H/T to Rob who sent me the link and made at least a tenuous connection to my previous efforts.

Jonathan Rauch. Does that name sound familiar to you? And if so what did he do for gun owners?

Okay, so maybe one out of 50 or 100 gun rights people will recognize it. You would have to be pretty hard core (potential pun material) to recognize his name and make the connection to gun rights.

So, Rauch just published an article in Reason: The Right Kind of Gun Rights–Why the D.C. case is about self defense. Before I tell you the first article he wrote which got my attention and ultimately nearly all gun rights activists here’s the final clue–from todays article:

Yesterday, unbeknownst to itself, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a gay-rights case. To most people, admittedly, District of Columbia v. Heller is a gun-rights case. In fact, it’s the most important gun-rights case in decades, one that may cast a shadow for decades to come. But to gay Americans, and other minorities often targeted with violence, Heller is about civil rights, not shooting clubs.

To put it all together, this is from the main page on the Pink Pistols website:

“Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible.”

–Jonathan Rauch, Salon Magazine, March 13, 2000

Yeah, now you should remember. Jonathan Rauch wrote an article and the Pink Pistols spontaneously burst up out of nothingness and gives the gun hating liberals severe indigestion to this day.

Cool, you say. But so what?

What’s interesting to me is that some other people and I had been trying for a year or two before Rauch wrote his article to get something going (see the Lewiston Morning Tribune and the Seattle Times) using the same concept. We didn’t get much traction. Perhaps it was the wider distribution of his article. Or maybe it was just an idea whose time had finally come. Perhaps it was just the right person got the message and had better organization skills than we did. Or maybe Rauch puts his words together in some magic way. No matter. Rauch wrote a single article and did massive damage to those that would take our freedoms away from us.

Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword and Rauch demonstrated that in a big way.