Lighting candles and cursing the darkness. "Politically speaking, the 'gun control movement' is an elitist exercise in limp-dickery." How this explains the Gunwalker Conspiracy. "We had a plan."

Anatomy of a limp dick.

One year on from the Tuscon shooting, the Brady Bunch is getting together to mourn both the dead, and if they're honest, the death of their citizen disarmament political movement. ("D.C. Gun Victims Vigil Sunday; Anniversary of Tucson Shooting.") This will be an opportunity for them to both light a candle AND curse the darkness. As for myself, I think I'll give the Brady blood-dancing-'round-the-Maypole-in-January a pass and go to the Birmingham gun show instead. Have to raise a little money for the next hearing trip, don't you know? ;-)

Even Mike the Mouth's Bloomberg/Newsweek has been forced to admit as much in an article entitled "Gun Control: A Movement Without Followers."

In the year since the Tucson (Ariz.) massacre, in which a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people and wounded 13, the most famous victim, Gabrielle Giffords, has recovered admirably. The Arizona representative has co-authored a memoir and made appearances in the well of the House of Representatives and on national television. What Giffords and her fellow Democrats have not done is use the Tucson bloodshed to achieve tougher gun control laws.

The inaction, especially President Barack Obama’s passivity on the topic, demonstrates that gun control has expired as a national political issue. If Democrats can’t sell stiffer restrictions after a midday attack on a congresswoman, when can they?

My favorite Brady moan from this article is:

“It’s shameful, as we approach the anniversary of the Tucson tragedy, that the only bill Congress has acted on would make it easier to carry concealed guns across state lines,” says Dennis Henigan, who heads the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington.

Shameful? A concession to political realities, rather.

Giffords, Obama, and other Democrats can read polls showing diminished support for gun control. In late October, Gallup reported that a record-low 26 percent of Americans favor a ban on civilian possession of handguns, down from 60 percent when Gallup first asked the question in 1959. By a 60-35 margin, Gallup said, “Americans’ preference regarding gun laws is generally that the government enforce existing laws more strictly and not pass new laws.”

The Supreme Court, too, is doing its part to deter broader gun control. In landmark rulings in 2008 and 2010, the justices clarified that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep a handgun at home, striking down local bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Of course it doesn't help that the Obama administration's apparent clandestine operation to deliver on his promise to Sarah Brady that they were proceeding with citizen disarmament ploys "under the radar" just blew up in its face like a loaded cheap cigar.

But the realization that, politically speaking, the 'gun control movement' is an elitist exercise in limp-dickery is not new. I just finished (praise the Lord for giving me the strength to endure) a 2006 book by Kristin Goss, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies and Political Science at Duke University, entitled Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. From the publisher's blurb:

More than any other advanced industrial democracy, the United States is besieged by Commanding majorities of Americans voice support for stricter controls on firearms. Yet they have never mounted a true national movement for gun control. Why? Disarmed unravels this paradox.

Based on historical archives, interviews, and original survey evidence, Kristin Goss suggests that the gun control campaign has been stymied by a combination of factors, including the inability to secure patronage resources, the difficulties in articulating a message that would resonate with supporters, and strategic decisions made in the name of effective policy. The power of the so-called gun lobby has played an important role in hobbling the gun-control campaign, but that is not the entire story. Instead of pursuing a strategy of incremental change on the local and state levels, gun control advocates have sought national policies. Some 40% of state gun control laws predate the 1970s, and the gun lobby has systematically weakened even these longstanding restrictions.

A compelling and engagingly written look at one of America's most divisive political issues, Disarmed illuminates the organizational, historical, and policy-related factors that constrain mass mobilization, and brings into sharp relief the agonizing dilemmas faced by advocates of gun control and other issues in the United States.

Right. Social scientist Goss attempts to give the gun control movement elitists a game plan for rising above their elitism (below?) to appeal to the common man (or, rather, woman, since Goss identifies them as the gun banner's natural audience) to create a mass movement for gun control. The book is by turns turgid, illogical and contradictory. The gun banners loved it, though, with dust jacket endorsements from Sarah Brady, Carolyn McCarthy and Robert Spitzer. There are, however, some raisins in the turd if you choose to pick them out from the brown stuff.

Note well the above phrase, "the inability to secure patronage resources." Among the most important of these, Goss explains, are governmental, bureaucratic "patronage resources," and chief among them, the ATF.

"By the late 90s, with a pro-control president in the White House, BATF was poised to become a quiet ally to gun control organizations. . . To avoid arousing the gun lobby, the agency justified its research projects in terms of "enforcement" of existing laws, which gun rights organizations were on record as supporting. . . One insider summarized the bureaucracy's strategy as follows: "We had a plan to move from enforcement to policy to politics without anybody noticing, and that's what we did."

The footnote to this quote indicates that it is based on a "personal interview with (a) former Treasury official, March, 2002."

And, here, gentle readers, is the genesis of the Gunwalker Conspiracy. Absent the political will for the kind of disarmament schemes the elitists sought -- in the face of the political blow back that embracing gun control cost the Democrats and RINOs -- blocked at almost every turn by these factors even with the willing assistance of the news media which could never quite persuade the American people that citizen disarmament was a good thing -- the gun grabbers inside the present administration, made up largely of people from the Clinton administration who remembered the 1994 landslide loss with palpable pain, recognized that whatever they were to accomplish had to be, in Obama's words to Sarah Brady, "under the radar." Ipse dixit.

And nine months after Obama took office, the clandestine gunwalking program was off to the races. It was their only hope of changing the political realities faced by the gun ban advocates. That it didn't succeed is not for lack of trying. Only now they have to face the music, and the judgment of a rightfully wrathful people.