Beto O'Rourke came through Arkansas two weeks ago with his big new gun-control message.
Then, at the end of the very next week, he bellowed, "Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15, your AK-47" in a nationally televised debate.
To put that another way: Beto O'Rourke came through Arkansas bearing a gift for the Arkansas Republican Party, which already had everything.
And to put it one other way: Beto O'Rourke came through Arkansas, found a dead horse that was the state's Democratic Party, and beat it, then went on national television a few days later to throw the deceased and beaten animal into a pauper's grave.
There is this thing that happens in contemporary American politics, and, with variations in details, it goes like this:
A legitimate issue arises such as the proliferation of semiautomatic assault-style rifles, which most of the evil or crazed mass shooters use. A majority of the people can generally support doing something to control those weapons.
But the issue has nuance. You might want to try to restrict magazine capacity. You might want to acknowledge the futility of getting rid of the guns and offer a government purchase plan and a ban that would be purely prospective on the guns' manufacture and sale.
Newly sensitized, thoughtful people permit themselves thoughtful moments.
Then a cellar-dwelling big mouth in the Democratic presidential race, polling miserably, says in a debate seen by millions that he's coming for the AR-15s and AK-47s, and, suddenly, all nuance is gone.
Republicans, who know how to frighten people with a bogeyman, have one.
The debate changes. Two days later I'm on a panel with two Republicans and all they want to talk about is that Beto O'Rourke--irrelevant except to Republican fearmongering tactics, no more likely to be the Democratic presidential nominee than I am--wants the Democrats to come take our guns.
Please notice that O'Rourke didn't say that he was coming for the guns. He said "we," which could be taken to mean all Democrats, from Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who weren't the ones who said it, on down.
A conservative friend whom I've heard say in years past that he doesn't know why people need AR-15s is emailing a map showing a red dot for every home in Arkansas where Beto will need to confiscate an AR-15. For the punchline, the map shows so many dots the state is solid red.
The issue no longer permits subtlety. It is one solid color. It is fear, or fearmongering. The potentially thoughtful gun owners aren't thinking now of AR-15s as unneeded weapons. They're thinking of precious personal property to treasure against Democratic politicians like O'Rourke who will get their rear ends kicked if they try to take anybody's personal property or freedom.
The entire debate changes to polarized simplicity because of one Democrat's stupidity and the rapid universal tactical advantage taken by cynically savvy Republicans.
Soon you get this tweet from the state Republican Party: "When @ArkDems invited @BetoORourke to Arkansas, they stood by as he used Arkansans as a prop to push his gun confiscation plan to appease the Far-Left."
Never minding the odd hyphenation and capitalization of the "far left," the Republicans cast the state's beleaguered Democrats as pliant servants to whatever Beto was going to say the next week.
The fact is that the state's Democrats only booked O'Rourke because he was the lone presidential candidate with ticket-selling potential who didn't have anything better to do that Saturday night.
The Republican tweet carries this little choice postscript: "@TomCottonAR is not about to let that happen."
And, of course, Cotton's re-election campaign follows with an online ad explaining that Cotton will never let happen what Beto so ominously threatened.
Beto O'Rourke's shooting off his mouth in no way requires heroic resistance by Tom Cotton or anybody. His words would vanish absent exploitation.
F inally, the preposterous president, Donald Trump, chimes in to say "dummy" Beto's remark is making it hard to achieve any kind of bipartisan gun legislation.
It was already plenty hard because Trump wants to oblige both the NRA and the gun zealots while also appearing heroic to those emotionally desperate for some sort of common-sense reform. Typically, he'd already embraced for the cable television audience the utter logic of universal background checks, then backed off for the audience of Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.
Now Beto gives Trump an excuse to say Republicans are newly fearful of working with congressional Democrats, considering that they're coming for the guns.
So we have another little story of the absurdity and dysfunction of contemporary American politics.
The next time somebody asks you why we can't achieve common-sense reform on guns, just say stupidity and cynicism. Or, synonymously, Beto and Trump.
Or you could just scream and pull your hair out.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/22/2019