When I first saw this article at The Daily Beast, talking about how Chris Christie was “faking it” on gun rights, I had no idea how much of the gun community would echo that sentiment. My reaction was “Well, yeah, but they’re all faking it.” You see, aside from the very rare gunny politician (and they do exist, they just aren’t that common), almost all your politicians arrive at this issue based on whether or not that position is politically expedient. Even your politicians that may pay a lot of lip service to gun rights have a breaking point, and you’d be surprised by how many “great friends” will head for the hills and leave you to the wolves if the vote suddenly starts to turn hard for them. In any of your state legislative bodies, there are legislative friends who really have not been tested, and nearly none of these guys are going home after a hard day of shaking hands and kissing babies to clean their AR-15s. It’s quite easy to say “Oh, I’m with you on this or that,” when they’re talking to your lawmaker to constituent in the comfort of their office. It’s quite another thing to actually take a hard vote for us when there’s not a knock down, drag out fight over it with both sides and the media fully engaged.
So while Governor Christie is not my ideal candidate for 2016 (I’m partial to Scott Walker if he’s interested in running), and while I agree that he’s vetoed a number of bills for us out of a desire to run for the GOP nomination, I have to respect that he’s signaled to us through action rather than lip service. Does that mean I trust him on guns? Not really. But trusting in politicians is usually a fool’s business. Since politicians, as a general rule, act out of political expedience, the trick is to continue making our issue expedient for them. Over the long run, that’ll work out a lot better for you than trust.
This needed to be said. Politicians follow the desires of their next constituency. One reason I’m against term limits. If their next constituency isn’t their voters…
“Since politicians, as a general rule, act out of political expedience, the trick is to continue making our issue expedient for them.”
Metaphorically stated, “You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.”
Most of them fake it. Bring up the issue to your local pro-gun rep and they’ll start to drone on about how much they enjoy hunting or support “sportsmen”. They only really support your right to own an AR because there are enough people who would get pissed off if they didn’t. The moment it becomes an affordable loss while still securing their next term we’ll see the underside of the bus in no time.
The root cause of this in my opinion is just due to the fact that the citizen-legislator is extinct. No longer retiring to the homestead, politicians have become so ingrained in elitist society, with wealth to afford all the security they need and connections to work wherever for their remaining years, that they really don’t see the need to personally wield a firearm like we might. When you have no personal connection to the issue you tend to not truly care about it.
Why Scott Walker over Rand Paul?
To borrow a line from the Guy Richie movie Snatch: “Sneaky fucking Russians” :)
I don’t trust Rand on foreign policy.
I suppose the best thing about Scott Walker’s foreign policy is that it basically doesn’t exist.
There’s literally nothing to dislike :)
Because they have an irrational dislike of him and his dad, even though both are excellent on guns and foreign policy, and really everything.
My disliking of Ron Paul is not irrational. I want to like Rand, and I’d be willing to get behind him if he can ease my discomfort about whether or not he’s bringing his dad’s political machine along for the campaign, or whether he’s willing to build an independent power base. Is he going to associate with people like Gary North as his father often did? Is he going to seek support from paleo-libertarians like Lew Rockwell?
I have two priorities, guns and the NSA. Right now Rand Paul is the only person on the right side of those issues. Plus, I know he’s one of the rare “true believers” you talked about. How can you be sure Scott Walker wouldn’t roll over on you if there was another shooting / terrorist attack?
I dunno, I still think we’re better off having re-elected Obama than getting Romney in.
Even two terms of Deval Patrick haven’t been as bad as Romney’s one term as Mass Governor.
I feel the same way with Christie, I’d hate to see a RINO getting the more reasonable Republicans to line up behind him while he does his “Progressive” nonsense.
You’re exactly right, for example most would view flogging as an extreme punishment, but if 70 percent of voters supported it then you wouldn’t be able to find a politician who would oppose it.
I agree with this post down to the letter. This is exactly the way I look at the issue.
I mean, damn, it’s not like GWB was a conviction pro-gun politician, but the difference in behavior between his exec branch and that of the current (conviction anti-gun) prez is crystal clear. We won’t even talk about judges.
Politicians fall into three categories, not two: pro-gun, anti-gun, and pragmatic/”cut a deal” types.
Christie previously sent out a lot of signals that he was an actual anti-gunner. Now he is signaling (in the form of real, politically consequential actions) that he may instead be a deal-cutter on our issue. I am not fully convinced yet, but I am not going to write him off yet.
Obviously a conviction pro-gun politician beats a deal-cutter, and if we are in a position to insist on a pro-gun candidate for a particular office we should do so.
But by the same token, a deal-cutter is in fact preferable — is far preferable — to a conviction anti-gun politician.
Yep. That’s why it’s not our job to “educate” politicians into loving us and our rights. It’s our job to use what they want to get what we want.
Politicians want money, power, and votes. Our job is to threaten their votes, take away their money, and thus deprive them of power. Our job is to cause them so much political pain that they do what we tell them.
Any other approach gets you laughed off and screwed over. But if you make it so damn painful to screw you over, they’ll screw over someone else.
CC is a RINO and I will never vote for him. Look at how NJ is run. Do you really want that for this nation??
I don’t trust any of them. They are ALL crooks. Democrat or republican. They don’t give a rats a$$ about the citizens of the country. They only care about where their next bribe is coming from. Think about this. If the government really cared about you, why don’t they just ban all tobacco products & use? Because they get billions in tax dollars, that they blow on park projects and other $h!t we don’t need. Vote ALL incumbents out over the next 6 years. That’s they way you make change. One definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over then expect a different result. Yet we still continue to vote for Feinstein, Pelosi, McCain , Reid and some others. Feinstein said that if she could have got the votes she would have banned & confiscated all guns, yet she admitted to carrying a 38spl revolver for protection. That’s call hypocritical where I come from. She & the others are just elitist who don’t care about the constitution until some
Body tries to shut them up, then they yell 1st amendment. We need change & quick. The government has us over $17,000,000,000,000.00 in debt with now plan to fix it. What happens when other countries decide not to loan us anymore money. Then the people living off of hard working tax payers will have nothing and the government won’t be able to help because it will collapse. Then what?
Oh you can usually count on a politician to act in a predictable way. You just can’t judge how they will act in office based on anything that comes out of their mouth, since politicians lie almost as much as they breathe.
Take for example the case of President GW Bush. There are a lot of conservatives and gunnies who despise GW Bush. But I’m not one of them.
I remember back in 2004 when the AW ban was due to sunset, and the cries of doom from many of our friends who were convinced that Bush would facilitate a renewed AW ban. But I was confident Bush would do no such thing and that the ban would die.
But if Bush had already said during his 2000 campaign that he would sign a renewed ban, why was I so sure in 2004? Because I know that politicians B.S. all the time, and only past actions can show how a politician will really act in office. And Bush had sided with us when he was Governor of Texas, even when it was politically risky.
In 1999 during the peak of the effort by anti-gun mayors to sue gun companies into oblivion, Bush signed Texas legislation preventing such abuse of the state court system. That was not an act of expediency. The easy call would have been to sideline that legislation somehow, but Bush didn’t. That’s why I knew the Bush 2000 campaign talk about the Fed AW ban was B.S. intended to fool anti-gunners. Only actions count, not words.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/07/us/2000-campaign-gun-issue-bush-stand-used-turn-election-into-showdown.html
I knew from the start in 2000 that Bush was a mixed bag, with his ‘compassionate conservatism’ and support of amnesty for illegal aliens. But Bush was definitely pro-gun, definitely conservative, and most importantly was the candidate well positioned and able to beat Gore.