Isn’t it widely accepted that Al Gore’s position on licensing gun owners was a big reason we ended up with President George W. Bush rather than President Al Gore? Now Bloomberg and Obama have sold the Democratic Party that gun control is a winning issue again! That must be why Connecticut’s Senators have floated a bill requiring licenses to purchase handguns nationwide.
This probably won’t gore their ox, since I doubt there’s too much risk for either of them to lose their seats over the gun issue in Connecticut. This will only get worse as the hard core owners flee the Nutmeg State for freer pastures. But it certainly isn’t going to help the Democratic Party brand itself to successfully compete in places where gun rights are an issue.
Yeah, the Dems have pretty well cemented themselves as the anti-gun party. It is really funny seeing the discontinuity in pro-gun Dems. Did you see the ITAR post at TFB? They came out of the woodwork to defend that pile of poo, and complained that TFB was going full political. Sorry, it is sad, but guns are political here. If you like guns and you like Democrats you have a discontinuity somewhere, and it will come up even in “non-political” blogs. Due to the nature of the issue it is unavoidable. Dems *will* try and pass laws that negatively affect sportsmen, and any blog worth anything, political or not, will report on it.
(And of course all this is not to say Republicans are saints on the issue, because they are not. They are better though, and that does count for something.)
Unfortunately so. It’s an even bigger issue than the fact that they’re on average less “pro-gun” than typical Conservative/libertarian gun owners are. I hold out some hope that some of them will eventually own up to the disconnect (believe me they’re aware of it).
They take no responsibility for the problem in the Democratic Party, instead usually going into some BusHitlerAlexJonesEvilGOPnahnahnahcan’thearyou diatribe in order to avoid having to openly address this serious issue. I’ve even seen them try to blame the GOP for the Katrina confiscations (they claim that because some non-local actors were involved, that it’s Bush’s fault. And they do this with a straight face. You’ll hear more about Reagan’s actions in CA with regard to the Black Panthers than you will about Manchin, Feinstein, O’Malley, Clinton, Boxer, or the hundreds of other politicians on their own side who are the real enemies of gun rights.
They’re isolated in their own party and the don’t seem to want to do anything about it. It’s incredibly sad, and I hope someday we start seeing a change.
ProTip: They’ll never admit that their party is actually anti-gun. Vaguely allude to it and it;ll be Bush this and Reagan that because the Democrat politicians aren’t actually anti-gun.
I also dislike the way they bring out Reagan. It’s as if, because I think that he’s overall a generally fairly good President (perhaps even one of the best, but in some ways, only because so many other Presidents set the standard so low…), I’m expected to agree with him on *everything*.
It’s disingenuous, too, because the person saying “You like Reagan, so you’d better like this!” probably ONLY agrees with Reagan on that particular issue, and pretty much NOTHING ELSE.
(Oh, look: A peeve is following me home. Should I make it a pet?)
Also, Maryland: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/blog/bs-md-van-hollen-gun-20150611-story.html
Maryland passed a nearly identical scheme in 2013. Nickname for Baltimore? Bloodymore. Homicides were up 20% year over year even before this year’s riots. Not one HQL in the bunch.
I wish someone would post the JHU “study”. Daniel Webster’s last masterpiece on Missouri was a total fraud. Since CT homicides are up since 2002, while being down everywhere else I am more than a little skeptical here. As for 1995, homicide is down everywhere since 1995 (mostly).
Having lived most of my life there, I can tell you that there’s a big disconnect between not only the political and real-life sections of people’s brains, but there’s a big difference between the rural parts of the state and the more urban areas. Even people who weren’t very gun friendly enjoyed time at the range with a rifle and/or shotgun (at least before the stupid CT government decided to require permits for those too). However, take a look at the cities. Hartford and New Haven are notoriously bad, New London is tiny but has well earned its reputation for weird crimes, and Bridgeport is largely a hell-hole outside a few very small areas.
Then take a look at the state as a whole. I left not only because of bad gun laws and the horrible cost of living (largely due to taxes and a metric crap ton of “regulations”) but because there are no jobs there. I saw four main economic sectors in the state: the Navy (not going away anytime soon) and contractors (Northrop Grumman pulled out recently), farming (big buy local movement but, again, taxes and government interference), insurance (really only in Hartford), and gun companies (do I even need to spell that one out for you?). There are three main types of people in the 18-30ish bracket: those who desperately want to leave the state, those who really want to leave, and those who want to but feel they can’t for certain reasons.
It seems like every two or three days these gun hating anti-freedom progressive statists keep introducing gun control bills.how many have been introduced just last month? 4-5 of them? None of them are going to get anywhere but they can all say that they did something.