The Gun Control Debate is over. We won.

[K-Romulus]

RE: VT and new laws.

My guess is that "they" are waiting until after the funerals to start their attack; especially after getting called out for trying to politicize things too soon.

 

[alucard0822]

The dems are not stupid, gun control played a signifigant role in losing elections, control of congress, and the presidency. They stand 18 months away from a presidential election where for the first time in over a decade it is possible to control both houses and the oval office. Gun control has been and will remain a central platform of the democratic party weither advertised as such or not. You can be sure that they will not touch gun control with a 10 foot pole untill after jan 09. After that, potentially they have 2 full years to push any and all bills that they want and the power to sign them into law. Even better for the brady's is a gun grabbing republican in the whitehouse. Guiliani would glady sign AWB^2 into law in exchange for any number of his pet projects, the dems not only get their ban, but also wouldn't be seen as the bad guy. If you think gun control is dead and we have nothing to worry about just wait a couple years untill it wakes up, in the meantime I would rather kick em while they are down.

 

[jad0110]

I agree with a lot of other posters.

Though things certainly appear to be encouraging, DO NOT rest on your laurels! Though I'd hardly call the news coverage fair to us, it is far cry from what it was 10 to 20 years ago.

Though there certainly is ugliness out there, what scares me at this point is that things seem almost too quiet. Anyone else notice this?

I hate to say this, but this is a war that we will never win. There will always be antis. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must always stay on the offensive and never be lulled into a false sense of sedurity.

 

[Cato the Younger]

in relation to Horsesense's comment

Dear Sir,
I believe you are refering to Jean Paul Lafiette's pirate army at the battle of New Orleans. I think that what was criminal about him was not his possession of warships, cannon, and a large force of armed men, but rather his use of them in piracy. Mr. Zenah, I am supporting Ron Paul for '08- but if you are his running mate, that would be even better! I think the problem is that if we attempt to restrict certains groups from getting weapons, it will both be unfair to that group, as well as to society as a whole. Strict gun control in Chicago (along with 1968 GCA) started with the goal of keeping urban blacks from possessing firearms to use in riot-type situations- admittedly a prejudicial goal. However, that has morphed in Chicago, as well as other places, into disarming the populace as a whole. In regards to the VT thing, we SHOULD NOT be saying "lets disarm people with greencards." Rather, we should be saying "What if he had pulled his gun, and been shot down by 2-4 CCW'ers who were allowed on campus, and thus stopped his rampage before it became deadly." Address the issue in a way that expands 2d Amendment rights for everyone, NOT by arguing for stripping rights from people- down that path lies liscensing and registration for EVERYONE.

 

[tbtrout]

Dude, we are only in a skirmish, the war is far from over. Take what you can get, pat yourself on the back and ge back in the fight.

 

[GLOCK19XDSC]

No war was ever won by defense.

I think that people are waking up to the fact that they are responsible for their own self-defense and that 911 is not the be-all, end-all solution to every situation in which they may find themselves. This line of thought should be encouraged.

These things I have been doing:

Point out that this...person...chained the doors in the building in order to keep his victims confined while on his rampage and that he could have just as easily chained the doors and started a fire that would most likely have claimed MORE lives, but no-one would be clamoring to ban fire or matches afterwards, and that it is just as ridiculous to ban firearms due to the acts of one psycho as it is to ban matches for the same reason.

Point out that, while tragic, the loss of 32 lives is only perceived as horrific as it is because it happened all at once, and that crime that affects many more people on a daily basis is just as horrific, but not as newsworthy.

Point out that criminals tend to select victims based on perceived weakness, as we have seen time and again, and the fact that there are those who carry firearms acts as a crime deterrent, and that even those people who do not carry benefit thereby, because a criminal never knows, but this one had a good idea due to the gun-free zone.

Point out that the Brady Bunch are concerned with collecting donations and their salaries, that the controversy surrounding guns is what guarantees those salaries, and the drivel they spout to the gullible who keep sending them money is a way to perpetuate those salaries.

Point out that that the majority of politicians DO NOT have the interests of their constituents in mind, and tend to say whatever they need to say to remain in, or get into, office.

Point out that only those politicians who consider themselves untouchable, have nothing to lose and are grasping at straws, or believe that they must spout a gun-control mantra in order to get elected are calling for more gun control legislation at this time.

Point out that gun-control laws provide nothing but a means by which the strong take advantage of the weak and elderly, and the gang take advantage of the lone.


Certainly, there would be more calls for greater gun-control, by the usual suspects, if it weren't for the 2008 election. It will be a mistake to elect them based on their lack of willingness to touch the issue today, because it is just as certain there will be a surge of gun-control legislation after the election, once power is assured to those who lean that way.

 

[GOSA]

This comes from a local paper, The Witness, 2007-04-19.

Gun country
Witness Thu, 19 Apr 2007

By Gwynne Dyer

Take Americans’ guns away and you lose their votes, writes GWYNNE DYER

You can imagine lots of countries where a candidate for the presidency might lie about owning a gun so as not to alienate the voters, but only in the United States would he lie and say he does own a gun when he doesn’t. That was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s sin earlier this year — and he compounded it by claiming that he was a lifelong hunter. Diligent reporters checked and found that Romney had never taken out a hunting licence anywhere. (Where were they when President George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”?)

