Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT) on gun regulation (states' rights, pro-gun)

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MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to an issue that you seem to break away from liberal Democratic orthodoxy and that’s gun control. This is a brochure in your gubernatorial campaign from the NRA.

“In November we should return a truly pro-gun Governor to office by re-electing Governor Howard Dean.†And again, David Broder’s coverage of your campaign. “Dean bragged that he has ‘an A rating’ from the National Rifle Association... he argued that ‘as Democrats, we ought to say keep the federal laws we have, enforce them, but no new laws.’ Get the gun issue off the table. It cost Al Gore three states—and the presidency.â€

Which states did Gore lose because of guns?

GOV. DEAN: I think Montana, Tennessee and West Virginia. There may be more, but those are the ones I would guess, given their patterns with previous elections.

MR. RUSSERT: Democrats in Congress right now are saying that at gun shows, you can buy a gun on Saturday or Sunday and there is no background check, because many law enforcement agencies are closed. They want to extend that deadline. Would you support that kind of gun control?

GOV. DEAN: What I would support—I do support closing the gun show loophole, but I would like to see InstaCheck, which is the same system that we have elsewhere, and I think if it takes keeping somebody on duty in law enforcement agencies, that would be fine. Look, let me explain to you why I take the position I do on gun control. In Vermont, in the last 11 years, we’ve had between a high of 25 and a low of five homicides per year. Most of them, the majority, are domestic related, not many of them have firearms and not one of them would be changed if we had gun control. We essentially have no gun control in Vermont. All we have is you can’t bring guns to school.

Now, I don’t believe for a moment that that’s appropriate for New York or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. But the point I’m trying to make here is why does gun control have to be a national issue? We have some good federal laws. I support keeping them. We should close the gun show loophole with Instacheck and after that why can’t each state make its own laws? Why can’t each state address what they want to do about gun control as a state? Because what we need in Vermont is not the same thing as what you may need in Washington, D.C.

A guy in Tennessee told me, “Look, when you say gun control to me in Tennessee, it sounds like you want to take away the squirrel rifle that my father gave to me. When you say gun control in New York, it sounds like you want to get the Uzis and the illegal handguns off the street.†It’s two different problems. We have national laws. I’m not in favor of repealing them, but I think additional gun control ought be to be done on a state-by-state basis if the state wants it and we ought not to have a one-size-fits-all federal government approach.

MR. RUSSERT: But keep people traveling from state to state very easily.

GOV. DEAN: That’s right. And Virginia is a perfect example of this. New York claimed that a lot of their guns were coming from Virginia, so they had lax laws, so they signed a bill that said you can only buy one gun a month. That’s a Virginia law. It doesn’t apply to other states. It seems to me it addressed the problem in Virginia successfully. Why can’t we do that?

Democrats are getting killed on gun control. Democratic activists who basically are in favor of gun control are glad to see me coming in the West and the South, because they do not want to lose any more national elections on the gun issue.
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http://dean2004.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_dean2004_archive.html
 
"MR. RUSSERT: Democrats in Congress right now are saying that at gun shows, you can buy a gun on Saturday or Sunday and there is no background check, because many law enforcement agencies are closed. They want to extend that deadline. Would you support that kind of gun control?"

Does Russert have the slightest clue as to what the law actually is, or does he just make up things as he goes along?
 
When you say gun control in New York, it sounds like you want to get the Uzis and the illegal handguns off the street.â€
Click to expand...

Oooh, why I oughta... (using best 1940's movie accent)....

No, what he means is "Since we can't actually do anything to get the illegal handguns or Uzis (when was the last time criminals used friggin Uzis:confused: ?) off the street, we'll take 'em away from the law abiding folk so we can say we're doing something about crime".

Now I know he may seem pro-gun to those in pro-gun states, but I can tell you that to those of us in communist hell, he sure doesn't seem too pro gun.

At the same time, we here in MD get what we vote for - if we keep electing the same leftist career politicians to Annapolis things are never gonna change. We did get a Republican elected Governor (beat a Kennedy no less!), but we need all the help we can get, so for me and mine Dean is definately not pro gun when he says"Let the states decide".
 
I wouldn't say he is "pro-gun", just not as anti-gun as most politicians. Even Bush is for the "assult-weapon" ban being extended. He really sounds, "mildly" anti despite the realization that gun control wouldn't have stopped one of VT's murders. He might be better on this issue than the other Dems and than Bush but he still isn't getting my vote.
 
Then who would you vote for?
Click to expand...

Remember that gun control is only one issue. Given, he is not as anti-gun as the other Democratic candidates, but on ALL other issues he is a typical far-leftist nanny-stater.

IMHO, other than stepping up to the plate after 9/11, Bush is the most liberal Republican Prez we've ever had. And, instead of being overly anti-gun (except for the AWB, where he actually stated his position) he seems to want to pull the politician move and stay neutral. I haven't heard Bush yet blathering about hunting rifles.

And I'll hold my nose and vote for him; President Dean overall would be much worse.
 
I wouldn't consider him pro-gun. Being from Vermont doesn't cut it. How can you claim there is a "gun show loophole" and be pro-gun? He's trying to play the part. People like him payed attention to how Gore screwed himself by siding with the gun grabbers. He's just trying to distance himself enough to get a pass.
 
