Jacqui Goddard
London Telegraph
Sunday, January 7, 2007

America is under threat from malevolent forces intent on stripping citizens of their liberties. Dark enemies are stalking the innocent and the public must gird itself for confrontation.

So claims the National Rifle Association, America's largest, wealthiest and most politically powerful gun rights group, which has printed pamphlets entitled Freedom in Peril to alert its four million members. The danger, it says, can be summed up in one word: Democrats.

So alarmed is the NRA at the advent of a Democrat-controlled Congress after 11 years of pro-gun Republicanism that it has issued a new call to arms, urging benefactors to open up their wallets and stand up for their constitutional right to gun ownership.

"Second Amendment freedom today stands naked in the path of a marching axis of adversaries far darker and more dangerous than gun owners have ever known," it notes.

The pamphlet paints a picture of fear and lawlessness under anti-gun Democrats, infested by animal rights terrorists and illegal aliens whose violence goes unchecked while law-abiding gun owners, such as sport huntsmen, see their own rights dismantled.

Its rogues' gallery includes a caricature of New York senator and prospective presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, naming her as the "modern incarnation of political guile and cynical grace". It singles out Democratic bankrollers Barbra Streisand and George Clooney, and the "one-world extremists" of the United Nations.

The NRA insists: "These enemies of freedom are preparing for a profound and foreboding confrontation. We'd better be ready."

Gun control advocates say that the NRA's demonisation of the Left and combative language reflect the level of "paranoia" it is feeling.

"The NRA had enormous power and saw it come tumbling down on election day," said Peter Hamm of the Brady Centre to Prevent Gun Violence. "I don't think I could sleep well at night if I had been part of designing something like this. It comes right up to the line of suggesting armed resistance."