Good read and something to think about...
----------
For Gun Owners That Can't Quite Decide Who To Vote For Tuesday
This is the column that, to my pleasure, appeared before the
election. You can also find it here on the Shotgun News web
site. If you know a gun ownership who doesn't know who to vote for on
Tuesday, or doesn't see any reason to vote for Bush over Kerry
or some third partycandidate, have them read this.
-----
After The Election
By Clayton E. Cramer
By the time you read this, the election will be over. Either
Bush will have won, Kerry will have won--or lawyers will trying
to repeat the 2000 Florida disaster.
I hope that Bush will have won by a sufficiently large margin
that Kerry accepts the loss, and concedes on Election Night. But
as I write these words, I find myself increasingly worried that
Kerry might win.
The news media are pulling out all the stops to elect Kerry:
misrepresenting the final report of the Iraqi Survey Group on
WMDs; reporting news based on 1973 Air National Guard memos that
were produced on a modern computer; soft-pedaling the really
astonishing level of violence that Bush campaign offices are
suffering from drive-by shootings, from screaming demonstrators
forcing entry, and other forms of intimidation.
We have won a great victory in September, with the expiration
of the federal assault weapons law. If, as you read these words,
the news media are filled with coverage about "President-elect
Kerry," you can be sure that a new, much more extreme version
of the assault weapons law will be introduced into Congress.
When President Bush took office in 2001, the federal government
stopped assisting ambulance-chasers in suing the gun industry
for "negligent marketing." (Negligent marketing means that gun
manufacturers were obeying all laws concerning making and
selling guns, but federal and state authorities were failing
to enforce existing laws.) You can be sure that President Kerry
will resume that assistance. Remember: one of America's
most successful trial lawyers will be Vice President John
Edwards.
If John Kerry is preparing his inaugural address as you read
this column, remember that you can blame a lot of gun owners.
John Kerry made it very clear throughout his time in the U.S.
Senate which side he was on, and it wasn't our side.
A lot of American gun owners were taken in by Kerry's photo-ops
with a shotgun, and did not pay attention to his voting history. If you are
one of the gun owners who voted for John Kerry a few days ago,
let's just say that gun ownership wasn't near the top of your
list of priorities. If it was, you weren't paying attention.
Or maybe you said, "I don't want to get called for jury duty."
Sorry, but that won't fly.
Many states now use driver's license information to call
jurors. Would you rather spend two weeks on jury duty every few
years, or lose the right to own a gun?
"There's no real difference, anyway." I suppose to a blind
person, there's no real difference between red and blue. This
election has given us a very clear difference-even more clear-cut
than the 2000 election, where Gore's history on gun control was
disappointing, but he had in the past been on our side.
Kerry has never been on our side. If you don't want to invest
the time to follow politics (and many people would prefer not to
do so), you could at least see what gun rights groups such as
the NRA or Gun Owners of America had to say about the candidates.
There is one group of gun owners that I am especially upset with
--and those are the self-righteous gun rights purists, who
complained that Bush wasn't pure enough. They insisted that
because Bush agreed to sign a renewal of the federal assault
weapons ban, they could not vote for him.
If the choice a few days ago had been between George Bush and a
wishy-washy Democrat, I could understand the purists who voted
Libertarian or did not vote for President at all.
But that wasn't the situation this election day. John Kerry was
clearly our enemy. President Bush appointed an Attorney General
who has defended the Second Amendment as an individual right.
Do you think Attorney General Ashcroft made a decision like that without consulting President
Bush?
If a federal assault weapons ban had made it to the Oval Office,
and Bush had signed it, I could understand the purist disdain
for Bush. But it didn't happen, because George Bush and House
Republicans did an incredibly sly job of making sure that no
assault weapon ban came to his desk. This largely defused the
assault weapon issue as part of the campaign.
