Author David Horowitz of Los Angeles, California is the designated recipient of the CCRKBA Gun Rights Defender of the Month Award for November.

In nominating Horowitz for the Award, John Michael Snyder, CCRKBA Public Affairs Director, said, “we welcome converts to the gun rights movement in the United States. Our candidate this month, a one-time leader of the New Left in the 1960s, grew disillusioned with the consequences of radicalism in America and abroad, and by the 1980s, his political about-face was complete.

“David Horowitz knows our opposition from the inside and how serious that opposition is regarding the destruction of traditional American values, including the individual Second Amendment civil right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. His writings can be most instructive for all of us as we struggle to preserve the traditional American right to keep and bear arms. He certainly is most deserving of this Award.”

Horowitz views the assault on the right to keep and bear arms as part of an all-out assault on American values, as part of a revolutionary commitment to change the United States from a nation in which government derives its powers from the consent of the governed to one in which the governed derive whatever rights they have at a given moment from the authority of the government.

He writes that believers in this statist ideology use any means to advance their cause and that those of us on the receiving end must wake up to these facts of political life and battle hard in order to defeat them.

In describing the reaction of the statists to the Columbine school shootings in Colorado, for instance, he notes, “there are 20,000 gun laws already on the books, 17 of which were violated by the Columbine killers. What would one more law accomplish that these 20,000 could not, especially one that would merely mandate background checks on buyers at gun shows, as the new one did? Is there any evidence that these shows are the sites of a significant number of criminal purchases, or that such legislation would have any effect on armed crime? The Brady Bill – the most celebrated triumph of gun control advocates in the last decade – has been violated on more than a quarter of a million occasions since its adoption, but the Clinton Administration (although a fierce advocate of the legislation) has only prosecuted a handful of the violators. Is there any more than political smoke at issue in this debate?

“Or is there any correlation at all between stringent registration laws and reduced gun deaths? A social scientist named John Lott has published a study showing that communities in which citizens are armed have lower incidences of gun violence than communities where guns are relatively absent. In places like New York, where gun violence has been reduced and the murder rate has been cut by a phenomenal 60 percent, the reason appears to be aggressive police tactics, which have come under fire from many of the same liberals who think gun control is the answer. Do the people who hate Chuck Heston adore New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Hardly.

“I do not intend this as an argument for or against the gun legislation that was proposed and that failed in the wake of Columbine. It is merely a case for sobriety in assessing the positions of the disputants. The gun legislation proposed after Columbine may or may not have been worthy. But any difference it might make is so insignificant that it could not justify the foam-at-the-mouth response of its proponents or the stigmas they have placed on those, like Heston, who disagree with them about it.

“Why are liberals so compulsively intolerant? It is not a question that can be casually dismissed…

“George Stephanopoulos’ memories of his days in the White House capture a similar moment in the command center of the political process. Before impeachment irretrievably tainted the atmosphere of the Clinton White House, Stephanopoulos and the President were discussing an open congressional seat and the prospect of an upcoming special election. ‘It’s Nazi time,’ Clinton remarked to Stephanopoulos, by which he meant time to get back to campaigning against Republicans. Two years later, at the outset of another campaign, Clinton told Dick Morris: ‘You have to understand, Bob Dole is evil, what he wants is evil.’ This of a war hero who was a consensus builder in his years as Senate Majority Leader.”

David Horowitz’ latest book, “The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits,” was published by Spence Publishing Company in Dallas, Texas. He also is the author of such best-selling books as “Hating Whitey” and “Radical Son,” and, with Peter Collier, co-author of “Destructive Generation. He is President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and is Editor of the journal “Heterodoxy.”

A regular columnist for the on-line magazine “Salon,” he also is Editor of “The War Room,” a tactical newsletter for Republicans distributed by e-mail and fax (www.dhorowitz.com, 800-822-4520).