Fortunately or unfortunately (you decide) RKBA is not the only issue we face as a nation. To vote on only this issue is a mistake. Take a step back and try to look at the big picture. (smoking a cigar will help!)
You're blowing smoke. Yours is an extremely narrow and shortsighted vision that ignores a developing crisis and will only increase it. Here is a partial outline of the big picture that you seem unable to see past your smoke.
- The U.S. is becoming increasingly urbanized. Urban population centers tend to be anti-gun.
- Both houses of the Congress are controlled by the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party tends to be anti gun.
- The economic base of this country has shifted from small family-run businesses to large corporations that are increasingly absorbed into multinational corporations. Multinational corporations tend to be anti gun.
- The United Nations and the European Union have increasing power which extends into this country, including influence on politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Supreme Court Justices such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The UN and the EU tend to be anti gun.
- The United States is one of the few remaining countries in which individuals are allowed to own firearms and carry them for the defense of their own lives and that of their families, but it is under increasing pressure from within as well as without to abolish that situation.
- In other countries the firearms owned by individuals have been seized and destroyed, sometimes under the guise of gun "buybacks," as in Australia. Similar events take place in the United States often enough to be reported in messages by forum members, and those events are documented in newspaper reports they provide. The most notable of such events took place in New Orleans in 2005.
- Gun registration, ballistic fingerprinting, and similar schemes are increasingly promoted in the United States. All such schemes have the same inevitable result: gun confiscation.
- In England and other countries the parallel movement to anti-gun schemes is the discouragement and disparagement of self defense. That same movement is rampant in the United States and it underlies the drive to discourage individual ownership of the means for self defense: firearms.
- In many institutions--schools, colleges, universities, airports, places of entertainment, and other public arenas--even pictures, photos, drawings, and symbols of firearms are banned and anyone who displays even a toy gun is subject to arrest.
- The media--nearly all of it--is anti gun and anti self defense.
- When a firearm is destroyed or confiscated it is gone forever, never to be recovered by its owner.
- When gun owners are deprived of their firearms they are gun owners no longer. They are former gun owners who have no political power as a group whatsoever and will never have any ever again.
The rabidly anti gun forces know all that and count on it. It's a disservice to gun owners to tell them to look at some other picture when this one is real and its consequences are always imminent.
It's also especially dimwitted to argue that gun owners waste their votes on ideal Presidential candidates who have no chance of winning, or to "send messages," or to vote for other than the Republican Presidential candidate in this coming election. It makes no difference who he is. The alternatives--Clinton, Obama, and Edwards--all are adamantly and avowedly anti gun, and all have committed themselves to disarming every individual in the United States.
This election is for keeps. The one major element missing from the above dismal mix is a Democratic President. When that element is in place, not all of the gun forums in the universe will have any possible effect on the eventual outcome.
What makes this situation even worse is the repeated attacks on the NRA by some gun owners and so-called "gun rights" organizations. Imperfect as the NRA is, it is the
only power base available to gun owners. Weakening the NRA, voting for third party candidates who have no chance, sending "messages," looking for illusory "big pictures," and all such childish pseudosophisticated nonsense are what will end individual firearms ownership in this country, and with it the right to self defense.
This is what happened in other countries and this is what will happen here if gun owners allow themselves to be deluded or self deluded. In the grand political picture every person who reads this message is no more or less than one vote. When they use it to "send a message," that message goes to the dead letter office.