Some day they'll wake up and realize they're Republicans.
No, I won't, thanks. I'm a center- to center-left independent, which is entirely consistent with being an AK owner and CHL holder.
That would be great, and I hope someday we can get to the point where we are free to vote ONLY for the person, but I think what most people are trying to get at in this thread is that a vote for a Democrat, even if that Democrat is pro-gun, is at best a loss of a vote against gun control, and at worst, a vote for gun control.
Actually, for those of you who are pro-RKBA Republicans, keep in mind that if the repubs think that you will always vote them as the "lesser of two evils," they will throw you under the bus, just like George H.W. Bush did. And no gun owner should look at the Bush Administration's proposal to automatically bar anyone on the secret watchlist from owning a gun, with no due process, without shuddering. Not to mention warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, legalized torture, and suspension of habeus corpus, all of which would certainly be used against gun owners if confiscatory bans on "assault weapons" or whatever should happen to pass.
For the repubs on this board, the only way to keep pro-gun repubs pro-gun is to make it clear that your support for them is contingent on respecting your civil liberties. Right now, the Republican party takes your votes for granted, which is why they would even
think of running someone as anti-gun as Mitt Romney or Rudy Guliani.
On the other side of the coin, the national Democratic party is now coming to realize that there are more Dem and indie gun owners than repub gun owners, that 4 out of 5 gun owners are NOT hunters, and that OUR support for Dem candidates is contingent on said candidates staying the heck out of our gun safes. Hence Jim Webb, Bob Casey, Jon Tester winning Senate seats in '06, Ted Strickland in Ohio, etc. The pendulum is shifting, and a lot of the less fossilized national Dems are getting it.
I for one would be hesitant to vote for my own father if he was a Democrat because his voice and his vote would be swallowed up when he got to DC. Will that ever change? Maybe. We have seen a few stalwarts--Zoell Miller, Joe Liberman--but not very many. In my opinion, a vote for a Democrat is a vote for the Democrat party, and that means, among other distasteful things, gun control.
Joe Lieberman is quite anti-gun. Webb, Tester, Casey, and others would be better examples.
There's also a cultural thing going on. People from Massachusetts (rate of violent crime in 2005 = 456.9/100,000) look at South Carolina (rate of violent crime in 2005 = 761.1) and ask, "We're supposed to ask people from those sates how to combat crime?"
The murder rates in the northeast states tend to be much lower than in the south or west. For example, in 2006, the murder rate in New York state was 4.8/100,000. Arizona 7.5, and Nevada was 9.0 - so people from New York should ask people from Arizona and Nevada about gun control?
Don't forget that most of the northeast states are more pro-gun than many southern states. New Hampshire, for example, is considerably more pro-gun than North Carolina is.
Of the 15 states with the highest murder rates in the country, a dozen or so have CCW (I think: Louisiana, Nevada, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississipi, Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, and Florida).
Since only two states
don't have CCW, it is clear that there are other factors at work.
The states with some of the lowest crime rates in the nation are also CCW states, and Florida's homicide rate was roughly the same as New Jersey's at last count.
At any rate, I still have some hope for Bill Richardson. That's OK, the only Republican I'd trust (McCain) probably ain't going to make it anyway.
McCain was until relatively recently a (paid?) spokesperson for the gun-control lobby Americans for Gun Safety.
Kennedy was a supporter of the 1st and 2nd Amendments. I am pretty sure he was a life member of the NRA (but I could be wrong about that). If I am wrong about that, I am sure that someone will correct me.
He was an NRA life member, an "assault weapon" owner (he owned an M1 Garand and an early AR-15, among other things), and supported a high view of the Second Amendment in no uncertain terms.
Wow, people are more nuts than I thought. You honestly believe baptists want to take over the country and force everyone to go to their church?
Not necessarily to
attend their church, but certainly to live by their teachings.
Sex toys were banned in Alabama not that long ago, and the theocrats are pushing for bans in other states. They are pushing as hard as they can to ban sexual content from the Internet and cable TV, to ban certain magazines from military bases, they are gung-ho for the War on Non-Approved Herbs, have fought civil unions (both homosexual and heterosexual) tooth and nail, are probably behind a good bit of the anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol movements, etc. And don't forget the close connection of some on the religious right to gun control, e.g. William J. Bennett and others.
I don't see much of an attempt to make us all attend Baptist churches, but there are certainly attempts to make more of us live like Baptists, methinks.
BTW, I am Christian, but I do not believe that I have been put here on this earth to push other people around via the police power of the state (I am very libertarian in that sense).
I think kerry was going along with the AWB because he may have been under pressure by voters to support it.
I think Kerry went along with the AWB because (1) he was clueless as to what it covered, and (2) he was clueless about the demographics of U.S. gun ownership in the 21st century. I believe he honestly thought it covered military automatic weapons (inexcusable), and that most gun owners are hunters (also inexcusable). Addressing that kind of ignorance is one thing that we pro-gun Dems and indies are working on. Some people learn more quickly than others.
I think that the dem-repub contention is getting out of hand. Those of us caught in the middle of a very unrealistic divide between people who share a lot of the same ideas fueled by those members of the extreme left and right are growing farther apart. People are letting qualities erroneously drawn up by those who only want to disrupt for the sake of drawing attention and causing tension define them, and are forcing those qualities that they think, and were informed, are wrong on those who may not be that dissimilar from themselves.
We are all decent people here on THR.
Just because one person identifies with the republican party does not mean that they are Texan, rabble-rousing, gun-loving, violence-promoting cowboys, bent on conquest, that the left media likes to portray them as.
Likewise, not all Democrats are the baby-killing, gay loving, gun hating, anti-establishment, pinkos that the right media draws them up to be.
The people who are ruining gun culture are people who are unnecessarily afraid, and do not understand the firearm community. If we can teach them, amoung everyone, to understand guns, and understand firearm safety, then we have something we can work with.
...
That said, what can we do?
Go out, meet with that most hated liberal neighbor of yours, don't talk politics, just have dinner and offer to take them to the range, or out hunting. Tactfully, people that don't know guns scare easily. Take it lightly, and ignore political chiding. Treat acrimony with reserve and respect, and their attitude will change.
Go out, meet with the hardlined republican neighbor, argue about sports, not about how the president isn't your favourite. Tact, politeness, repsect and reserve. Plan to have an neigborhood block barbeque, maybe on a game day, or just to lets the kids get together. There is no reason why we can't get along.
Funderb, well said.