If you are one of those gun rights purists who did not vote for
President Bush this year--and are now cringing at the prospect
of what President Kerry is going to do to your gun rights--I
sure hope that you learned your lesson. The rest of us are
going to have four years to repent for your decision.
posted by Clayton Cramer on October 29, 2004.
http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2004_10_24_archive.html#109902573234380731
----------
For Gun Owners That Can't Quite Decide Who To Vote For Tuesday
This is the column that, to my pleasure, appeared before the
election. You can also find it here on the Shotgun News web
site. If you know a gun ownership who doesn't know who to vote for on
Tuesday, or doesn't see any reason to vote for Bush over Kerry
or some third partycandidate, have them read this.
-----
After The Election
By Clayton E. Cramer
By the time you read this, the election will be over. Either
Bush will have won, Kerry will have won--or lawyers will trying
to repeat the 2000 Florida disaster.
I hope that Bush will have won by a sufficiently large margin
that Kerry accepts the loss, and concedes on Election Night. But
as I write these words, I find myself increasingly worried that
Kerry might win.
The news media are pulling out all the stops to elect Kerry:
misrepresenting the final report of the Iraqi Survey Group on
WMDs; reporting news based on 1973 Air National Guard memos that
were produced on a modern computer; soft-pedaling the really
astonishing level of violence that Bush campaign offices are
suffering from drive-by shootings, from screaming demonstrators
forcing entry, and other forms of intimidation.
We have won a great victory in September, with the expiration
of the federal assault weapons law. If, as you read these words,
the news media are filled with coverage about "President-elect
Kerry," you can be sure that a new, much more extreme version
of the assault weapons law will be introduced into Congress.
When President Bush took office in 2001, the federal government
stopped assisting ambulance-chasers in suing the gun industry
for "negligent marketing." (Negligent marketing means that gun
manufacturers were obeying all laws concerning making and
selling guns, but federal and state authorities were failing
to enforce existing laws.) You can be sure that President Kerry
will resume that assistance. Remember: one of America's
most successful trial lawyers will be Vice President John
Edwards.
If John Kerry is preparing his inaugural address as you read
this column, remember that you can blame a lot of gun owners.
John Kerry made it very clear throughout his time in the U.S.
Senate which side he was on, and it wasn't our side.
A lot of American gun owners were taken in by Kerry's photo-ops
with a shotgun, and did not pay attention to his voting history. If you are
one of the gun owners who voted for John Kerry a few days ago,
let's just say that gun ownership wasn't near the top of your
list of priorities. If it was, you weren't paying attention.
Or maybe you said, "I don't want to get called for jury duty."
Sorry, but that won't fly.
Many states now use driver's license information to call
jurors. Would you rather spend two weeks on jury duty every few
years, or lose the right to own a gun?
"There's no real difference, anyway." I suppose to a blind
person, there's no real difference between red and blue. This
election has given us a very clear difference-even more clear-cut
than the 2000 election, where Gore's history on gun control was
disappointing, but he had in the past been on our side.
Kerry has never been on our side. If you don't want to invest
the time to follow politics (and many people would prefer not to
do so), you could at least see what gun rights groups such as
the NRA or Gun Owners of America had to say about the candidates.
There is one group of gun owners that I am especially upset with
--and those are the self-righteous gun rights purists, who
complained that Bush wasn't pure enough. They insisted that
because Bush agreed to sign a renewal of the federal assault
weapons ban, they could not vote for him.
If the choice a few days ago had been between George Bush and a
wishy-washy Democrat, I could understand the purists who voted
Libertarian or did not vote for President at all.
But that wasn't the situation this election day. John Kerry was
clearly our enemy. President Bush appointed an Attorney General
who has defended the Second Amendment as an individual right.
Do you think Attorney General Ashcroft made a decision like that without consulting President
Bush?
If a federal assault weapons ban had made it to the Oval Office,
and Bush had signed it, I could understand the purist disdain
for Bush. But it didn't happen, because George Bush and House
Republicans did an incredibly sly job of making sure that no
assault weapon ban came to his desk. This largely defused the
assault weapon issue as part of the campaign.
If you are one of those gun rights purists who did not vote for
President Bush this year--and are now cringing at the prospect
of what President Kerry is going to do to your gun rights--I
sure hope that you learned your lesson. The rest of us are
going to have four years to repent for your decision.
posted by Clayton Cramer on October 29, 2004.
http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2004_10_24_archive.html#109902573234380731
