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Okay,
the National Rifle Association isn’t quite the Klan. But it’s getting closer.
For years, big corporations had welcomed the opportunity to accumulate more customers by giving discounts to NRA members, even if they pack assault rifles.
For years, big corporations had welcomed the opportunity to accumulate more customers by giving discounts to NRA members, even if they pack assault rifles.
Yet
in the aftermath of the shootings in Parkland, Florida, and the activism of
high school students, corporations are bailing out of their deals with the NRA.
As
we’ve seen with the corporate firings of sleazebag movie moguls and predatory
television personalities, nothing concentrates the minds of CEOs like a moral
protest that’s gaining traction.
As
I said, the NRA isn’t the Klan, but since Trump became president it’s behaved
like a subsidiary of the alt-right.
At
the CPAC conference, NRA president Wayne LaPierre cloaked his pro-gun
address in paranoia about a “tidal wave” of “European-style socialists bearing
down upon us,” telling his audience “you should be frightened.”
Most
Americans know this kind of talk is bonkers. Not incidentally, most Americans
also want gun controls. Ninety-seven percent support universal background
checks and 70 percent favor registering all guns with
the police.
Preventing
gun violence is coming to be seen less as an issue of “gun rights” and more
about public morality. “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on
our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?“
Obama asked in 2012, after twenty first-graders were massacred at the Sandy
Hook Elementary School.
Obama
got nowhere, of course, but now change seems to be in the air. Why? I think
Donald Trump deserves some credit. .
Trump’s
response to the slayings in Parkland has been to urge schools to arm teachers.
The proposal is not only wrongheaded – more than 30 studies have shown that additional guns
increase gun violence and homicides – but profoundly immoral.
If
the only way to control gun violence is for all Americans arm themselves, we
would all be living in a social Darwinist hell.
The
moral void of Donald Trump has been a catastrophe for America in many ways, but
it’s contributing to a backlash against the systemic abuses of power on which
so much violence in American life is founded.
The
Parkland students are insisting that adults stand up to the immorality of the
NRA. Corporations are responding. So are politicians.
“We get out there and make sure everybody knows how much money their politician took from the NRA,” said David Hogg, one of the students.
Similarly,
the #MeToo movement is insisting that America wake up to the immoral behavior
of powerful predatory men.
Harvey
Weinstein and his ilk aren’t killers but they are accused of assaulting and
even raping women whose careers depended on them.
For
years, these women didn’t dare raise their voices. They were told this was the
way the system worked, much as we’ve been told for years there’s no way to take
on the NRA.
Would
the #MeToo movement have erupted without the abuser-in-chief in the Oval Office?
Maybe. But Trump’s personal history – 19 women have accused him of sexual
misconduct – has helped fuel it.
The
#BlackLivesMatter movement predated Trump, but our racist-in-chief – who
criticizes black athletes for protesting police violence – has given it new
meaning and urgency as well.
The
NRA’s position that everyone should carry a gun contrasts with the reality that
a black man brandishing one could quite possibly be shot and killed by the
police.
The
cumulative and growing force of these three intertwined movements comes from a
basic premise of our civic life together, which Trump’s moral obtuseness has
brought into sharp focus.
In
order to survive, people need several things – food, water, a roof over our
heads. But the most basic of all is safety. That’s why governments were created
in the first place.
If
Americans can’t be secure from someone packing an assault rifle, or from the
predatory behavior of powerful men, or from the police, we do not live in a
functioning society.
Make
no mistake. This is all about power – a powerful political lobby that has
bullied America for too long, powerful men who haven’t been held accountable
for their behavior, police who for too long have been unconstrained.
A
moral movement is growing against the violence perpetrated by all of them,
making it necessary for both government and business to take action.
It
is being led by people whose moral authority cannot be denied: students whose
friends have been murdered, women who have been abused, the parents and partners
of black men who have been slain.
It
is already having a profound impact on America.
Robert
B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and
"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving
Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect
magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality
For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good." He's
co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism,"
which is streaming now.
