Are there no liberal gun-rights supporters?

Sure there are. Just count the number of people here that voted for Badnarik. I did.

Yeah, a few, lessee, White Horseradish, Joe Demko, bountyhunter, Gordon Fink, Malone LaVeigh. There are others, I just don't remember them right now.

yo

Not a "Liberal"

But I do support the basic premise behind some to of the points you've raised.

Firearms Owner: Thats a given.

Gay Marriage/Traditional Marriage: The only role of .gov in marriage is keeper of record. Man/Woman, Man/Man, Woman/Woman, Man/inflatable-sheep and multiable there of, makes no differance to my life. Insurance coverage and the like is a contract between private parties. Governments only role their is to ensure the terms of the voluntary contacts are honored.

War against Afghanistan/Iraq/???: Cause is just, the correct protocol was not followed.

Research/Space Exploration: Sorry, not with ya there. Its not the .govs role to appropriate money via taxes for this. Think it is? Get the Constitution amended to state such.

Okay, here's the short version.

You cannot be a "real liberal" according to today's definition of the word and believe in "real gun rights."

You may have libertarian leanings. You might even really value freedom. But you cannot believe in real gun rights and be a real modern liberal any more.

The definition of "classical liberal" no longer applies today.

Modern liberals are socialists and leftists who believe the best outcome for everyone will be reached so long as the government is making all the decisions.

Modern liberals are anti-individual and anti-freedom. They view America as the ultimate source of evil in the world.....I mean, really, with our unsophisticated silly cowboy notions.

Real liberals are all for appreciating diversity and tolerance, except of course for those who don't toe the modern liberal ideological line 100%.

Those people who don't toe the ideological line 100% would be, of course, the rednecks and the hillbillies......the great unwashed ignorant masses from "fly over country."

And, of course, believing in real gun rights is part and parcel of being an ignorant redneck and hillbilly from "Fly over country."

Bascially, all you "liberals" on THR would be treated like lepers by real liberals the moment the word "gun" came out of your mouths.

hillbilly



See this NY Times article for more info.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/nyregion/04york.html?pagewanted=1


A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America
By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: November 4, 2004

triking a characteristic New York pose near Lincoln Center yesterday, Beverly Camhe clutched three morning newspapers to her chest while balancing a large latte and talked about how disconsolate she was to realize that not only had her candidate, John Kerry, lost but that she and her city were so out of step with the rest of the country.

"Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?" she said. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe."

Like Ms. Camhe, a film producer, three of every four voters in New York City gave Mr. Kerry their vote, a starkly different choice from the rest of the nation. So they awoke yesterday with something of a woozy existential hangover and had to confront once again how much of a 51st State they are, different in their sensibilities, lifestyles and polyglot texture from most of America. The election seemed to reverse the perspective of the famous Saul Steinberg cartoon, with much of the land mass of America now in the foreground and New York a tiny, distant and irrelevant dot.
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Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense that perhaps Middle America doesn't care as much about New York and its animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center.

"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "

City residents talked about this chasm between outlooks with characteristic New York bluntness.

Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln Center. The site was almost a cliché corner of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with a newsstand next door selling French and Italian newspapers and, a bit farther down, the Lincoln Plaza theater showing foreign movies.

"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."

"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.

His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."

"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."

Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.

"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.

Like those in the rest of the country, New Yorkers stayed up late watching the results, and some went to bed with a glimmer of hope that Mr. Kerry might yet find victory in some fortuitous combination of battleground states. But they awoke to reality. Some politically conscious children were disheartened - or sleepy - enough to ask parents if they could stay home. But even grownups were unnerved.

"To paraphrase our current president, I'm in shock and awe," said Keithe Sales, a 58-year-old former publishing administrator walking a dog near Central Park. He said he and friends shared a feeling of "disempowerment" as a result of the country's choice of President Bush. "There is a feeling of 'What do I have to do to get this man out of office?'''

In downtown Brooklyn, J. J. Murphy, 34, a teacher, said that Mr. Kerry's loss underscored the geographic divide between the Northeast and the rest of the country. He harked back to Reconstruction to help explain his point.

"One thing Clinton and Gore had going for them was they were from the South," he said. "There's a lot of resentment toward the Northeast carpetbagger stereotype, and Kerry fit right in to that."

Mr. Murphy said he understood why Mr. Bush appealed to Southerners in a way that he did not appeal to New Yorkers.

"Even though Bush isn't one of them - he's a son of privilege - he comes off as just a good old boy," Mr. Murphy said.


