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6 reasons why President Obama will defeat the NRA and win universal background checks

Something is going to happen this session in the US Congress that hasn’t happened in more than a decade: The National Rifle Association (NRA) is going to lose on a top priority issue. Here are six reasons why President Obama will win a victory on universal background checks.

5. Democrats will remember Joe Baca

Mayor Bloomberg dropped $3.3 million dollars into a primary race between Democrats in California. Joe Baca, an incumbent US congressman, had supported gun rights for 20-plus years. His opponent was for gun control, and rode Mr. Bloomberg’s lavish spending to victory. The NRA sat out the race, attributed to the fact Mr. Baca had voted against the gun group on one partisan vote and supported Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. The message to moderate Democrats could not have been clearer: Vote against gun control, and you might lose your seat.

That’s a new message in gun politics. We’ve seen how primary challenges in the GOP have radically increased partisan loyalty on that side of the aisle. If gun-control advocates like Bloomberg and Gabrielle Giffords really want to change gun politics, they will throw their weight around in Democratic primaries in 2014, and let wavering Democrats know their intentions – now. Bloomberg’s move against Rep. Baca in California last election already sent a pretty strong message.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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