Glenn Beck’s NRA-ILA Leadership Forum Speech

A fair number of highlights.  Good speech.

Some folks don’t like his delivery (just a tad melodramatic at times), but few can argue against the actual message.

Sarah Palin Freedom Speech at NRA-ILA Leadership Forum

Worth watching.

Made a few waves in the media, too.

Ted Cruz at NRA-ILA Leadership Forum

Very much worth watching.  He hits on the fact that Obama hasn’t enforced gun laws, yet still wants more gun laws, and that Obama cut school safety funding.

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HotAir has a good roundup of other quotes from the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum.

John Wayne on Liberals

Strange to hear John Wayne talking about Keynesianism and socialism on the horizon, as he dissects modern liberalism/leftism.

Rick Perry at CPAC 2013

It’s a good speech that made Real Clear Politics, HotAir, and Drudge, for the last few minutes in which he says Republicans lost in 2008 and 2012 because they didn’t run conservative candidates.  It’s worth it to watch the rest of the speech, which makes a lot of other good points.  The sound bite at the end really isn’t as important as the small-government principles he espouses.

Bill Whittle: “Where Do We Go Now?” Q&A

Follow up to yesterday.

Bill Whittle: “Where Do We Go Now?”

Worth the time to watch.  It’s a follow-up to the last election, and answers some questions about where to go… and sets a really bold blueprint for Whittle’s own ideas.

Bill Whittle’s Virtual State of the Union on Guns

Black Conservatives: Gun Control Has Racist Roots

With video at the Daily Caller.

“For black Americans, we know that gun control has ultimately been about people control. It sprouts from racist soil; be it after the, or during the infamous Dred Scott case where black man’s humanity was not recognized,” said Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality at the press conference sponsored by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

Harry Alford, the president of the Black Chamber of Commerce, praised the National Rifle Association in his speech at the event.

“The National Rifle Association was started, founded by religious leaders who wanted to protect free slaves from the Ku Klux Klan,” said Alford.

“They would raise money, buy arms, show the free slaves how to use those arms and protect their families. God bless you. Many of us probably wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the NRA.”

Those who’ve never read it should take the time to read Clayton Cramer’s “The Racist Roots of Gun Control“.  It’s a relatively short essay that really opens your eyes if you’ve never heard the arguments before.

Obama’s Use Of “The Children” For Gun Control

HotAir has a good roundup of quotes on Obama’s exploitation of kids here.  It’s worth looking at a couple of them closer.

From Brendan O’Neill of Sp!ked:

There was something nauseating about the way Barack Obama surrounded himself with children as he unveiled his gun control plans. It looked like emotional blackmail. “Look these innocent babes in the face and tell them guns are good” – that was the implicit message of this cynical, innocence-exploiting press conference, which brought to mind one of the late Wacko Jacko’s weird child-centred peace concerts more than it did a serious Lincoln-style presidential address. What Obama and his advisers appear to have overlooked is that it doesn’t matter one jot what children think of guns, or anything else for that matter: politics is an adult business, and should be shaped by adult arguments, not childish fears.

Obama’s anti-gun stunt was a see-through attempt to circumvent the democratic realm of grown-up debate and competing interests by laying down the trump card marked, “But what about the children?!” In the wake of the horrific Newtown school massacre, Obama received numerous letters from upset children, and he cynically decided to scan and publish them on the White House website and then invite the letter-writers to attend his big gun-control announcement. “I just wanted to tell you that I feel really sad”, says one of the kiddie letters. “Can we stop using GUNS? I am really scared of guns and criminals around the world.” This is probably the first time in history (and let’s hope it’s the last) that a 200-year-old constitution fought for tooth-and-catapult might be rewritten on the basis of what a precocious eight-year-old felt as she watched the evening news.

While it’s interesting and fairly important to note that young folks almost ready to vote (or young voters) actually want to buy guns, what’s unimportant is an elementary schooler’s opinions.  Though it is worth noting how those opinions are manufactured by the left via subversion through teaching, because, again, they control education.

The use of children to front a potentially big overhaul of Americans’ constitutional rights is really about silencing dissent, exploiting the wide-eyed innocence of worried children to try to shame those adults who still dare to say: “But what about my constitutional rights?” Indeed, it is normally only the most censorious, authoritarian regimes or groups that use children to front or follow through political campaigns. Who can forget the Child Spies in George Orwell’s 1984, those “ungovernable little savages” whose simplistic moralism made them the perfect monitors of adult behaviour? Today, all sorts of fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-masses campaigns – from Green efforts to guilt-trip us over our carbon use to Mary Whitehouse-style demands to censor wicked art – exploit or evoke children to get their message across. And that message is: “It doesn’t matter what you adults believe or want or desire – the feelings of children are way more important.”

Of course, the left is governed by those same impulses and feelings, just with fancier wording.

From Ben Shapiro:

“What you tend to do is you tend to demonize people who differ from you politically by standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, saying they don’t seem to care enough about the dead kids.” Morgan could only stammer, “How dare you!”

A few nights later, he invited me on again, specifically to stand once again on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook — only this time, he would bring the parents of those children to make the imagistic point. His counterargument to accusation was to prove the veracity of my accusation.

But that’s all the left’s got on issues ranging from gun control to the debt ceiling: appeals to emotion and to the supposed moral shortcomings of their opposition.

It’s the emotional appeal.  To the low-information voter, whether because life gets in the way, or because they’re disinterested, or because they’ve been dissuaded and demoralized due to circumstance or tactics to keep them from voting, it’s an emotions game.  That’s why we have a republic – to prevent the angry lynch mob of democracy that the Founders understood could only be checked by strong rule of law and a deliberative republic.

And seperately, from Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner:

Whenever a politician proposes a policy surrounded by children, skepticism is in order. But skepticism, logic and sound argumentation are the enemies of President Obama in his gun control push, which kicked off Wednesday on a White House stage filled with kids.

After December’s Sandy Hook massacre, Obama has reached deeper than usual into his bag of debater’s tricks and rhetorical ploys. He assigns evil motives to those who disagree with him on policy. He tries to pre-empt cost-benefit analysis with facile assertions that any policy is mandatory if it will save “only one life.” And the most contentious policy he seeks — a ban on so-called assault weapons — has near zero correlation to the problem he claims to be addressing.

Obama on Wednesday told voters to ask their congressman “what’s more important, doing whatever it takes to get an A grade from the gun lobby that funds their campaigns, or giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade?”

Obama’s direct and unmistakable implication: The only reason to oppose an “assault weapons ban” is for campaign contributions. In his press conference, he credited “an economic element” to “those who oppose any common-sense gun control or gun safety measures.”

Obama rules out the possibility that some people deeply value the constitutionally enshrined right to bear arms. Concerns about unintended consequences? Obama doesn’t acknowledge those. Anyone studying the 1994 “assault weapons ban” can see it did little to curb violence. But in Obama’s mind, that argument is just another cover story for “I Want More NRA Contributions!”

It’s called projection.

It’s one of the reasons why conservatives can understand what leftists are thinking, but the left lacks the thought necessary to figure out what conservatives stand for.