Be sure to go to Page 2 of this article for even more.....

Count me in.

Count me in as well.

I prefer to think of myself as a "classical liberal" or libertarian, although I am not a member of the LP.

One more thing, Bbaerst....


You write:

"What makes gun owners, especially the ones on these boards, so conservative? Why
do I not see any liberal 2nd Amendment supporters like myself? Does anyone share
my position?"


Okay......

First, go to a web site where real, dyed in the wool liberals hang out.

Something like, oh, this.

http://www.democraticunderground.com

Go there, if they ever reopen their forums to non-registered users again, and do a search for the word "gun" or any other word associated with firearms.

Read for yourself.

Also, bbaerst, make a list of some modern liberal politicians.

Ted Kennedy
Charles Schumer
Charles Rangel
Hillary Clinton
Bill Clinton
Al Gore
Barbara Boxer
Diane Feinstein
John Kerry


And do searches using their names as keywords along with "guns" or "Firearms."

Do those two little bits of internet reserach on your own and you will answer your own question for yourself.

hillbilly

Bbaerst, you must then hang out with a higher class of "liberal" than I do.

But then again, I'm just one of those "fly over" red state rednecks the NY Times story is about.

But you are right, Bbaerst..........ever since Bill Clinton, from my own home state, was elected, I've been demonized by the national media and elected officials as a threat to the country because I own guns, been labeled as a militia wacko, been treated as an outcast at the various colleges I've worked at because I own guns and am an NRA instructor.

But it's the fault of people like me that the deep divides exist in the country.

Got it. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

hillbilly

...effective gun legislation can be found through instant background checks and proper training for CCW holders.

Click to expand...

Where's it say that in the Second Amendment? That might be "effective gun legislation," all right, but it's at once stupid, unnecessary, and a flagrant infringement of our rights. If you want to talk about supporting rights, I'd suggest you go back to the rights as stated, not laws whose sole purpose is to infringe those rights.

Bbaersrt,

If a background check and training requirements were the only restrictions to owning a firearm, you'd probably have a great many people agree with you. But the gun banners work in increments, and those are often a first step. Then more ownership restrictions are added, and training standards go up. And then more is added.

Do a history search about blacks trying to vote in the South prior to the Sixties: Poll taxes, applied selectively; "literacy" tests, which even a college graduate couldn't pass; and so on. Here in California, a legislator is proposing having every round of ammo sold in California "etched" with a unique serial number-so bullets found at a crime scene can be tracked to the buyer. On the surface, it doesn't sound unreasonable-until you understand what it will do to the cost of ammo (not a single manufacturer is doing this), accessability (how many makers are even going to bother), and the paperwork for tracking, which turns this into a massive registration/restriction/taxation scheme.

I know how you feel; I used to be a liberal myself, until I discovered that I was being lied to. It hurts. But you are in a great position to effect change. Write your reps, and tell them you support a great many of their social programs, and their aims, but that you are a member of the NRA, and you vote your guns. (you ARE a member of the NRA, aren't you? [because if you aren't you should be!])

I am going to try to write a letter a month, if not more, to the Democratic leadership, telling them how I feel, and how I vote. It'll take time, but eventually some of the Democrats will not equate guns with Evil. Maybe.

There use to be (maybe still is) a group called "Democrats for the second amendment". Unfortunately, they represented a very very small percentage of Democrats.

The Democrats want to control you and enforce their opinions on you the same as the Republicans do. It's either Jesus or socialism, you choose. Either way you're going to get something crammed down your throat by some self-righteous spanky-rag. You sound very liberal and free-thinking, which says to me that you should hate both parties with the fiery hot passion of a thousand suns, much like I do.

Sounds like you need to vote Libertarian my friend...

Another classical liberal / small-"L" libertarian.

Strong supporter of gay rights.

Opponent of state and federal laws that are really ecclesiastical laws in origin and purpose.

Big on that whole "Martin Niemoller was right" thing.

Lifelong opponent of Mrs. Grundy.

6-year -olds are citizens? No, sorry. In Constituational terms, they're not even "persons."

All Standing Wolf was trying to point out was that you may not understand the "rights" you advocate as well as you think.


Liberals aren't liberals anymore.

When someone describes themselves as "liberal", it's usually safe to assume they have some socialist leanings which in general preclude gun rights. Even if they don't, pretty much everyone in their party does. That's why modern "liberals" aren't gun-rights supporters.

