The Speeches: Part 1

I’ve been looking at the speeches the various candidates gave before the NRA’s Celebration of American Values, and I’ll offer up a few impressions. I’ll split this up into a few posts, because there’s a lot that was talked about, and it’ll get too long otherwise.

Senator John McCain

McCain, whether you like him or not, has generally been pretty friendly to gun owners over his career. I have my differences with him on several gun issues, which he acknowledges:

Over the years, we’ve not agreed on every issue. We had differences over my efforts to standardize sales procedures at gun shows and to clean up our campaign finance system. I understand and respect your position. But while we may disagree on the means, we do agree on the need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, and, in the light of the number of my colleagues who have been disgraced or under investigation and are worried about indictment, agree that Washington needs cleaning up. Americans have lost trust in their government, and that trust must be restored.

But I’m as big a believer in the first amendment as I am in the second, and I can’t abide by a method of restoring trust that places limits on the speech of its citizens to criticize candidates for federal office. I will never forgive John McCain for McCain-Feingold. He either repudiates that, or he won’t get my vote.

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney tells us:

Now, as governor, I worked closely with the NRA and the Gun Owners Action League to advance legislation that expanded the rights of gun owners in my state. And my door was always open to you, and that will continue to be the case if I’m elected president. Together, we reduced burdensome bureaucratic regulations, we made it easier for people to exercise their constitutional rights.

This would be Mitt’s definition of working closely:

“Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts,” Romney said, at a bill signing ceremony on July 1 with legislators, sportsmen’s groups and gun safety advocates. “These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.”

Now, as it happens, the bill Romney signed actually helped out gun owners in Massachusetts in a number of ways, and kept the federal exemptions to the assault weapons ban in place when the federal ban expired. But you’d think from the Governor’s rhetoric, he was, you know, pandering or something. Mitt Romney? Pander? Naaah. At least he said he’d repeal McCain-Feingold:

And I’ll ask Congress to repeal the McCain-Feingold law which sought to impose restrictions on the First Amendment rights of groups like the NRA to advocate for issues we care about. Some parts have already been declared unconstitutional. We ought to get rid of the entire bill.

I couldn’t agree more, but can’t help but feel Mitt’s lips are chafing against my ass a bit too harshly. I’m surprised he didn’t offer to not only repeal the law, but personally eat the paper it’s written on at the Banquet for the Annual NRA Members Meeting.