It’s a game best played lying on the grass on your back, gazing up at the clouds lazily passing by overhead. Except it isn’t a giraffe or a fire engine that old hands in the mainstream media see when they look at the president’s frontal assault on the gun lobby and owners of firearms. Instead, they see something far more invidious.

Tom Brokaw sees the “silence on gun violence” (silence?) as akin to the failure of many to speak out against racial segregation in pre-civil rights America. Mediaite has a video capture of the veteran newsman’s interesting take on current events, which he proffered on Thursday’s Morning Joe:

It reminds me a lot of what happened in the South in the 1960s during the civil rights movement. Good people stayed in their houses and didn’t speak up when there was carnage in the streets and the total violation of a fundamental rights of African-Americans as they marched in Selma, and they let Bull Connor and the redneck elements of the South and the Klan take over their culture in effect and become of face of it. And now a lot of people who I know who grew up during that time have deep regrets about not speaking out.

There were a few brave souls who did and they were knocked down pretty hard within their own communities for coming out and speaking out in a moderate way, not even in a liberal way about the right of African-Americans to be able to vote, for example, and to walk into any restaurant they wanted to. But there was a lot of silence at the time. Now it’s time for the people who do have strong feelings, who are feeling that they can’t do anything about it, to kind of band together and have something to say here.

Bob Schieffer, who’s been around even longer than Brokaw, also equated Obama’s efforts to rein in gun violence with Lyndon Johnson’s push for civil rights legislation. But he took his comparisons a loony step further, insisting that “taking on the gun lobby” would be a comparatively easy task for Obama, who had bagged much bigger game – think Osama bin Laden. Newsbusters.org has the video, the money portion of which is transcribed below:

[W]hat happened in Newtown was probably the worst day in this country’s history since 9/11. We found Osama bin Laden. We tracked him down. We changed the way that we dealt with that problem. Surely, finding Osama bin Laden; surely, passing civil rights legislation, as Lyndon Johnson was able to do; and before that, surely, defeating the Nazis, was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby.

Have either of these journalists ever read the Second Amendment? Better still, has Obama? Has he read the “Federalist Papers,” or at least the portion where James Madison explained why the founding fathers included language in the Constitution on the right of the people to bear arms? It was so that the citizens of America would have a check against the government’s usurpation of their liberties. It was to protect them against tyrants — like Obama.

Related Articles

• Texas, Missouri, other states respond post-haste to block Obama gun ban
• Obama raises hypocrisy bar with 23 executive orders in one fell swoop (Photos)
• Obama’s autocratic dream (Video)
• Another Maryland 6-year-old suspended for pointing finger like gun
• 6-year-old Maryland student suspended for pointing finger like gun
• SF HS student suspended over private Newtown poem•
• Michael Moore: ‘Calm down, white people, and put away your guns’ (Photos)
• Father arrested, strip-searched after 4-year-old draws ‘man with gun’
• School disciplines 10-year-old for gun-shaped pizza slice (Video)
• TSA airport screeners stop teen with handgun design on pocketbook
• TSA takes toy away from mentally challenged man

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook.