Teens on the March

By Bill Maher

The recent gun control protests made everyone feel good for a day, but I wouldn’t expect gun control anytime soon. Like any prey animal, a politician’s primary motivation is self-preservation, and the really formative event for office holders and gun control didn’t happen in Washington, March 24th or on school campuses April 20th; it happened in Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district on March 13th. That’s when Democrat Conor Lamb flipped a Trump seat with a campaign that started with an ad where he fired an AR-15, while the voiceover said he “still loves to shoot.”

Lamb’s position on school killings? “I think that the emotions that a lot of us are feeling right now are very raw because we know that there's not one thing we can do with the stroke of a pen or one thing you can ban. We need a comprehensive answer on mental health.”

And the old NRA favorite: “I believe we have a pretty good law on the books…”

At a Lamb rally, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts called Lamb a "God-fearing, union-supporting, gun-owning Democrat.”

The Democrats eked out a victory by less than 700 votes by communicating to single-issue, gun rights voters that they had nothing to fear from Conor Lamb. They could go back to fearing black people, the UN and fluoride. That’s a narrow margin – 0.2% – and Lamb did it by taking gun control off the table. By saying strengthen background checks – whatever that means – and making a Mike Pence serious-face about “mental health.” 

That’s what we learned in March.