "Monica-gate, Benghazi-gate, Email-gate, Wiped Server–gate. Hillary Clinton has more 'gates' than a South Texas cattle ranch, and Americans know it.
"She will not bring a dawn of new promise and opportunity," he concluded ominously. "Hillary Rodham Clinton will bring a permanent darkness of deceit and despair forced upon the American people to endure."
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"The NRA itself has been pushed farther to the right, I think further than the leaders would want to go," said political scientist Robert Spitzer, who has written five books on gun policy, including Guns Across America, which will be released by Oxford University Press next month.
"The reason why is because the NRA in the last 20-plus years has fed its followers a steady stream of angry, defensive, apocalyptic rhetoric about the government, about gun laws, about Democrats, about liberals," Spitzer added. "It has really worked aggressively to fan the flames of what I would label paranoia among its base, and they are now a captive, to some extent, of that base."
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Paradoxically, this could actually open space for Clinton to carve out a more moderate position on gun rights—provided she can balance public support for gun rights with the left's sustained demand for stricter laws. "I think you'll find that when she talks about the issue it'll be fairly sympathetic to gun owners, and she may have some success at defusing that—partly because unlike Obama she has shown some strength among blue-collar, white voters, and that may be helpful to her," said Spitzer. "So she has the opportunity to appeal more as a friend to gun owners in a way that Obama could not."
