This article in The New York Times focuses on my local district, and of course the gun owner has to be the racist one:
Early on Election Day morning in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pa., Joe Sinitski, 48, stood in a long line inside a school gymnasium, inching his way toward three blue-curtained voting machines. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt and a National Rifle Association baseball cap. He said he would vote for Barack Obama, a choice that some months earlier he could not have imagined.
[…]
“For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean,†Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me. “I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.â€
But he voted Obama anyway. As much as I want to blast the New York Times for pointing this out, it’s a fact that many of the NRA members in this area are working class tradesman and Union members. It’s also a fact that many of them reflexively and habitually vote Democrat. In this area, it makes my job very difficult, because I have to appeal to them to vote on the gun issue. I’ve had difficulty getting cooperation with clubs, because, if you can believe this, supporting NRA endorsed candidates is controversial, because here they are pretty much universally Republican. In a place like Texas, this might not be so appalling, but here, Democrats running at the federal level, and in the Southeast at the state level, are typically reflexively anti-gun. I can bet you that Joe the Racist here voted for Patrick Murphy too.
If you want to understand why Pennsylvania, which has a per-capita gun ownership rate that is close to Texas, and who issues 1 million hunting licenses per year, and 600,000 concealed carry licenses, can consistently vote for anti-gun Democrats at the federal level, I give you Joe Sinitski. It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth, and it makes the life of gun rights activists in this state very difficult. Particularly in my area.
And I hope he learns to enjoy every minute of the experience. Bless his racist little heart.
Looks like you need to start developing pro gun Democrats.
JR:
They’ve been successful with that model in northern and southwestern, PA. We have two pro-gun federal reps in those areas. Southwestern PA is represented by Murtha, who, despite his stance on other issues, is good on guns. Same with Paul Kanjorski up in the north.
The problem with developing pro-gun Democrats is you have to have an electorate that’s willing to vote the gun issue. A lot of the guys around here do, and vote Republican, but there are a comfortable enough number of gun owners who will vote Democrats no matter how bad the Democrat is on guns. That’s the problem. They’ve also never had to suffer the consequences of it, because the rest of the state has, largely, saved them from their own bad decisions. We’d be in a lot of trouble if Democrats in the rest of Pennsylvania were as bad on guns as they are in the Southeast.
That’s also the reason it took a year to get the medical center down the road built, and 2/3 of the times you drive through a construction area on the highway in the middle of the week, nobody is there working. Sign me on this one “Wished I hadn’t moved away from a right-to-work state.”
And we do have pro-gun Democrats here. They’re the only ones who get elected. Indiana, too.