The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
There are one million hunters in Pennsylvania in a state of twelve million. That’s a lot of hunters. Michigan also has quite a lot of hunters, which would make you think Obama would know better than to bring this up:
Palin’s bio is “compelling,” Obama said.
The crowd booed. “No, it’s an interesting story.” More boos. “No, no, it is. I mean that sincerely. Mother, governor, moose shooter.”
The crowd broke out in laughter. “That’s cool. That’s cool. That’s cool stuff,” Obama said.
Over at Cemetery’s gun blog. A lot of New Jersey gun owners don’t really get how bad they have it, and more than a few are blisfully unaware of how easy it is to end up a felon. At a match a few months ago, I was talking to a guy who’s friend was in a lot of trouble because he and a buddy were target shooting on their property, when the police showed up and, at gunpoint, disarmed them and hauled them off to jail. He had his kids with him, and there was some worry he’d lose the kids, because they charged him with endangering them too. His crime? Possession of .22LR hollow point ammunition. A whole box of it. That’s worth a lot of time in New Jersey. You can buy that stuff easily out of state. Most folks have no idea it’s illegal.
Carl in Chicago points out a Brady presser that would seem to indicate that if HR 6691 is passed, that the mass of guns flooding into our nations capital will produce such an immense gravitational field that it will collapse into a singularity that will consume the city, followed quickly by the rest of the nation, planet, solar system, and known universe.
In short, they are freaking out because the laws in Washington D.C. will be substantially identical to most of the 50 states, with the exception that carrying a loaded firearm on your person will still be unlawful. This is the press release of an organization struggling to find relevance in a political climate that’s not favorable to their message. I can’t imagine how much it must worry the Brady’s that the original Republican bill was tabled, because the Democrats wanted to take credit for getting this done. And the Democrat bill was more pro-gun than the Republican bill! The Brady’s have to find relevance in this election, and they haven’t been able to so far. The best they’ve been able to get is “don’t tell me that we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.” from Barack Obama, who also keeps insisting he’s not a gun banner. While there’s no doubt Obama is their man, most sensible Democrats are now aware that this is a losing issue for them.
UPDATE: Cam wants to know where the evidence is that this bill would change anything about carrying of firearms? Maybe the evidence went back to school with the Brady intern.
From a New Jersey media source at that:
According to the research done by the NSSF, 72 percent more women are hunting with firearms today than just five years ago. And 50 percent more women are now target shooting. The statistics, from National Sporting Goods Association surveys spanning 2001 through 2005, show more than 3 million women hunt and over 5 million women enjoy shooting.
[…]
The statistics show that 23 percent of the shooting population in America are now women. Women also own 9 percent of the firearms in America, and this figure is increasing with each passing year.
I’ve also found that women are far better additions to the community than many men. This is merely antecdotal evidence, but in my experience women:
This data is good news for us, and not very good news for the anti-gun folks. The stereotypical soccer mom is the gun control key demographic. What’s going to happen when their key demographic keeps a Glock in the glove compartment?
I’ve mentioned that I signed up to be NRA’s Election Volunteer Coordinator for my congressional district (PA-08), and we’ve been working on a plan. Our job is to gather volunteers to help pro-gun campaigns, and to help get gun owners involved in the political struggle. Since I’ve only had the title for a month or so, we’re just getting started, but we have a plan going forward for this election.
We’ve already established a web presence for gun issues in the 8th congressional district. We’ve been identifying all the gun clubs and ranges in the district and near (more than a dozen), and have been looking at the gun show schedules. We’re scheduled to appear at the Valley Forge Gun Show on September 20th in the morning, where we’ll be working with the EVC for the 6th and 7th congressional districts. We’re also now starting to contact all the gun clubs in the area in an attempt to try to get the message out to gun owners in the county that this isn’t an election they want to sit out. If all works well, we should have a healthy number of volunteers and involved gun owners to make a difference in November.
Pennsylvania is a blue state in most of the past elections, but it’s one that Democrats can’t take for granted, and we’re usually regarded as a swing state. It’s true the climate here generally favors Democrats in national elections, but Republican in this state can’t give up. We have to make them fight to get Pennsylvania. Here’s a promising tidbit:
“Obama hasn’t closed the deal here yet in a state where Democrats have won the last four (presidential) elections,†said G. Terry Madonna, Ph.D., director of the Franklin & Marshall College Center for Politics and Public Affairs. “Clinton Democrats are still not going for him.â€
Without Pennsylvania, it is unlikely Obama can win the election. No Democrat has been elected president without winning the Keystone State since Harry Truman in 1948.