Classic liberals are different of course, and there are plenty of us around here, as everyone else is saying.

The 2nd only covers weapons that would be useful or acceptable in a "well-regulated militia", so I think that while we may hate it, it is justified that certain weapons, like a sawed-off shotgun for instance, may not be constitutionally supported. Mysteriously, I wonder why the US vs. Miller supreme court decision didn't call the constitutionality of the 1934 NFA into question regarding automatic submachine guns...

Click to expand...

US vs. Miller was perhaps the most idiotic decision ever reached by the SCOTUS. Do an internet search and uncover the whole truth.

The NFA, bbaerst, is a violation of our rights just as sure as the AWB is. Or, at least, it has become that way.

Look at it this way - the NFA registry existed for literally 50 years. In that time, the crime rate with registered machine guns was basically zero. No one was getting hurt or killed by machine guns. The system was working! These "reasonable restrictions" were fine! People could legally own machine guns, and the sky didn't fall.

Then, in 1986, they closed the NFA registry to new machine guns.

It didn't stop any crime.

It didn't save anyone's life.

All it did was create a "talking point" that Dems and Reps, working together, had "banned dangerous machine guns."

That mentality is what we are fighting, and what we still fight, today.

Welcome to THR.

I'm liberal in some attitudes and causes I support, but not "liberal" in the sense of the contemporary Democratic party, which seems like a wishy-washy mess with no foundational philosophy or clear set of principles (actually, that's pretty much the case of the Republicans these days, too). I believe in environmentalism, helping the unfortunate get on their feet, minority rights, etc., but not through federal legislation, taxing, and dreaded "programs." Ideally, local communities, individuals, non-profit groups, corporations, churches, etc. would get off their butts and address the faults of our society.

Problem is, a lot of people are too lazy or greedy to care about anyone but themselves. They want the government to fix stuff, provide services, and legislate their pet issues, but not when they themselves get taxed or see one of their desires suddenly thwarted by a law. The ideal, OTOH, is to get government off our backs so we can do things more efficiently ourselves while enjoying the fruits of liberty.

Regarding a literalist interpretation of the 2nd amendment, what about the 1st? Is it ok for someone to falsely scream "fire" in a nursing home, for someone to print libelous and defamatory "news" stories about your wife and the pool boy, to practice Satanism with little kids in the middle of the mall, etc.? If not, why should one amendment be open to interpretation or limitation but not the other? Why do many people here get up in arms over any attempts to restrict their RKBA but not incursions against our other Constitutional liberties (McCain-Feingold, Patriot Act, etc.)?

it is only natural that there be at least some restrictions or pre-requisites for gun ownership.

Click to expand...

Yes - and those prerequisites are that you must have enough money to buy the gun in question, and you must have the motivation to go buy it. Kinda like the sensible restrictions and pre-requisites on computer ownership.

Aside from that, I agree with you on most points. Government should have no place in marriage, and the invasion of Iraq is/was dangerous folly. I don't think government should be involved in research of space development, though.

Random musings....

It is never safe to assume anything.

DU is no more representative of the average Democrat than the Bruder Schwiegen is representative of republicans

Philosphy is a continuum, no one is ALL conservative or ALL liberal - a belief in open gun rights is classically liberal.

Republican or Democrat is not synonymous with conservative or liberal - you can be any.

There are idiots in all camps

(Sweeping Generalization) 150 years ago the republicans were the liberals and the Democrats were conservative.

People view politics as a series of chronological snapshots, and forget that change takes time, years, decades, generations, maybe even longer. Nothing political happens overnight.

IMHO, blah blah blah

I like to think I am mainly liberal, but I detest most all political parties and politics in general. Anybody who wants to be elected should be barred from office - we need professional managers in government, not politicians.

bbaerst,

I too could be considered a "classical liberal". In many ways that's what a libertarian is today. Most liberals today are at least closet socialists, which I do not believe to be good for america.

We support the pink pistols (gay gun club) in their ownership and seeking of rights. I'd say that a good half of us support gay marriage/civil unions. Of course, I think that the government should get out of the marriage business and just do civil unions. Get a priest if you want to get "married".

We have talked about the "patriot" act, and most of us disagreed with it, however, this is a gun board, so expect a slant towards gun issues. I talk about other issues elsewhere. Tech issues on Slashdot, for example.

If the Democrats and Republicans swapped on the gun control issue, I'd have a much tougher time choosing how to vote (Democrats still like to spend too much money on social programs).