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“Truth And Consequences”
Well, here I am still
in the chariot. I am pleased to be among political
thinkers, and I hope, political activists ... fellow
charioteers, if you will.
My life has always been pretty active. I marched with
Martin Luther King in 1963, long before Hollywood found
it fashionable. Supporting civil rights then was about
as popular as supporting gun rights is now. Yup, I’m
currently the President of the National Rifle
Association.
Clearly, my views are not bound by political
correctness. The thought police do not frighten me. I
hope I frighten them.
Since your Political Union debates follow traditional
structure, my resolution would go something like this:
Be it resolved that societal dishonesty can kill you.
That is to say, a world without consequences is a world
without truth, and that you can die from that lie.
I believe that in your heart you already know something
is profoundly wrong. When bartenders are responsible for
drunk drivers’ acts, and gunmakers are responsible for
criminals’ acts, and nobody is responsible for O. J.
Simpson’s acts, something is wrong.
As students, you should search for truth. Your brain
evolved to demand reality. It can best process
information against an unchanging backdrop of certainty.
But that’s hard to find. Your world is all spin.
Actions are further and further removed from
consequences. Cause and effect are, at best,
theoretical. Equal and opposite reactions are no longer
PC.
The Dow tops ten thousand, but our lives are not
enriched. We enjoy unprecedented affluence, but our
souls are impoverished. Our lungs inhale the rarefied
air of prosperity, but our hearts yearn for nourishment.
You lack that invisible anchor that tethered your
grandparents to reality—you know what I’m talking
about.
Our nation’s abundance is like a narcotic that masks
our malady—we feel too good to acknowledge that
we’re sick. We’re like the cocaine-snorting rock
star, who dares not look in the mirror—the ghoulish
reflection would ruin the buzz.
In his book “The End of Sanity,” Martin Gross says,
“blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being
established as the norm in almost every area of human
endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new
anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from
every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling.
Americans know something without a name is undermining
the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to
separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong.
And they don't like it.”
Let me give you two good examples: This
Administration’s approach to crime and to war. Our
government’s duplicity proves my point.
If you drove into Richmond, Virginia, today, you’d be
greeted by billboards with giant words that say, “An
illegal gun gets you five years in federal prison.”
These warn all felons that Project Exile is in effect.
Project Exile simply enforces existing federal law.
Project Exile means every convicted felon caught with a
gun, no matter what he’s doing, will go to prison for
five years. No parole, no early releases, no discussion,
period.
My, my—incarcerating armed felons. What a novel idea.
It works, like no other anti-crime policy ever proposed.
Project Exile, in its first year in Richmond, cut gun
homicides by 62 percent. And as you’d expect, related
gun crimes like robbery, rape and assault also
plummeted. That means hundreds of people in Richmond
today are alive and intact who, without Project Exile,
would be dead or bleeding.
For years the NRA has demanded that Project Exile be
deployed nationwide. Makes sense, huh? The laws are
already on the books. Just enforce them.
But Bill Clinton won’t do it. When he says he’s
serious about fighting crime, consider that as a matter
of policy—as a matter of policy - the Clinton
Administration is not prosecuting violations of federal
gun law. In fact, they reversed the Bush
Administration’s policy of prosecuting felons with
guns. Instead, with plea bargains, a wink and a nod,
they’ve been letting armed felons off the hook. From
1992 to 1998, prosecutions have been cut almost in half.
So while Project Exile was saving lives in Richmond,
federal prosecution for gun law violations everywhere
else dropped by 46 percent.
Such fraud could not happen without the news media’s
alliance in the dishonesty; it goes utterly unreported.
Here are more examples.
Everyone remembers the press’s podium-pounding for
Clinton’s Crime Bill and its “urgently needed”
juvenile gun transfer provisions. It became law. But
nobody is reporting that, out of thousands of certain
offenders, his Justice Department bothered to prosecute
only five people in 1997 and six in 1998.
Everyone remembers all the press support for his
“desperately needed” semi-auto gun ban—that
outlawed guns based solely on their appearance. But
nobody is reporting that, out of thousands of certain
offenders, the Clinton Administration prosecuted four
people in 1997 and four in 1998.
Everyone remembers that media love-child, the Brady
Bill. Mr. Clinton repeatedly claims that a quarter
million handguns have been prevented from falling into
the hands of convicted felons. But nobody is reporting
what matters to you: How many of those quarter million
people were convicted and taken off your streets for the
federal crime of being a felon trying to buy a gun? Try
nine!
It’s surreal. Mr. Clinton stands in the Rose Garden
with his ten prop cops, lip-biting in pained support of
some new law. The press does its best to get it passed.
It becomes law. Then everybody forgets about it. And
Americans buy it over and over and over again.
Maybe you think a politician’s lies can’t hurt you.
But let me tell you, armed felons can.
Passing laws is what keeps politicians’ careers alive.
Enforcing laws is what keeps you alive. But nobody’s
getting arrested, nobody’s going to jail, it’s all a
giant scam. It’s not real life. It’s a big lie,
packaged by an alliance between this Administration and
a media that systematically propagates its doctrine.
