Publicola is blogging again, after a long hiatus. His blog predates this one by a good bit. I agree with his analysis about what’s going on in Colorado. What they are trying to do is swing the pendulum back in the other direction. No new major gun control has passed in this country since the 1990s, really at either the state or federal level. That’s largely because of the drubbing we gave them at the ballot box after the smoke cleared. Well, it’s twenty years later and Obama and the far-left Democrats are betting that the gun vote is built into the Republican count, and that the gun issue can no longer deliver swing voters. They are throwing down, and betting they can slap us around with impunity, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is what that looks like in New Jersey, as Democrats tell gun owners they won’t get to have a say before the voting:
We already saw a devastating loss in New York, and New Jersey and California aren’t far behind. This is certainly not good, but in the big picture gun owners have been punching bags for politicians in those states for years, and we all know it. It’s like showing how tough you are by beating up the fat kid after lunch. Colorado is different, because it is a state that has typical western attitudes when it comes to civilian gun ownership. New gun restrictions there, even modest ones, is a much bigger deal than in the states anti-gun forces have already largely won. Any victory there will provide a template that will be repeated in other traditionally pro-gun swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, you name it. Once the dominoes start to fall, it’s going to be extremely difficult to stop. This is why they cannot be allowed to score any wins at all. This isn’t about reasonableness. This isn’t about people coming together to solve problems. Politics is not either of those things: it is about power, and nothing else, and the side that is more effective at wielding power is the one that goes home victorious, and the other beaten up and bloodied in ways that couldn’t have been imagined when you went in thinking they were going to be reasonable. There is no reasonableness in the political process, there is only victory and defeat.
If they beat us in Colorado, we have to punish those responsible in the next election cycle. If Colorado passes gun control, and no one loses their seats, it’s going to be over for gun rights in Colorado, and possibly other states. Once politicians learn you can’t threaten their seats, your state will be New Jersey and California very very fast. Political elites don’t like civilian gun ownership. They don’t really like you either. We’re going to need all hands on deck to try to stop this, and failing that, to deliver the punishment that is necessary at election time. The progressive-left is calling what they think is a bluff. We have to show them it’s no bluff, and that we still hold a winning hand.
“Colorado is different, because it is a state that has typical western attitudes when it comes to civilian gun ownership.”
Wrong tense. CO HAD those attitudes, but has been thoroughly Californicated – the east side, anyway.
You are right. If no seats are lost because of this travesty, we are, essentially, screwed on a national level. I predict additional, more draconian antigun laws will be introduced this session in Colorado, which will be “false flags” to allow swing district Dems to vote “NO,” then go back to their districts and say how they stood tall for the Second Amendment.
I will be visiting each of those swing districts in 2014 and hosting events for gun owners, talking about how their legislators sold them out.
Michael B
Yes. Yes. Yes!
It used to be an accepted fact that the Democratic Party lost their lock on Congress in 1994 for one and only one reason: passage of the original 1994 Assault Weapon Ban. More than anything else, this “fact†prevented any subsequent federal gun control legislation from passing for nearly twenty years.
Even if some (or even most) of the new gun controls being passed in Colorado, New York and California are ultimately invalidated in the courts, Democrats will continue to push new gun controls unless they pay a price at the next election.
There is nothing more important in the next eighteen months that defeating vulnerable anti-gun Democrats in every local, state and federal election.
Which is why we need to POUND repeal at every chance, even machineguns.
But we always try to be “reasonable”. Hows that working?
Still waiting for the repeal on Brady I was promised after the ’94 elections…
I don’t even feel good enough to tease ya about agreeing with me.
The gun bills are voted on today in the Co house. I just watched as the mag cap limit passed 34-31. Now they’re on to the universal background check bill. Or the “you can’t take your gf or pal shooting” bill as it’d be more accurately called.
They still have to go through the senate & get inked by the governor, but that’s more a formality from what I see.
I still say for Coloradans to call their reps, senators & the gov, & for out-of-staters to threaten to withold tourists dollars, but that’s cause it’s the right thing ot do, not cause it’ll change their damned minds.
But thanks for paying attention to our plight. It could be your plight too, & soon, but thanks none the less.
“No new major gun control has passed in this country since the 1990s, really at either the state or federal level.”
Is that strictly true, everywhere, or has it been a case of it being Republican gun control, in which case Noe Dare Call It Gun Control?
I’m thinking of Pennsylvania Act 17 of 1995, passed at the behest of a new, NRA-endorsed Republican governor, to be enforced by a Republican AG who the NRA would also later endorse (albeit unsuccessfully) for governor. That was barely seven months after that Republican drubbing.
You may recall the NRA dubbing it the “Sportsmens Omnibus Anti-Crime Bill.”
There has been no case in any state of Republican-initiated gun control since the beginning of the “modern era†of gun control in 1968.
Many Republicans have acquiesced to and voted for Democratic anti-gun legislation. But it is always the Democratic Party that starts and creates the political impetus for new gun controls.
Painful to watch
Well folks, looks like the Democrats want to press this nation into a civil divide.
Shame Texas and Pennsylvania aren’t closer together