This is a great day to call your Congressional Representative and let them know you stand for gun rights, and you want to make sure they remember to do the same. Today, the Obama Administration is pushing gun control again. I mentioned the rallies previously, but people on his mailing list are also getting an email pitch from the daughter of the Sandy Hook principal urging phone calls to Congress.
In the weeks and months after that horrible day, lawmakers from across the country told us, the families of the victims, that they’d take action to make our communities safer. What we found out is that, for some of our members of Congress, those were empty promises.
It’s very sad about those empty promises. It’s not quite as sad as the blatant partisan nature of this call to action that is designed to try and demonize the GOP-controlled House when it’s the Democratic Senate that acknowledges they should be the first to pass a bill with any chance of moving.
What I find most interesting about this partisan pitch by a gun control activist is that it shows how unserious they really are about the actual cause as opposed to the politics of promoting their party. All of my local lawmakers know that I’m with them because of gun rights. I’ll be against them, should it be warranted, because of gun rights. My support focuses on actually getting things accomplished or keeping threats at bay rather than simply using the issue to hurt a political party. That does not appear to be the case for many of the new advocates for gun control. If this woman wanted action, she would insist that her email be targeted to Senators, not Republican House members.
Meanwhile, Charles Cooke from National Review highlights the rather shocking (to none outside of the White House) news that contrary to what the Obama Administration is trying to demand of Democrats, they have no serious desire to keep harping on gun control.
Do you mean to say that a couple of months after the bill went down, there isn’t, magically, a groundswell of support for its revival? That the statistics showing that Americans really don’t care about this and don’t want the Senate to spend its time on it haven’t changed? That the 2014 elections are still going to be held in 2014, and that conservative Democrats still fear the voters on this issue?
When you combine the efforts of Bloomberg with the Obama team, I have to wonder if they have decided it is time to purge the Democratic Party of all leaders who find gun ownership remotely acceptable. While Obama isn’t being quite as hostile to pro-gun Dems as Bloomberg, he’s still trying to brand the GOP as the party to save gun rights with his attacks on the House.
It’s all fun and games until the Democrats lose the Senate.
“I have to wonder if they have decided it is time to purge the Democratic Party of all leaders who find gun ownership remotely acceptable”
That’s sort of the impression I got every time I heard a Democratic politician say any variation of “Sandy Hook changes EVERYTHING!” It’s like what they were actually saying was “FINALLY we can stop tolerating these neanderthals in our midst…it’s going to be ok now to say ‘we don’t serve YOUR kind here’ and discard left-leaning gun owners like last week’s recyclables.”
Bringing up the issue the first time was actually beneficial–it had been awhile since we’d seen what Republicans would do under pressure to pass gun control, and they’d probably forgotten how much blowback they can get from the grassroots on the issue. It was clarifying. Everyone has already made their position known. Every single vote that changes sides opens up an opportunity to brand them a traitor to the cause.
There is zero incentive for people on either side to change their earlier vote.
Gun Control and partisanship
I think that Obama has a deliberate long term goal of destroying opposition to Liberal/Democratic control of the nation. And that many of the pronouncements and policy positions from the White House are guided by that goal.
I thought it was notable that from the very beginning of the Obama gun-control campaign since Newton, that blasting the NRA was foremost. Just as Giffords new astroturf group from the very beginning announced as a primary goal “countering the gun lobby”. It’s more about being anti-NRA than pro-gun-control.
I think that most Democrats/Liberals really believe that the NRA is just a tool of the Republican party, and therefore destroying the NRA will help elect Democrats. Therefore much of the current gun-control effort is more about partisanship than gun-control.
On the other hand Bloomberg is a true-believer in gun control and he is likely to monkey-wrench the plans of the Democrats.
So it will be interesting to see who ultimately uses whom. Will the Democrats turn the gun-control effort into a partisan tool to elect Democrats? Or will the gun-control campaign purge the Democrats, turning the party into a tool of gun-control? So far Bloomberg is winning that contest.