If you ever doubted that gun control was, in fact, a partisan issue, look no further than how many of the Parkland kids have delved into the politics of the Democrat Party. Hell, ringleader David Hogg even got elected as vice chairman of the party.
Briefly.
He didn't last long in the job, and he made a lot of enemies of his fellow travelers while doing it, but it seems that he's not learned his lesson. He wants to shake up the party...apparently in a different way than the waves he previously made.
NPR quoted Hogg saying, “We should hold our share of the lead opposition party to Donald Trump to a standard at least as high as we would hold a middle schooler. People want new leadership and they feel like they’re not being properly represented.”
He expressed concern that the Democrats are losing ground but trying to cover it by denying the decline, which he claims is political suicide: “When you tell people not to believe what they’re seeing or what they’re feeling with the economy or the president or something like what is happening in Gaza, you’re going to lose them.”
Hogg continued, “I think that the establishment of the Democratic Party is going out there trying to offer voters basically a different shade of lipstick that they’re putting on the pig and expecting voters to somehow buy that when the reality is they’re sick and tired of that. They want fighters.”
The whole "they want fighters" thing was true about the Republican Party for years. Then we got Donald Trump, who, for all his sins, is most definitely a fighter. Now, the Republicans are running a lot of them, and while there will always be ebbs and flows in the halls of Congress with regard to who has the majority and who doesn't, the truth is that Republicans are enjoying a lot more support from their party faithful than Democrats are.
Then again, the fact that Democrats are siding with Nazis, terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, and openly siding with avowed socialists probably isn't helping all that much, either.
That said, Hogg isn't inherently wrong. Trump won in 2024 because Democrats kept telling us the economy was great and there was nothing to worry about, even as many of us were trying to figure out how to stretch our grocery budgets to cover increasing costs. Op-eds telling us not only that the economy was great, but that they knew it was great because we kept replacing worn out appliances — yes, someone really tried to use the sale of appliances to justify their economic pronouncements — were never going to land right.
And the fact that Hogg isn't wrong on this worries me, because when David Hogg is the voice of reason in the Democrats' ranks, we've got a problem.
Especially because he's such a radical on guns. He might have tried to position himself as a shooter, thus "one of us," but he's also notoriously against any firearm that might be useful for the actual purposes of the Second Amendment. If he's the voice of reason among the party, what else do they actually have in store for us?
We already know that the Democratic Socialists of America want to upend the Constitution, and that includes a lot of gun control, especially as socialism is one of those things you can vote yourself into, but you have to shoot your way out of. That's a level of insanity that should worry everyone, even Hogg.
After all, to his credit, he also called out New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham for overstepping her authority by banning firearm carry completely in Albuquerque. He's got a line he doesn't think should be crossed, apparently, and his party is so bonkers these days that they'll blow right past it.
Honestly, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where Hogg is the voice of sanity.
