The American Bar Association is the trade group for many of the nation’s attorneys (please keep your lawyer jokes in the comments family friendly). But in addition to promoting the practice of law and trying to keep their members from living up to the public’s worst stereotypes of the profession, they’ve also chosen to get involved in social issue advocacy. For some reason. And one of their pet causes is what the gun-grabbing community euphemistically refers to as “preventing gun violence.” Translation: The ABA is a made member of the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex . . . As Amy Miller reports at legalinsurrection.com, ABA president James R. Silkenat highlighted what he sees as one of the the association’s major initiatives at their recent national meeting:
“Part of our mission as an association is to defend liberty and deliver justice,” Silkenat said at the program, “Combatting Gun Violence: A Role for Lawyers and the Bar.” Someone “who cannot go to the laundromat, the movie theater or school, without fear for their safety, is not truly free—even if he or she can vote or have the right to legal counsel,” he said.
Does that mean they’ll be suing the city of Chicago on behalf of innocent south-siders who are terrorized and murdered by gang bangers while city government and the street gangs coexist in symbiotic bliss? No, no it doesn’t.
Instead, they’re working hard to ensure more restrictions on individual gun ownership by law abiding citizens, whatever the Constitution may say about the matter. The ABA has thrown in with many of the usual suspects like the Brady Campaign, the American College of Physicians to work for more gun control laws. And they’ve created a Standing Committee on Gun Violence that’s liberally stocked with gun control industry shills.
As Miller puts it,
The gun control advocates who presented at the ABA’s meeting are perfectly aware that what they’re doing has nothing to do with the Constitution. They’re playing a very tricky—and shameless—political game with our Constitutional rights, and are depending upon the knee jerk reactions of politicians and the media to give their arguments credibility.
[Harvard Law professor Laurence] Tribe noted that even though “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” the court decisions do allow for certain gun regulations and that the real challenge for proponents of gun regulations is a political one—to get laws enacted. “It’s not the Second Amendment that stands in the way” of reform,” said David Clark, chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Gun Violence.
People like Tribe and Clark understand that the real end game for progressives isn’t necessarily less guns—it’s the ability to control with absolute certainty the culture surrounding personal responsibility, self-defense, and dependence on government.