We’ve discussed both the need for an honest evaluation of the present political situation of the Second Amendment as well as the need to use the right tactics and strategies for a given job. Now, we will delve a little into the tactical/strategic area some more, this time by looking at a tactic that was advocated a long time ago by an anti-Second Amendment zealot – and how it can be used to regain our rights because it already has worked to do so.
In 1976, Nelson “Pete” Shields, who after his son’s death went to work for what eventually became the Brady Campaign, stated in an interview with the New Yorker, “Right now, though, we’d be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal — total control of handguns in the United States — is going to take time.”
Thankfully, Shields, who turned to anti-Second Amendment advocacy after his son was murdered, was wrong about his timetable – we are over three decades from the end point of the seven-to-ten-year timeline he estimated it would take to get a handgun ban. 32 years after that interview, the Supreme Court ruled handgun bans unconstitutional in the Heller decision and ruled the Second Amendment was binding on the states in the McDonald case two years after that.
But there is something we can learn from this anti-Second Amendment extremist from long ago:
We can see how the other side has been far more effective in a tactical and strategic sense than many Second Amendment supporters who have been highly critical of NRA EVP Wayne LaPierre [read my History of the NRA Executive Vice President]. What many of them may not want you to know is that under LaPierre’s tenure as Executive Director of NRA-ILA and NRA Executive Vice President, which ran from 1986 to the present, has seen significant gains for our Second Amendment rights.
by Harold Hutchison
