The N.R.A. Can Be Beat

The N.R.A. Can Be Beat
Parents throughout the country live with the dread
that the next lockdown at their child’s school won’t be a drill and that screams like those we heard on cellphones from classrooms at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will come from their own child’s classroom.
Hundreds have been killed in mass shootings at a high school in Littleton, Colo., a church in Charleston, S. C.,
an office party in San Bernardino, Calif., a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and elsewhere in the past 20 years.
But the gun lobby’s stranglehold on our elected officials does not need to continue, if candidates stand up to the lobby and voters demand
that they commit themselves to the sorts of changes that a vast majority of Americans want.
Though many Americans, and some elected officials, have taken a stand to stanch the epidemic of gun violence, the National Rifle Association
and its congressional servants have been an unyielding obstacle to sensible reform.
A version of this editorial appears in print on February 16, 2018, on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: The N. R.A.
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People have been injured or killed in eight school shootings in the first seven weeks of 2018 alone.
The terror that has gripped their elected officials, however, is fear of the wealthy
gun lobby, to which they have let themselves be held hostage for decades.