On May 8, 2013–nearly a month after Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) gun control push failed to garner the votes necessary for passage–Breitbart News suggested that gun controllers’ new tactic would be to treat gun owners the way the left treated cigarette smokers and seek a myriad of restrictions for health and other reasons.
On September 10, 2o15, Moms Demand Action’s Shannon Watts explained that the her group’s relentless, Micheal Bloomberg-funded push for gun control is fashioned after the way others pursued “tighter [laws]” on smoking.
During an appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Watts claimed her gun control group is defeating the NRA by going around Congress to get “policies in place” at various businesses “just like they did with tighter [laws for] smoking.”
This is an old but often-used tactic, first espoused by then-U.S. Attorney Eric Holder in 1995. According to Newsbusters, Holder said:
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’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes.
We have seen a broader push in this direction over the past few months as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Democrat Senators, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and various gun control groups have presented guns and access to guns as a “public health” issue. Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) even claimed that there is a “gun violence epidemic.”
Moms Demand Action is right there with them, hoping a push that makes gun owners look like cigarette smokers will finally secure the gun control that has eluded them to this point.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.