Forgive my severity, but that’s precisely the
definition of the Soviet propaganda machine of the
‘50s and ‘60s.
While this Administration weaves reality spun from empty
air and heavy breathing, the NRA is helping fund Project
Exile to keep it alive. I submit to you that the
consequence of what we’re doing saves people ... and
the consequence of what they’re doing kills people.
It’s a certain consequence that if you choose not to
prosecute criminals, people will die. It is also a
certain consequence that if you choose to go to war,
people will die.
Consider Kosovo. Though undeclared, the war is real.
What is unreal is Bill Clinton’s grasp of its
consequences ... and perhaps yours.
From the outset it appears nobody anticipated that
first, human consequence of war called refugees, that
first stream of tragedy that spills from armed conflict.
It seems our leadership is surprised and unprepared,
caught short on tents, food, clothes and medicine for
tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of
refugees.
Now, I am not one of those conservatives who reflexively
opposes everything Bill Clinton does with knee-jerk
uniformity. Whether or not we should have gone is
irrelevant. That debate is over.
So let’s discuss what reality demands of us now. The
only good war is a fast and decisive war, with
overwhelming military might that results in quick
victory.
But that chance is lost. Instead we’re doling out
cruise missiles like popsicles in a
popularity-poll-guided war, conducted by a man who did
not display the will to fight as a younger man, whom I
doubt would go fight now, and who would not offer his
own loved ones to march on Kosovo.
Warfare experts grasp the truth that Mr. Clinton
doesn’t: now we’re in it, we must win it. That means
that ground troops—daddies, neighbors, classmates,
uncles, husbands, and good friends—are going to die.
Are you willing to send yours?
More important, are you willing to take a round in the
gut? I mean you here tonight. You, and you, and you.
You’re the flesh that fills uniforms. You may say
that’s melodrama; but this actor filled a uniform for
two years overseas.
You there, listening politely while you plan your next
date and your first million, are you willing to put that
all aside—just as thousands of good men did 60 years
ago—and go fight?
Or are you thinking, as I suspect, that it’s some
lesser person’s job? Or that, nestled safely in our
distance and abundance, we can just wiggle joysticks on
remote control missiles and win this ... Gameboy war?
If you believe that, you have lots of equally naive
company. A CNN/Gallup poll three days ago reported that
2 out of 3 Americans think we have a moral obligation to
fight Milosevic. But an equal number, 2 out of 3, were
unwilling to agree that casualties are an acceptable
consequence. So we’re all for moral obligation,
alright ... as long as there is no pain, no price, no
consequence.
No, the truth is, life has consequences and must be
lived in that reality, not as it is pretended to be
lived by people who aren’t honest. We have an arrogant
Administration and conspiring media who are getting us
into events that have genuine consequences.
But then, this President has long seen himself as free
of consequences.
There is something wrong with a government that
purposely, as a matter of policy, ignores the
consequences of letting armed felons go free, or of
going to war.
To me, that disappointment is the grand tragedy of the
Baby Boomers. For all the dreams we had for the
generation that now runs this country—my
generation’s children and your generation’s
parents—for all the Baby Boomers’ achievements in
communications and space and medicine, it is all for
naught if you inherit and perpetuate societal
dishonesty.
So what can you do?
I learned the answer 36 years ago on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., standing with Dr.
Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.
You simply refuse to go along. You disobey. Peaceably,
yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely.
But when you’re asked to live their lies, you practice
civil defiance. You refuse to go along with the spin and
facade and vacant language of dishonest people.
I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr.
King ... who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and
Jesus, and every other great man who refused to go
along. Racial discrimination was illegal, but violation
had no consequences. Segregation was illegal, but
prosecution of offenders was not a policy. So Dr. King
taught us to defy societal dishonesty with action—and
changed our country.
Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with
that defiant spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor,
sent Thoreau to jail, refused to sit in the back of the
bus, and protested a dishonestly fought war in Viet Nam.
Our uniquely American genes naturally defy political
posturing. For example: Who’s conducting the greatest
intellectual rebellion in history right now? It's not
the likes of the New York Times or Washington
Post or other traditionally crusading journals of
American opinion. No, it’s the Internet, built by and
for the minds of young people like you, people yearning
for truth.
In that same spirit, I’m asking you to disavow
cultural dishonesty with massive civil defiance against
a government spoiled by prosperity ... against wishful
thinking masquerading as leadership ... and against news
media who perpetuate the untruth that action can occur
without consequence.
I ask you, in Lincoln’s words, “so that this nation
may long endure, “please ... do what you must to
reveal, and then revere, truth ... expect and accept the
consequences of your actions and those of your nation
... and every day, test what you see with what you know
is right.
And when it’s dishonest, defy it. Follow in the
hallowed footsteps of the great disobedience movements
of history that freed exiles, founded religions,
defeated tyrants, and in the hands of an aroused rabble
in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built
this country.
If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree. Thank
you.
©
1999 National Rifle Association
Reprinted with
permission
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