Breitbart.com continues vetting the Obama presidency, turning its rhetorical guns on Attorney General Eric Holder. Speaking to a women’s forum in 1995, Holder suggested some rather naive things that he thought out to be done about guns. Not gun violence, keep in mind, or violent crime in general, but guns themselves.
Holder was addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club. In his remarks, broadcast by CSPAN 2, he explained that he intended to use anti-smoking campaigns as his model to “change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC” about guns.
“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”
Holder added that he had asked advertising agencies in the nation’s capital to assist by making anti-gun ads rather than commercials “that make me buy things that I don’t really need.” He had also approached local newspapers and television stations, he said, asking them to devote prime space and time, respectively, to his anti-gun campaign.
There’s quite a bit of naivete packed into that. Who was supposed to pad the ad makers to make those mind-altering ads? They’re paid by product makers to persuade Holder and the rest of us to want to “buy things that I really don’t need.” Does Holder want them to bankroll his pet campaign out of their own pockets, or ours? They’re not self-perpetuating institutions like the government, they have to make a living. Someone will have to pay for this campaign against guns.
But set that aside for now. The fact is, in the time since Holder made these remarks, gun laws have been liberalized across the country, and yet we’re not awash in blood as the gun grabbers predicted.
Holder suggests that media images so powerful that they can create a sea change in attitudes. Yet also, in the time since he delivered those remarks, media images have unquestionable gotten more violent. Video games in particular have gotten much more violent and far more realistic. And yet the combination of liberalized gun carry laws and more violence in the media hasn’t led to an American bloodbath. Gun-related crime is actually trending down. Liberals usually predict that a bad economy will lead to an increase in crime, yet that hasn’t happened since the great recession started, either. Does Eric Holder actually think that gang bangers took their gun cues from watching Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry (who had been busted in a drug sting five years before Holder made these remarks) and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? He says he does think that, in the video at Breitbart.com.
Fast forward to 2012. The media is more violent, Obama’s election has led to a powerful increase in gun sales (out of fear that Obama’s would be an anti-gun administration), gun carry laws are liberalized, yet there has been no increase in gun violence.
Holder’s DOJ has led to a sharp increase in gun violence, though, by walking guns across the border to Mexico — thousands of guns, which have been implicated in the murders of hundreds of Mexicans as well as two American agents. What would the Eric Holder of 1995 have to say to the Eric Holder of 2012?
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