Opinion: Opinion: The NRA’s demographic death spiral

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, The Times’ letters editor, and it is Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. The Cold War was declared over 27 years ago today. Here’s a look back at the week in Opinion.

The right may have won the battle, but the numbers say the left will win the war. Gay marriage is here to stay (even Donald Trump thinks so). A majority of seniors may have voted for Donald Trump, but if millennials made up the electorate, Hillary Clinton would have won by hundreds of electoral votes (small consolation now, but still). And so on.

Now there’s this: The rate of gun ownership among young adults is falling fast, to 14% today from 23% in 1980. In fact, about half the firearms in this country are owned by just 3% of adults, suggesting the National Rifle Assn. lacks the public support to continue achieving legislative and electoral victories across the country. In an op-ed article, Firmin DeBrabander reports on the demographics that do not bode well for America’s gun lobby:

Given these trends, it should come as no surprise that public opinion also stands against the NRA.

Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, polls indicated that more than 70% of Americans favored universal background checks for gun transactions. And a 2015 Johns Hopkins study found that majorities favor a host of stronger gun safety measures, including allowing lawsuits against negligent dealers, enacting safe storage laws and preventing sales to individuals with domestic violence restraining orders. While Missouri lawmakers recently approved a permitless carry law in their state, a majority of residents oppose the measure.

The NRA has traditionally succeeded in overcoming the popular will because it knows how to pressure (or threaten) lawmakers into its corner. Even after Sandy Hook, for instance, the NRA rallied enough members of Congress to block background checks. And the gun lobby obviously did well in this last election — though it spent a record amount — getting the president it wanted, as well as several new lawmakers to manipulate.

NRA opponents, however, have discovered a powerful line of attack that promises to make the legislative landscape better reflect the state of gun ownership and gun rights support. Instead of appealing to lawmakers, who are corrupted and corruptible, they’re going directly to the people.

Gun safety advocates sponsored ballot initiatives in four states, and won three, barely losing the fourth. Nevada passed universal background checks, California banned possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines and Washington state allowed judges to “issue orders enabling authorities to temporarily seize guns from people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others.” Maine voters narrowly declined to approve universal background checks.

The gun safety movement has suffered so many gut-wrenching setbacks in recent years, it was high time for a new approach. And, evidently, it’s working. When voters are asked directly about gun safety measures, they will check the box.

It was not long ago that the gun lobby enjoyed support from both sides of the political aisle. No more. Now the NRA is a fixture of the right — and increasingly, the right wing of the right — as it insists on an uncompromising agenda that alienates more and more Americans. In short, the gun lobby is marginalizing itself.

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Fidel Castro died as he lived — praised by useful idiots. Jonah Goldberg gives the “gold medal in the Useful Idiot Olympics” to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his cringe-worthy praise of the late Cuban dictator as that country’s “longest-serving” president. Goldberg then goes after Geraldo Rivera for praising El Comandante because, you know, Rivera’s thinking is so reflective of the entire left’s. L.A. Times

In Trumpworld, getting 2.5 million fewer votes than your opponent is a “landslide” victory. Simple math ought to show why Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton was about as close as they come, but columnist Doyle McManus debunks the president-elect’s claims that millions of people voted illegally and that his margin of victory in the electoral college somehow gives him a political mandate. L.A. Times

Another Trumpworld fantasy: Millions of immigrants will self-deport. It sounds easy, but in reality it’s just as difficult as rounding up 11 million immigrants here illegally and deporting them by force. Trump’s top immigration adviser believes the incoming administration can make life so burdensome for the immigrants in the U.S. illegally that many of them will simply choose to go home, but that would require cracking down on the employers and countless small businesses that rely on affordable labor, a politically untenable undertaking. L.A. Times

Big cities like L.A. have vowed to forgo cooperation with Trump on deportations. Over at the New York Times’ opinion website, two scholars debate the responsibility of cities to serve their residents by shielding them from federal action or to assist Washington in enforcing immigration law. New York Times

Who cares if a few left-wing college students burn American flags? The debate over criminalizing flag desecration — reignited this week when Trump called on people who set Old Glory aflame to be locked up and have their citizenship revoked — is a stupid one, caused largely by attention-seeking college kids and “conservative retailers of false outrage,” writes Mark Oppenheimer. He suggests a better way: “Radical, safe-space-obsessed students are a minority within a minority, and it’s time for politicians, and the rest of us, to cease writing, or legislating, about what they drink, whom they bed and what they do to their American flags.” L.A. Times

Set my inbox on fire: paul.thornton@latimes.com