I’m hoping Pennsylvanians, especially those who want to preserve their Second Amendment rights, will volunteer to help defeat Barack Obama this year.
Because the basic math also shows McCain must win over many Democrats, one group he and Obama are fighting over are the blue-collar, working-class Democrats who backed New York Sen. Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primary.
That represents a significant demographic in my congressional district, and a lot of these guys are also gun owners. We need to get the word out to them.
We bloggers have been noticing more than a few stories of children being the victims of stupid parents evil baby killing guns in the Google Alerts, and yet it’s like crickets over at the Brady Campaign Blog, which has all summer been running all manner of stories highlighting dead or injured children, law abiding gun owners, and concealed carry permit holders engaging in various acts of stupidity.
We speculated that their prolific blogging was perhaps the product of a talented new intern, who may have gone back to school. Or perhaps Doug Pennington was on extended vacation. Or maybe the Bradys just got tired of paying their staff to produce blog material that was only read by gun bloggers. Either way, it seems quite possible we’ve seen another Brady new media effort fall flat on its face.
David Frum has a very good editorial on the vanishing GOP voter. I think Frum over-analyzes the problem to a great degree, and concentrates largely on the disappearing GOP vote in Northern Virginia, which I think is driven more by the culture of the federal government than by anything. The idea that immigration is to blame, and rising inequality is at issue I think is wrong. But I think there’s some grains of truth in some of what he has said:
There is a long list of reasons for this anti-Republican tilt among the affluent: social issues, the environment, an ever more internationalist elite’s distaste for the Republican Party’s assertive nationalism. Maybe the most important reason, however, can be reduced to the two words: “Robert Rubin.†By returning to the center on economic matters in the 1990s, the Democrats emancipated higher-income and socially moderate voters to vote with their values rather than with their pocketbooks.
Whether conservatives want to admit it or not, The Clinton Administration post-1994 successfully sold itself economically centrist, and it must be admitted that government grew less under Clinton with a Republican Congress than it has under George W. Bush. Clinton’s brand of Democratic governance did indeed free suburban voters to vote their values, and those values are not, generally, very socially conservative.
Big city political machines have always been Democratic strongholds. That much hasn’t really changed. But suburban areas have typically trended Republican as middle and upper-middle class voters, many of whom left cities to get away from the machine politics, voted to keep taxes low, and government running leaner and with fewer tentacles into the economy. What has George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism done for this type of Republican voter?
I don’t think former Republican voters are pissed off with income inequality, I think they are pissed off with government, as low approval ratings of Congress and the President indicate. Frum hits it largely when he says this:
Republicans have been badly hurt in upper America by the collapse of their onetime reputation for integrity and competence.
That pretty much sums it up. Republicans have demonstrated themselves no more capable of using government to protect conservative interests than Democrats. Republican’s can’t cede suburban voters to the Democrats, unless they want to be the minority party for most of the 21st century. John McCain, for all his faults, might be the kind of conservative that suburban voters can get behind.
Everyone by now has heard Barack Obama trying to reassure skeptical Pennsylvanians that he’s not going to take their guns:
“If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it,’’ Obama said. But the Illinois senator could still see skeptics in the crowd, particularly on the faces of several men at the back of the room.
So he tried again. “Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress,’’ he said. “This can’t be the reason not to vote for me. Can everyone hear me in the back? I see a couple of sportsmen back there. I’m not going to take away your guns.’’
There’s two telling things about this. One is that even the most left leaning candidate to serve in recent memory can’t come out explicitly in favor of gun control, and at least has to feign support for the Second Amendment. Remember that just eight years ago, presidential candidates were running on national licensing and registration, and renewing the assault weapons ban!
The other thing is, there’s a whole lot of things Obama can do to end gun ownership in this country without going door-to-door. I actually believe him when he says he’s not going to take your guns. But will he let your children buy guns? Will he let you pass your guns along to your children? Will he use onerous regulation, to close down every gun shop? Will he use environmental regulations to close down shooting ranges?
President Barack Obama can end gun ownership in this country in a generation without he or any of his agents setting a single foot in anyone’s home. He might argue that he doesn’t have the votes in Congress to do it, but that’s not comforting. There’s a lot of damage an Obama Administratin can do with no help from Congress, and that’s why this guy needs to lose, and lose big. Pennsylvanians should not fool themselves.