"Second Amendment advocates may end up overlooking the governor's race, even though the men running for the seat Republican Bill Haslam and Democrat Mike McWherter have made gun rights a focus of their campaigns," Erik Schelzig of the Associated Press reports.

"John Harris, executive director of the Tennessee Firearms Association, said Friday he does not expect his group to endorse either candidate," we are told.

Why?

The core arguments appear to be that Haslam had been a member of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun group (he has since resigned and joined the NRA), and McWherter is being supported at a rally by Bill Clinton--which was enough to cause a prominent local gun show promoter to withdraw his support.

Still, both men would like us to believe not only are they no threat to gun rights but they will actually work to protect them. And while there's never any guarantee that what a man does will track with what he says he'll do, there is a way to make reneging on promises problematic for him--and that's by eliciting unequivocal responses to direct questions, leaving no "wiggle room" for interpretation. There is a way to nail both these power-seekers down in advance on how much real trust they're willing to place in We the People, and prove them to be fork-tongued opportunists if they later betray their promises.

Why would anyone who is honest and sincere fear that?

I challenge both candidates to provide specific answers to each of the questions in the Gun Rights Political Questionnaire. And I'm sending the questions, along with a link to this column, to both campaigns.

Let's see how far they're willing to push the envelope, or if they try to get by with generalized platitudes that tell us nothing about what they would really do if they had the power. Alternatively, let's see if they ignore it altogether.

Any way it goes with either candidate, I'll report back later.