By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
OPINION: Adam Kinzinger is an angry and frustrated little fella.
For those who don’t remember the former Illinois Congressman, he served on the Jan. 6 House committee alongside Liz Cheney where he read from prepared scripts and cried a lot, was censured by the RNC and forced to leave Congress in disgrace, and then, of course, ended up with a job at CNN.
Today, Kinzinger has become a man without a country, of sorts. Republicans still despise him and Democrats could care less what he does, since his usefulness is at an end.
Kinzinger, who’s only 45, is struggling for relevancy, trying to find an audience that will listen to his angry rants. His memoir, “Renegade: My Life in Faith, the Military, and Defending America from Trump’s Attack on Democracy” is scheduled to be released Oct. 17, and will likely not exactly fly off the shelves.
In the meantime, the self-described renegade is trying to get back into the public eye by any means possible, and what better way to attract attention than by bashing the Second Amendment.
Last week, Kinzinger spoke at an event in Chicago that was organized by the Joyce Foundation, a private foundation with more than $1 billion in assets that is decidedly anti-gun. Barack Obama once served on their board. The event was hosted by David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief campaign strategist. Tim Heaphy, who served as the chief counsel for the Jan. 6 committee, was the other featured speaker.
“Second Amendment people should be on the front line of gun control,” Kinzinger told the left-leaning crowd.
The Chicago Tribune loved the idea, and wrote in an editorial that “those who want to see sensible regulations on gun ownership, such as background checks, age restrictions and red flag laws, should see ‘Second Amendment people’ as potential experts and allies. They know guns better than those who merely despise them.”
Sensible regulations? Experts and allies? As if …
To be clear, Kinzinger’s suggestion – that gun owners should help infringe upon the Second Amendment – may be the single dumbest idea we’ve heard since December 15, 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified.
Granted, we do have far more expertise than the gun-ban industry – we can articulate the difference between a semi-auto AR and a select-fire “assault rifle” – but why the hell would we use this expertise to aid those who want to deprive us of the right to own weapons of our choice?
It would be like asking newspaper editors or television producers to help weaken the First Amendment, or asking lawyers for a quick way to overcome their clients’ self-incrimination protections. Like most of what Kinzinger and his gun-banning friends suggest, it makes no sense.
The only thing you can surmise about Kinzinger’s idea is that it is nothing new. The former Congressman strongly opposes our Second Amendment rights.
In May 2022, after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, Kinzinger told CNN he would support a federal ban on “assault weapons,” which, of course, he could not define.
“Look, I have opposed a ban, you know, fairly recently. I think I’m open to a ban now,” Kinzinger told CNN. “It’s going to depend on what it looks like because there’s a lot of nuances on what constitutes, you know, certain things.” He added that he would also support additional licensing and training requirements for potential AR purchasers.
That same month, Kinzinger told ABC News that raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21 was a “no brainer,” and he claimed he was a “strong defender of the Second Amendment.”
“And one of the things I believe that for some reason is a very rare thing is that as a person that appreciates and believes in the Second Amendment, we have to be the ones putting forward reasonable solutions to gun violence,” Kinzinger claimed.
Kinzinger is right in one respect; It is rare for someone who supports the Second Amendment to put forward ideas to weaken it. In fact, it’s not only rare, it’s incredibly stupid – about what you’d expect from a laughingstock of a former Congressman with plenty of time on his hands.
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