The Most Surprising Speaker At The 2A Rally

If you had told me that a former president of the Brady Campaign was going to speak at the 2A Rally Saturday, I would have wondered what substances you had ingested.

Dan Gross, former president of the Brady Campaign, was an unannounced speaker at the 2A Rally. What he said took a lot of people by surprise including me. You can listen to his short speech below:

Since then he has done a few interviews. The first probably was with John Crump who writes for Ammoland. His full candid interview is here. One thing Gross said really stood out in my opinion.

I think there are people on the “gun control or gun safety” side that have too loud of voice that really believe that there’s no place for guns in our country. Those are the people that lead to a lot of exhaustion that leads me to where I am now.

While Gross believes in background checks, he said he had no problem with someone selling a firearm to a friend without such a check. He also said it was wrong to focus on an assault weapons ban.

Given the tweets from Brady today, I can see why Gross has moved on. What they are calling for in the way of “gun violence prevention” will really have no impact. It is the mag bans, the “assault weapon” (sic) bans, and other such “gun safety” (sic) proposals.

Dave Workman of the Second Amendment Foundation also interviewed Gross for Liberty Park Press. As he notes in his piece on it, they had a 50-minute phone conversation. Gross stressed that there is a common ground and government doesn’t have to be involved.

Gross acknowledged his apprehensions about appearing at the rally and speaking to a crowd of Second Amendment activists. His fears dissipated when it became evident that people who attended are interested in the same things he’s interested in, which boil down to safer homes and safer families.


“We still disagree on some things I am sure,” he emphasized, “but we can’t let that get in the way of a real opportunity to accomplish some things.”

Some of those things are keeping firearms secured from young children and getting more training. I can agree with that.

Gross said that he and Rob Pincus have been working together for the past year on creating a Center for Gun Rights and Responsibilities. It will be interesting to see what comes of that.


9 thoughts on “The Most Surprising Speaker At The 2A Rally”

  1. Basically what people took of the 2A Rally is nothing more that a guy from the Brady Campaign was a speaker.

    And that “one of us” has been working with a declared enemy of Gun Rights.

    We are so screwed.

  2. Pingback: I am pissed off.
  3. I prefer to see it as someone who has been an opponent has had a bit of “road to Damascus” moment.

  4. “Some of those things are keeping firearms secured from young children and getting more training. ”

    While we may “agree” on things such as this, given the way these issues have been phrased by the opposition I’m not sure I do. Further, why should I trust the motives or trustworthiness of a long avowed enemy of all gun owners?

    Every time we talk about “keeping firearms secured from young children” we end up with mandatory and arbitrary gun storage laws that only serve to “bayonet the battlefield wounded” without adding anything to safety. Ethan’s Law here in Connecticut is an excellent example. This is once again a shift from personal responsibility to the “protection” of the nanny state. Back in the 1400’s when I was a kid, firearms weren’t “secured” from me. I was taught from a young age about gun safety and responsibility. What has changed?

    Similarly with “getting more training”, we have the example of the “training” requirements instituted in Illinois when they were force to issue carry permits. Training just became a time consuming and expensive impediment to getting “permission” from the state to exercise a right. Has anyone done any research that demonstrates that “more (state mandated) training” has any positive effect at all? If so, I haven’t seen it and would love to learn of it. Maybe we just need mandatory gun safety training in elementary and secondary schools? I could get behind that idea.

    To date, I haven’t seen anything that indicates that he has actually had a “road to Damascus” moment. And as Miguel stated, his short appearance has taken over the whole media message about an important event, and not in a good way for the purpose of the event. So NO! I have no faith in his intentions or conversion.

  5. And here we have an even more clear example of the optimist vs. pessimist test than the half-glass of water.

    Is he a guy who’s really had that Damascus road experience and the scales have fallen from his eyes, or is he an enemy infiltrator that’s trying to come up with another way of destroying everything?

    My own tendency is to say, “in God we trust; everyone else keep your hands where I can see them.” I find it hard to imagine that with the laws concerning firearms going to thousands of pages that one more law, one little change, can even be imagined that suddenly fixes everything. Let alone that such a law can be written clearly enough that it works properly. The laws are so convoluted that if someone wants to take a vacation trip, we need to spend hours researching if we can even drive through a state without stopping to move a gun from the passenger compartment to the trunk under lock and key.

    I plead ignorance of NC laws, but here in Florida, there’s an inch-thick book on just our laws that gets revised every few years. It’s virtually mandatory to keep on top of it. My belief is that for all 50 states, there could be another such book, and still another for the Federal laws. So one more little change is going to fix “gun violence?”

  6. I am going to have to see a sustained commitment before trusting the guy. I would like to see him bring the message to his former? comrades.

  7. Mr Gross’ speech shows one thing: we are the side that values the exchange of ideas. If John Lott tried to speak at an Everytown event, they’d empty every supermarket in a hundred mile radius of tomatoes.

  8. I don’t trust spies. From either side, there slime and deserve The Worst Treatment.
    He is a traitor, to someone, you choose.
    I already have.

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