Gov. Dean is a moderate, greyhound

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Of course last week's Dean hype managed to do both at once. It knocked him down by setting him up, in a way. No longer was the question "Is he too liberal to be electable?" Reporters belatedly scoured his record and discovered a fiscal conservative who put balanced budgets before social spending in Vermont, who opposes federal gun control legislation and backs the death penalty for certain crimes. Now the make-or-break question about Dean became: "Will liberals desert him when they figure out that he's actually a moderate?" Then came other pre-fab worries about the problems of sudden success: Had Dean peaked too soon? Could his fledgling campaign handle the attention? And OK, maybe he was moderate enough to be electable, but was he likable enough? Was his reputation for "straight talk" just a euphemism for brusque and arrogant?

Hanging out with the local Dean folks was my way of getting out of what his campaign dismisses as "the media echo chamber," and trying to figure out what's really going on. I've lived here almost 20 years. I know the San Francisco Dean phenomenon is not a microcosm of what it will take to get him elected; I saw the way the GOP smeared House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- and pushed her to the center some -- by calling her a "San Francisco Democrat" before she even took over the leadership post. I know we're DLC founder Al From's worst nightmare. But I also saw some intriguing things following Dean around San Francisco at the end of July, and talking to his supporters the week after he'd gone. The Bay Area Dean machine is attracting more than the usual suspects: It's neither the Greens nor the City Hall regulars; it's neither the moneyed elite nor the rabble; it's not just the young and the hip; it's not ponytailed '60s holdovers -- it's all of them, and then some. I met Republicans and Ross Perot voters who were supporting the antiwar candidate who promises to repeal Bush's tax cuts. And I met Dean himself, and watched two speeches. You can't get his charisma without seeing him in person.
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The UFCW crowd seemed a lot like Donna Brazile: They were ready to love everybody. Only the leftier candidates -- Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, Gephardt and Dean -- showed up; Sharpton couldn't make it, but Kerry appeared by satellite, as befits his attempt to be a more centrist liberal. All of them got big cheers. These were the folks Al From tried to warn us about. But if Dean hadn't been red-baited by the DLC, you might well hear him as the moderate in the race. He criticized Kucinich and Moseley Braun's call for single-payer universal healthcare, the left's politically impossible dream, as well as Gephardt's expensive public-private hybrid. Kerry vied with Dean for the moderate mantle with his relatively modest healthcare plan, but overall Dean came off as the fiscal conservative in the bunch. Amazingly, he got the biggest hand from this union audience when he called George Bush a "borrow and spend, credit-card Republican" and promised to erase the deficit if he's elected.
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One thing I don't worry about is that his lefty base doesn't know what he stands for, and will bolt when they realize he's a moderate. His base knows exactly how moderate he is. I interviewed dozens of his liberal devotees, and they all know the not-so-liberal aspects of his record. Someone at the Meetup lamented his staunch pro-Israel stance; several people I met said they differed with him on the death penalty. Brilliant says he has issues with Dean on all of his more conservative stands. "But he's not afraid to say what he thinks. Dean asks the fundamentally sound questions and does not have an ideological answer that trumps reason, as Bush does."
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/08/11/dean/
 
He's pro-gun like Jerry Falwell is pro-beastiality. Anyone who supports the AW-Ban (GW Included) is NOT pro-gun...

go back to DU "disrupter":neener:
 
Dean supports the AWB

He is also in favor of denying private sale of firearms (closing the "gun-show loopshole"). He is opposed to the gun-lawsuit immunity bill. In other words, his position is no different than any other Democratic presidential hopeful.

This nonsense about a state-by-state approach is just a cop-out. The 2A is not negotiable on a state-by-state basis. Sorry, but a vote for Dean is not a vote for RKBA. Neither really is a vote for Bush, but if the AWB sunsets, at least one can appreciate that he had a silent hand in the matter.
 
A friendly warning to our members... attacks on other members WILL get this thread locked, and WILL earn you some serious attention from the moderators. Attacking an argument (with a reasoned argument of your own) is fine: attacking the arguer is never acceptable on the High Road.
 
Dean's position on the AWB is same as Bush's, but Dean is honest about his position.

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I believe we should keep and enforce the federal gun laws we have - including the assault weapons ban and the Brady Bill - and close the gun show loophole using Insta-check and then let the states decide for themselves what, if any, additional gun control laws they want. Just as we resist attempts by President Bush to dictate to the states how we run our school systems and what kind of welfare programs to have, we need to resist attempts to tell states how to deal with guns beyond existing federal law.
http://www.deanforutah.com/guncontrol.html
 
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So...we vote for someone who is.....

"honest" about supporting oppressive Federal laws already on the books, and weaseling about allowing the states to do whatever they want.:eek:

Say, that concept would have done wonders for the cause of Civil Rights;)

Howard Dean is just another enemy of the Second Amendment:D
 
So he's honest about his anti gun positionn? Good. I will be just as honest with my anti Dean position. I wish there was a real pro-gun liberal candidate out there, but Dean is not the one. I agree with Dean on some social things; but I cant forgive him for these remarks. He is not pro gun. He is anti gun. And by the way, we all know already that Bush supports the AWB. It's been discussed extensively.

The right to arms is not about hunting any more than freedom of the press is about printing Hallmark cards.
 
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