Failure of Obama's Gun Push in Senate Offers Real Hope

"I was 'ready to rule' from the beginning. You shall be subject to my Hope & Change, I swear it. Both you, and one day, your heirs!!"

In the age of "Hope and Change" since Obama's election, there's been precious little hope. Meanwhile, the change we've been treated has been monstrously huge and unpopular laws being passed (ObamaCare), astronomical spending, a ramping up of class warfare rhetoric, a decline in the median income of the middle class, expensive and disastrous "Green" programs whose favors were doled out to political contributors/supporters, while 7%+ unemployment and $3.50 for a gallon of gas being referred to as the new normal-- all this as most of the mainstream media have transformed themselves into bitter and angry political cheerleaders.

Yet, even after Obama administration and the media pulled out every stop in its media blitz, and in the process sunk to new depths in exploiting the death of schoolchildren, the much-heralded Senate gun control bill failed.

Investors Business Daily had this take:

Gun ownership restrictions that the president said were supported by 90% of the nation have died in a Senate controlled by his party. Exploiting Newtown is haunting the power grabbers.

Just last week it was a political no-brainer. "Ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks," President Obama asserted yet again. This time he was at the University of Hartford, less than an hour's drive from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct., where 20 students and six staff members were slaughtered just before Christmas. With Obama were many of the Newtown victims' parents.

[...]

He challenged Congress: "If our democracy is working the way it's supposed to, and 90% of the American people agree on something, in the wake of a tragedy you'd think this would not be a heavy lift."

Turns out that our republic is working the way it's supposed to. A Gallup poll asking what's the most important problem facing the country shows why what the president is trying to do is indeed a "heavy lift" — only 4% in both April and March cited "guns/gun control," down from 6% in February.

The "economy in general" at 24%, "unemployment/jobs" at 18%, "dissatisfaction with government" at 16% and "federal budget deficit/federal debt" at 11% all dwarfed concerns about guns. And the problems of "health care," three years after ObamaCare was passed, and "ethical/moral/family decline" are both more worrisome to the public than gun control.

As moderate Democratic senators, especially those facing re-election next year, run away from gun-restriction legislation, it's no mystery what's happened.

As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on Wednesday, "in some cases" the president has used Newtown victims and their families as props. While still grieving, they were flown on Air Force One to lobby Congress, with the president repeatedly insisting -- yelling, in fact -- that "this is not about politics!"

There is something repugnant about the parents of murdered children being exploited several months later. It's especially distasteful when the victims' parents are hardly unanimous on gun control. Note Mark Mattioli, who compellingly called for well-trained, on-site armed guards to protect schoolchildren as a more effective alternative to new gun laws.

Even some of the most pro-gun control Democrats, notably Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, whose 1994 assault weapons ban failed ignominiously, admit as much. Intensified background checks, she conceded, "would not have prevented the tragedy in Newtown."

Well then, why should Newtown be the rationale to rush such a government power grab into law?
 

Perhaps it was public distaste that turned the tables on the Obama/media push. Perhaps it was the simple fact that the vast majority of Americans do not believe that gun control is the answer to problems of either crime or mass shootings. Obama's oft quoted 90% of the people favor new gun control nonsense seems pulled out of thin air.

And, of course, the fact that Americans are more concerned about the economy, unemployment, and the general amount of the frequent out-and-out lies coming from the federal governament was significant.

Or maybe, just maybe, people are beginning to recognize Obama's ongoing political campaign, disguised as political policy, for what it is-- a constant power grab against people's rights and property. Perhaps a significant portion of the low information citizens now see through Obama's simple reductive ploys, and his strawman arguments. Perhaps these same people will no longer view those standing up to Obama's vision of an enormous, redistributive government as mere backwards fools motivated by racism.

Maybe.

As I''ve said many times before, Obama's Leftist policies simply do not work. They have been tried numerous times before and have always failed miserably. There has never been a question of Obama's success. There has simply been a a question of just how much misery his failures will cause, and whether he and the media will be able to scapegoat their responsibility onto political opponents or targets of opportunity.

Perhaps this political loss for Obama has offered a glimmer of hope that low information America is wising up. Perhaps the misery in the years ahead-- misery that ObamaCare, the naivety of Obama's State Department, and this administration's reckless spending and ignorance of actual economics basically guarantee-- will not be allowed to be used as a catalyst for further harmful change.

It's a stretch. But maybe. And at this point I'm grabbing whatever hope I can.