ACLU Finally Coming Around on Guns?

They are wary of the record keeping requirements contained in their bill to expand the background check provisions. Actually, the ACLU is a rather diverse organization. Some state chapters have long recognized the Second Amendment as an individual civil liberty, even if the national ACLU long held to the now discredited state/collective right view.

4 thoughts on “ACLU Finally Coming Around on Guns?”

  1. When the ACLU comes around to a mainstream post-Heller framework, I will become a card-carrying member. Anyone remember that phrase from the eighties?

  2. A state ACLU officer was quite candid with me one time, when gun owners were cooperating with them to resist anti-civil-liberties legislation being pushed by some personalities in state government that would later be promoted to us as “pro-gun.” He said that many, many people in the ACLU were sympathetic with the Second Amendment, but they knew which side of their financial bread their butter was on. Their base of supporters was almost universally liberal and anti-gun, and they feared losing them if they got into the gun rights issue. And, they knew that social conservative propaganda has been such that gun owners would not make up the difference, no matter what they did.

    That is certainly disappointing in terms of “principle,” but of course it is a phenomenon that cuts both ways. I have written before about gun groups that declined to support pro-choice, pro-gun legislators, because the groups claimed to fear losing their conservative contributor base.

  3. We need to get more of us in this organization than we currently have, and start pushing them further along the 2nd Amendment spectrum. The Left does this, we should too. The ACLU is a big target, and has a fair degree of respect.

    Means we on the right have to stop denigrating it so much and start using it for good purposes.

  4. Whatever the status of closeted gun rights sympathy among ACLU-ians (I believe I’m still on their member roll) I suspect they’re jumping in now because the incompetent-or-malicious construction of, and antidemocratic methods used to pass, the post-Newtown gun control laws can no longer be ignored. Putting aside the issue of the day, these trends are a throwback to the bad old days of smoke-filled rooms and thinly-veiled bills of attainder (laws that realistically only affect a targeted out-group). Despite occasional appearances, the ACLU is not MoveOn.org or the SPLC.

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