The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem simply bizarre in most jurisdictions, but it is a serious political reality in the United States. That’s why hardly anybody in the U.S. is using the latest mass slaughter by some enraged loser (33 dead at Virginia Tech) to argue for more gun control. There’s not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse.

A dead issue

Gun control is a dead issue in the U.S., and it isn’t coming back. There is a sound political reason for this and there is also a rational explanation for it (which isn’t the same thing).

The political reason is simplicity itself. The Democratic Party realised that it wasn’t going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn’t stop talking about gun control. The party’s leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election, a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast, and realised that their problem was more than just Bush’s fatal charm. They weren’t winning in “heartland” states because they were seen as trying to take Americans’ guns away.

There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care passionately about their guns in Montana that it’s hard to get elected there if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party’s national platform commits it to uphold the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — and in the 2006 election it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would “stand up to anyone — Republican or Democratic — who tries to take away Montanans’ gun rights”. The new Democratic governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has “more guns than I need but not as many as I want … I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun and I’ll control mine”. It’s a whole new image for Democrats and it won them control of both houses of Congress in 2006. (Yes, the war helped, too, but by itself it wouldn’t have been enough.)

The Democrats were not going to lose the coastal states (where the effete intellectuals and most of the old urban working class live) even if they did drop gun control. They were not going to win in the heartland (where the born-agains and the Marlboro men live) if they didn’t drop gun control. So they dropped it and now no large party supports it.

That’s the politics of it and you can’t argue with that.

There is another, quite rational reason why gun control doesn’t get much traction in American politics any more. It’s simply too late. This is a society that owns approximately equal numbers of wristwatches and guns: around a quarter of a billion of each. There’s no going back — and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one, too.

As various commentators will be pointing out soon, if just one of those 33 murdered students had been carrying a concealed handgun maybe the killer would have been stopped sooner. It’s perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons with a permit in Virginia, but not on college campuses. This loophole must be closed. At least, that is the way the argument is usually put in the U.S., although the reality is not one gun per citizen over the age of 12, but some citizens with a great many guns and most citizens with none at all.

Americans kill Americans

More fundamentally, the gun-control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of 18 and 45 also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilisation model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don’t murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries like Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organisation in the United States. But it’s really a cultural thing. The British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to have more bullet holes in them than other people.

The slogan should actually go: “Guns don’t kill Americans; Americans kill Americans.”

• Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

I agree with the earlier poster who said that the internet's on our side. It's much easier than before to spread information -- previously, well funded anti organisations could outperform us, now we're much more equal.

GOSA
http://www.gunownerssa.org

 

[JLStorm]

We havent won anything, the original poster has just had the wool pulled over his eyes. You sir, need to wake up and thnk smarter.

 

[Kentak]

We'll win once we've rolled all gunlaws back to 1930, force the left's "moral relativism" out of the schools and put God back in.

This little scumbag was a product of Klinton & Oprah. And he's just one of many in this generation lacking a conscience or moral compass.

That's just ignorant and simplistic on so many levels.

 

[romma]

Dewey Wins!

 

[baz]

Nothing stays the same for long. If right now, because we have the momentum, we stop to gloat, the tortoise will pass us by. If we need a reminder of just how quickly sentiment can change, rember 9/11. Where are all the flags and yellow ribbons today? The fight for liberty is never over, thus no one can ever call the battle won.

 

[go_bang]

We haven't won jack until the Supreme Court weighs in on the Parker Case.

If the Supreme Court decides that the 2nd has nothing to do with the individual right to bear arms then the pro-gun movement is most likely screwed. Except maybe in states that have expressed the right more specifically in their constitutions, but overall it won't be pretty. I fear it will be a quick slide into the hell that is the UK and Australia after that.

If the Supreme Court ends up upholding the DC Circuit decision, then the anti-gunners are screwed. They'll probably have little choice but to disappear back into the woodwork while many of the gun control laws in the country are systematically taken down. The MSM will probably continue with their anti-gun bias, there will probably be calls for a repeal of the 2nd, but I doubt it will be much more than that. Maybe some nuisance legal action.

When you consider the impact the Parker case will have on gun control, whoever ends up president in 2008 is probably a non-issue.

At least that's how I see it. Someone chime in if I'm off my feed on this.

 

[Daniel T]

This comes from a local paper, The Witness, 2007-04-19.

That is an amazingly good article for a non-American.

 

[romma]

If we win at the Supreme Court level, then I will put a collapsible stock on my AR-15 finally.. Oh, and while I am at it, why not a full auto sear and selector switch to go with it...

 

[Chad]

Because 100 million people murdered by their own governments last century just can't be wrong... Fight Gun Control to the bitter end...

Romma...
I printed that and put it on my office wall.
It has resulted in some interesting conversations.

When I say that a large percentage of that 100 million probably thought "it can't happen here" it raises some interest.

When I remind them that the century in question ended only 7 years ago, the reactions range from shock to wonder to amazement. That really seems to make an impact.

Thanks for putting it out there.