The Inky is editorializing against Congressman Pat Murphy because he apparently doesn’t hate guns enough:
It sure looked that way yesterday, when Murphy voted with the National Rifle Association – and against the best interests of cities in his own backyard trying to stem gun violence, including Philadelphia.
Murphy was among 85 House Democrats who joined 181 Republicans in approving a bill that would roll back gun-safety measures enacted by the District of Columbia, after the Supreme Court struck down the city’s 32-year-old handgun ban in June.
I’d be willing to go to bat for Congressman Murphy if he was legitimately having a change of heart on the gun issue, but what does one of his staffers say?
Aides insist the congressman hasn’t changed his stripes. He still favors a ban on assault weapons and supports “reasonable gun laws.” The District of Columbia vote was about “striking the proper balance between constitutional rights and reasonable restrictions.”
Who is running this campaign? If you want to play the moderate-on-the-gun-issue suburban Democrat, the way Murphy is playing it is exactly wrong. It’s guaranteed to get him no allies.
I’m angry with Murphy’s support of the so called “assault weapons” ban. This violates one of our commandments, “Thou shalt not support gun bans!” HR1022, which Murphy has signed on to a sponsor, will ban most of the firearms that high-power competition shooters compete with, including the AR-15 and M1A. It will ban the Ruger 10/22. It will also ban all semi-automatic shotguns. That’s not moderate. That’s extreme. Murphy will get no support from us, no matter what he does on the DC issue, if he doesn’t withdraw his sponsorship of this bill.
On the other side of the card, the radical gun control activists in Philadelphia are furious that Murphy is supporting the Second Amendment when it comes to the Heller decision. Now even the Inky is calling him out for his ridiculous triangulation on this issue.
Patrick Murphy did not win Bucks County in 2006. He lost it narrowly. Because Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District includes parts of Montgomery County, and the City of Philadelphia, that was enough to win him the seat. Running on gun control, but only sort of, is exactly the wrong politics to play for this district. Murphy needs to pick a side, and I think the Congressman would find that truly embracing gun rights would find him a lot more support than gun control.
There are more than a dozen shooting clubs in Bucks County, several of which have memberships in the thousands. A lot of these guys are union members, and have common cause with the Democratic Party on other issue. Why is Congressman Murphy throwing these votes away for what measly support he’ll get from the few gun control proponents out there?
Right now his triangulation is ensuring that on the gun issue, Patrick Murphy is losing votes on all sides. That’s never smart politics.
If HR1022 ever got passed into law, does this mean that I’ll have to surrender my semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 rifle to gun grabbers like Barack Obama and Joe Biden?
I mean after all, my semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 rifle is such a fearsome and formidable “assault gun”, isn’t it? Since my semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 rifle also has a Butler Creek folding pistol-grip stock on it, and there are some after-market and “high-capacity” magazines for it in its storage case, it’s even more fearsome and formidable than it would be normally. This is simply because these accessories that I have for my semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 rifle would enable me to “spray shoot” it from my hip, right? Additionally, the .22 LR round that it is chambered for just gives it so much menacing firepower, you know.
Sometimes, I lie awake at night, wondering why rifles like my customized and semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 rifle have not yet been issued to our troops in theater, so that they can better fight the war on terror with them. Instead of pondering this question so much and losing sleep, I guess for now, I’ll just have to keep plinking empty cans and plastic jugs with my semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 rifle at my gun club on Saturday afternoons instead.