To gun control elitists, 'bitter clingers' are also 'poor souls'

by Mark Oliva

6:00am Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Today’s gun control politicians are making it clear. It’s not just guns they despise. There are two other primary obstacles to civil disarmament that they loathe.

One is the Second Amendment itself. The other, well, it’s you — the gun owner.

It wasn’t that long ago when President Barack Obama lambasted gun owners who refused to roll over to his gun control agenda. Stumping for his first election to The White House, he told fundraisers at a San Francisco event of smalltown Pennsylvania voters that were left behind, especially by the political elites.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” President Obama said in 2008. Interestingly, it was former U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), later Secretary of State, who rebuked him.

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“I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America,” she said. “His remarks are elitist and out of touch.”

Of course, that was before she labeled half of America “a basket of deplorables” in 2016 when she was making her second run for the Oval Office.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” former Secretary Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Those were also a whole lot of gun owners who couldn’t buy into her gun control agenda — which included banning the modern sporting rifle (MSR), the most popular-selling centerfire rifle in America.

‘Poor souls’

Fast-forward to 2024 and senior Democratic Members of Congress are repeating the same epithets. These were also the same politicians who were the vanguard of President Obama’s, Secretary Clinton’s, and President Joe Biden’s gun control agendas. Turns out, insulting and dismissing gun owners as “lesser” Americans is a popular attitude among Blue State elites.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was rebuked as an “elite” at an Oxford Union debate on April 25 when she said that certain Americans are “poor souls who are looking for some answers.” Their biggest sin, according to the Speaker Emeritus, is not bowing to the orthodoxy of the gun control elite.

“These poor souls ... are looking for some answers,” Rep. Pelosi said. “We’ve given them to them, but they’re blocked by some of their views on guns … they have the three Gs: Guns, Gays, and God.”

Rep. Pelosi didn’t think that was enough. She said, “cultural issues cloud some of their reception of an argument that really is in their interest.”

Did you catch that? Gun owners who reject a politically-driven gun control agenda aren’t thinking in their own self-interests. After all, every other gun control idea — especially the most recent overreaching of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to run roughshod on the separation of powers to write criminal law in the place of Congress — isn’t a bad idea in her mind. She believes President Biden’s big government abuse of the rulemaking process is good for voters. They’re just not bright enough to see it for themselves.

What makes it more insulting, Rep. Pelosi was making that argument at the Oxford Union, a debating society that’s held at Britian’s Oxford University. She trashed American voters on an overseas stage that pitches itself to hosting internationally prominent individuals across politics, academia and popular culture. That stage has hosted President Ronald Reagon, Mother Theresa, and Albert Einstein. It has also hosted former Secretary of State and Climate Envoy John Kerry, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Stacey Abrams and deposed and murdered former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

Forgot 'the people'

That’s rare air for a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. She’s not alone in her ideas. Rep. Jerry Nadler (R-N.Y.) last week thought he was a tad smarter than the Founding Fathers, including James Madison, who wrote the Second Amendment, and the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Heller decision, that upheld the Second Amendment as a right belonging to the people, not the government.

“The Second Amendment reads — quote — ‘A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed,” Rep. Nadler said during a hearing last week. “It is clearly a right, the Founding Fathers, the Framers were opposed to standing armies. They thought that those were instruments of tyranny and that militia what should be had and the Second Amendment was the guarantee, was framed as a guarantee that you could have a militia, a well-regulated militia, being safe in the security of a free state.

“That was the understanding for 200 years until the radical Supreme Court in the Heller decision upended 200 years of Constitutional interpretation and said that Second Amendment has nothing to do with militias,” he continued. “It’s a personal and basically unlimited right. The Supreme Court was wrong in that decision.”

Except, that’s not what the Second Amendment says. He cherry-picked the parts that support his big-government and gun control agendas. Madison — and the U.S. Supreme Court — must have collectively rolled their eyes at his continued ignorance to the Bill of Rights. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

“Apologies to Ranking Member Nadler if this isn’t what he stated but I think he might have left out some key words when he read the Second Amendment, and I’ll read it here,” Rep. Massie explained. “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And I’m not sure if I heard him say ‘the people.’ Which applies to all of the people as we well know, and I yield back.”

It’s insulting to American citizens when Members of Congress intentionally leave “the people” out of the rights they are endowed with by their Creator. It’s insulting to voters when elite politicians disregard them as “bitter clingers,” “deplorables” or “poor souls” who can’t be trusted to think, act and vote for themselves. Worse than that, it is breaking faith with the very “people” these elites are elected to represent and protect their rights from an overreaching government.

Those poor souls — the more than 100-plus million gun owning homes in America — and the industry that provides the means for exercising their Second Amendment rights know that no one is buying the gun control they’re selling.

Republished with permission from NSSF.