EXAMINER.COM2 Hours Ago

Newly elected NRA president falsely maligned

by Anthony Martin

No sooner had the NRA elected its new president at its annual convention in Houston, Texas this weekend than the collectivist press got busy maligning him. The headlines at the New York Daily News blared, "NRA's new president is worse than Wayne LaPierre."

LaPierre, of course, is for many the public face of the NRA, appearing on television often during debates and/or conflict concerning gun legislation in Congress or gun rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. He is not an elected official but a full-time NRA employee, serving as executive vice president.

The office of the president of the organization, however, is an elected office, and the chosen candidate serves a two year term.

The Daily News has a most apparent problem with the newly elected president, James Porter, an attorney who hails from the state of Alabama. The Daily News stated,

Elected on the eve of the NRA's annual convention, set to start Friday in Houston, James Porter takes over as its president with a long record ofSecond Amendment absolutism, conspiracy theory looniness and racial repulsiveness.

"NRA's new president is worse than Wayne LaPierre."

In that one sentence alone, the Daily News told at least two falsehoods, three if one takes issue with the notion that Second Amendment "absolutism" is somehow an aberration, although the Constitution itself makes it absolute -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That statement is as absolute as it gets.

But then it is not surprising that the Daily News and other leftwing outlets consider such a statement to be outrageous, given that they have made it abundantly clear that to them the Constitution is meaningless for today's world and is thus to be thrown onto the ash heap of history, free speech, free press, gun rights, and all.

Perhaps the nation should experiment with placing a muzzle on the press merely in order to let them see what it is like to have a guaranteed right tossed into the garbage. The Daily News should be subjected to oppression, watchdogs, and government agents who demand that opinions such as the article on the NRA be disallowed from being published and that thereafter it should have to obtain a special permit from government to write anything further about the subject.

How long, do you think, it would take for the "journalists" at the Daily News to cry foul, citing the First Amendment right to a free press? Yet obviously the Daily News believes that gun owners should be subjected to such scrutiny and restrictions because the newspaper has no dog in this hunt. Gun owners have the Second Amendment just as newspapers and reporters have the First Amendment.

The Daily News goes further in its character assassination of Mr. Porter by claiming he supports slavery. And how did they arrive at this conclusion? Because Porter does not agree with the premise that Lincoln was forced to wage war against the south due to the "barbaric evil" of slavery.

Once again, the Daily News places its own ignorance on display. The south was caught in a Catch-22 when it comes to slavery. It's entire economy was based on the practice. And even then, most southerners lived in abject poverty. The south did not have the advantage of industrialization as did the north. Thus, the Civil War was fought over economics every bit as much as slavery.

Granted, slavery needed to be eradicated. Many in the south agreed with that sentiment. But there is a right way and a wrong way to go about doing good.

In England, for example, slavery at one time was commonplace just as it was in most areas of the world. But as with abolitionists in America, many Englishmen came to believe that the practice was despicable and needed to be stopped.

One such Englishman was William Wilberforce, who in 1789 introduced a proposal in Parliament to ban the practice of slavery. His conversion to evangelical Christianity, he stated, was the motivating factor that led him to oppose enslaving human beings.

But he lost overwhelmingly. In the next session of Parliament a year later, Wilberforce introduced the measure again. Once again, he lost but he did not lose quite as badly as he did in the first vote. The next year Wilberforce introduced the very same proposal. Again, he lost.

This practice went on for the next 44 years until in 1833 Parliament approved the measure. By that time Wilberforce had resigned his seat in Parliament and was in ill health. But he had succeeded in changing an entire society on an issue that was bitterly divisive.

And not a single shot was fired. No war over it ensued. No one died in a battle over it. Wilberforce demonstrated that a decent human being with pure motives and a bottomless well of determination can accomplish change, if the cause is right.

Lincoln, as great a man as he was, went about abolishing slavery the wrong way. He violated several provisions of the Constitution in waging such a war, not the least of which was the 10th Amendment. The nation was not yet ready to accept the blanket premise that slavery should be abolished. The ground had not yet been prepared, in stark contrast to what Wilberforce and other evangelical Christians, such as John Newton, had done in England.

The result was a nation torn asunder, brother pitted against brother, families ripped apart, and deep wounds that would take another 50 years to heal, especially in the south that had to contend with carpetbaggers who wished to punish the region for being on the losing side of the Civil War.

None of this, of course, is reflected in the Daily News' tirade against Porter, which is not surprising given that the facts do not fit the fictitious template used by revisionists who have a hidden agenda.

Finally, the Daily News refers to Porter as a "conspiracy theorist" because he decried the move by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to support a U.N. treaty that would place Americans' gun rights under the oversight of international law rather than our own Constitution. The writer then proceeds to call Porter "nuts."

Given that the facts contradict the assertions made by the author of the Daily News article, it is safe to refer to him and the entire newspaper as "nuts" who lack the integrity to present all of the facts in what is obviously a hit piece aimed at all gun owners in America.

Notice. You may be interested in my blog series called "Musings After Midnight" at The Liberty Sphere.

You may also wish to visit my ministry site at Martin Christian Ministries.