When interest groups stray from their core missions to fight the culture wars, they diminish their own effectiveness.
When interest groups stray from their core missions to fight the culture wars, they diminish their own effectiveness.
S chool shootings come in more than one flavor, and yesterday’s shooting in Arlington, Texas — four injured, none fatally — was the vanilla kind. According to local news reports, some students got into a fight, and one of them pulled a gun and started blasting — a horrifying event, but not the theatrical Columbine-style massacre that usually comes to mind when you hear the words “school shooting.”
Naturally, the ghouls were on the scene while the blood was still hot.
Among the chief ghouls is Randi Weingarten, the prim union thug who earns the better part of a million dollars a year complaining about teacher pay. About the Texas shooting, she raged: “Just last month, a law went into effect in Texas that permits anyone over the age of 21 to carry a firearm in public without a permit or training. Make no mistake, laws like this put our kids, our families and all of us at risk.”
It is difficult to say for sure whether she is stupid or simply a prisoner of habit.
The suspect arrested in the Texas shooting is 18 years old, meaning that he cannot legally purchase a handgun, much less carry one. The shooting happened at a school, and it is a felony in Texas to bring a firearm onto a school property or into any place where school activities are taking place. The change in Texas law that Weingarten cited was unnecessary and inadvisable, as I argued while it was under consideration — there was nothing wrong with Texas’s prior system of licensure after a brief gun-safety course and a background check — but that law has absolutely nothing to do with yesterday’s shooting.
Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers should learn a lesson from their rivals over at the National Rifle Association.
In spite of its fearsome reputation, the NRA today is a shadow of what it once was. The NRA at the height of its influence was exactly what an advocacy group of that sort should be: a narrowly focused, genuinely bipartisan, single-interest lobbying outfit. The NRA in that configuration was remarkably effective, in part because it could count not only on almost universal Republican support but also on the support of many western and rural Democrats. For most of his Senate career, Democratic leader Harry Reid was solid on the Second Amendment, and his support was a boon for the NRA. Texas’s new “constitutional carry” regime puts it on the same footing as Vermont, the political home of socialist Bernie Sanders, who was, for much of his career, not too bad on gun rights himself. That bipartisan coalition, limited though it was, kept Americans’ gun rights out of the reach of the Democratic Party’s left wing for a couple of decades. The issue was, as one gun-control advocate put it, “off the table.”
One of the few sensible things the daffy socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn ever said in the course of his long public career was his observation that the gun debate is as much a matter of the “cultural divide” as one of policy. The NRA, in its transformation into an all-fronts culture-war outfit, has alienated some members and supporters (including me), putting itself in a weaker overall position when it comes to the issue that is allegedly its raison d’être.
Kulturkampf politics gives groups such as the NRA a more commanding influence over a smaller constituency of like-minded culture-warriors. That may be good for fundraising and for NRA executives, but it is a loss for Second Amendment advocacy, inasmuch as having reliable support from approximately 100 percent of Republicans and partial support from 30 percent of Democrats — nearly one-third of House Democrats voted against the so-called Assault Weapons Ban in 1994 — was better than having the perfervid support of approximately 100 percent of Republicans and the un-resting hostility of approximately 100 percent of Democrats.
That’s a lesson that has gone unlearned.
Randi Weingarten and the AFT are, at this point, only incidentally connected to the cause of public schools and the teachers who work in them. They have for many years now been in effect a subdivision of the Democratic Party, and their position has been one of consistent left-wing culture-war aggression, sticking their collective snout into everything from abortion to policing to the Second Amendment.
AFT members have suffered for this.
Wars involve enemies. If the AFT boss were interested in working toward consensus-driven bipartisan policies that would in some practical way benefit her constituents (and her constituents are teachers, not students — never forget that), then she would be focused on their issues rather than drawing a thousand lines in the sand on a thousand other points of contention. There are 27 Republican governors out there and 30 state legislatures under Republican control, with 55 percent of all state-legislature seats occupied by members of the GOP. If the interests of America’s teachers are going to advance, they will have to advance through Republican and Democratic legislators alike. And if Republican legislators are not simply citizens with different preferences and priorities but enemies, then that is not going to happen.
But if Randi Weingarten is interested in being a Democratic Party power-broker independent of the interests of her members, then shrill and stupid partisanship is the way to go.
Weingarten’s actions speak for themselves. I wonder if the teachers are listening.