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At some point, gun owners must wonder if they’re being played
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Historically, politicians from all over the political spectrum have had a rather annoying habit of acknowledging the existence of firearms owners and gun rights groups only when they need their votes.
While that’s not a rule carved in stone, it is hardly a rare situation. I recall a certain long-term congressman from a western state who, years ago facing re-election, arranged through a staffer to have his photograph taken to appear on the cover of a now-defunct outdoors publication. So the congressman shows up, somebody hands him a shotgun that was not his, and a pheasant that he did not shoot and poses him in front of a tree in the alley behind the building so he could extol his support for sportsmen. And ever since, that guy has not supported a single major pro-gun bill.
More recently, after having been a pro-gun member of the 111th Congress from New York’s 20th District, Democrat Kirstin Gillibrand – now elevated to the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton when she became Secretary of State – has been voting consistently anti-gun, and just the other day she joined only six other senators to oppose a measure that cut funding to the anti-gun ACORN organization in the midst of a scandal that suggests the organization has no moral compass at all.
Virginia’s Mark Warner, another Democrat who has appeared in a video extolling the virtues of waterfowl hunting for an afternoon, accused the National Rifle Association of having been “hijacked by those who are in the extreme” during the confirmation process for freshman Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has twice been involved in anti-gun rights rulings while on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
I think the NRA at some point has gone beyond its mission, and are perhaps allowing themselves to get hijacked by those who are in the extreme.” – Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
When Warner was Virginia governor a few years ago, he signed several pro-gun bills, but it now appears he did so only because the Legislature was strongly Republican. Warner had earlier voiced support for the 1994 Clinton gun ban. Now he's insulting and angering NRA members.
Who can forget the famous Warner quote that suggests a coalition of conservative groups, including the NRA, had “just about completely taken over the Republican Party” in Virginia. In his words, this was “a whole coalition of people that have all sorts of different views that I think most of us in this room would find threatening to them and what it means to be an American.”
Hmmm, isn’t this another way of defining “diversity?” If that’s a threat to “what it means to be an American,” perhaps Sen. Warner – who voted for Sotomayor’s confirmation – ought to examine his own party before taking shots at the NRA.
Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill from Missouri – where the 24th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference unfolds Sept. 25-27 in St. Louis – has never been pro-gun except during her campaign for the seat she now holds. As Larry Keane, vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation recalled in a scathing piece he wrote about candidate McCaskill “stalking hunters’ and gun owners’ votes” in the Oct. 20, 2006 edition of Human Events, “She’s running radio spots claiming that by following her dad through the woods as he hunted she learned to value and protect the 2nd Amendment.”
I think the fact the NRA is scoring that vote is dumb.” – Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
This is the same Claire McCaskill who opposed concealed carry in Missouri, and who balked at the NRA for having the audacity to score votes on a recent Senate measure that would have established national concealed carry reciprocity.
That was the vote that demonstrated just how deceptive some Democrats are on gun rights. The measure, sponsored by staunch pro-gun Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, required 60 votes for passage. Democrats, including Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas, played what Huffington Post blogger Ryan Grim revealed was a game of political sleight-of-hand, counting votes and giving one another cover under the watchful eye of choreographer Sen. Chuck Schumer, essentially so they could go home and tell the folks that they had voted with the NRA, but the measure still failed. The way Democrats set up the vote, it would have been nearly impossible not to fail, but it should have succeeded.
Before passing the D.C. vote measure, the Senate voted 62-36 to adopt an amendment that would expand gun rights in the nation’s capital. Gillibrand joined 32 other Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them in opposing the proposal.
In my book last year with Alan Gottlieb, These Dogs Don’t Hunt: The Democrats’ War on Guns, we took a hard look at how Democrats, as a party, had established such an awful history on gun rights that they became known as “The Party of Gun Control.” It is a label they just can’t shake, despite the efforts of many pro-gun individual members, including the 65 courageous House Democrats I wrote about in March who sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, telling him to back off on gun control initiatives because such measures would not get their support.
It is not enough for Democrats or Republicans to claim they “support the Second Amendment.” That kind of rhetoric is cheap and meaningless, and it is dished out by people who think American gun owners are a stupid lot that meet the stereotype depicted in all too many anti-gun editorial cartoons, that of a paranoid fool. You know, the kind of conservative whack job that candidate Barack Obama whined about at a 2008 San Francisco fund raiser, people who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
A truly pro-gun Democrat would have had his or her name on that March letter, drawing a line in the sand they vowed to protect when they ran for election and asked for your votes.
With Democrats in trouble and the mid-term elections looming in 14 months, pay close attention to how many of these politicians at some point start reaching out to appeal to those very gun owners whose rights they routinely disregard.
Members of the NRA and other gun rights organizations are tired of being taken for suckers. Democrats learned that the hard way in 1994, and in 2010, they may get a refresher course.
Visit with other Gun Rights Examiners:
And Don’t forget to visit:
For more info: These Dogs Don't Hunt: The Democrats' War on Guns. Second Amendment Foundation. National Rifle Association. Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
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