November 2012 – Page 8 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Gun Owner Votes Count

I get so damn sick of the message that individual votes don’t matter. Last election, we had a local state house race that was decided by around 100 votes. That’s so close that it’s painful. Well, this year, we have an even more painful vote – and that’s even with the numbers working in favor of the pro-gun candidate and against the anti-rights guy.

For those who don’t follow Pennsylvania politics closely, we had this legislator named Levdansky. He was the American Hunters & Shooters Association of lawmakers. He proclaims to be a sportsman, but he actively sought to screw all gun owners and even ruin everything for hunters in Pennsylvania by pushing HSUS-dream type bills. He cozied up to anti-rights groups and CeaseFire PA made his attempt to reclaim the office he lost in 2010 their priority House race this year.

Meanwhile, the current incumbent, Rep. Rick Saccone, actually supports Second Amendment and hunting rights.

This year, they are in a rematch. I say are and not were because the race is still to be determined. For a while, Levdansky was up by a few votes, but a more thorough count of all of the ballots in every precinct now puts Saccone up by 36 votes. Three dozen voters.

Because it’s such a close call, it’s going to hearings by the election board which is 2-1 Democratic control. The hearing isn’t until Friday, and the final count isn’t expected until next week, according to various news outlets.

If you happen to know any gun owners who didn’t vote in that race, you might want to give them a piece of your mind. Every vote will matter, and this razor thin margin makes it too close for comfort for any gun owner in the state.

ROI For NRA Spending

I’ve seen a lot of analysis like this that NRA basically blew a wad of cash for nearly nothing. If you look at our overall results in Pennsylvania, things don’t look that bad. But the fact is that in a lot of key races, NRA got beaten badly.

NRA is certainly not alone. A good many groups on the right also sunk huge, often times much much larger sums of dollars into this election with even less to show for it. That will hopefully blunt the damage to NRA’s reputation, but this is going to hurt, for certain. What is the root problem here? I would boil it down to a few factors.

For the past two elections, NRA has had a choice between Barack Obama and a candidate that could be charitably described as a compromise. John McCain was well understood to have gone all “maverick” on NRA at various points in his political career, and while Mitt Romney’s actual record on the issue wasn’t nearly as bad as his rhetoric, that signing statement was bound to dog him. NRA has never been in a position to endorse a candidate for President who was actually strong on our issue, and everyone knows it. NRA did much better in down ticket races where this was not a factor.
No grassroots interest group can hope to do more than swing elections at the margins. When you don’t have a close election, it’s hard to claim interest groups were relevant. NRA suffered extensive losses in their U.S. Senate endorsements. Two candidates probably deserve the blame there, namely Mourdock in Indiana, and Akin in Missouri. Their ridiculous jabbering about rape poisoned the well of GOP Senate prospects, and took most of those races down below the NRA’s margin. That’s not something that could have been helped, because it was a messaging problem created by two bad candidates.
The center-right groups are not reaching younger voters, largely because their use of technology is backwards. NRA actually does a better job in this area than most of the other groups that flushed millions of dollars down the toilet this election, but that’s not saying NRA’s efforts are particularly good. I believe a big component of Obama’s two victories have been his effective use of technology to reach and motivate younger voters, who are not reachable by TV, print or direct mail. We’re finally starting to see the technology revolution come to politics, and it’s OFA who is leading.
The GOP didn’t run on gun rights at all this election cycle. Even Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal got nary a mention. Most pundits believed everyone wanted to hear about the economy, and that if the Democrats made this a culture war election, they would lose. Well, how did that work out? The Democrats pounded the GOP on culture war issues with single women and young people, and won those groups by large margins. Gun rights are actually a culture war issue where there’s no generation gap. Why not attack Obama on the issue?

The bigger question is what to do about it?Â It should be possible to motivate young people on gun rights. If there’s one thing that’s true about Millennials, is that they are extremely socially liberal. If guns are your “thing” — how you like to spend your Saturdays — most Millennials are fine with that. It’s your thing. Millennials don’t make strong value judgements on other people’s choices, and that isÂ requiredÂ to be a strong gun control advocate. The way to market gun rights to Millennials is to make them understand it as a lifestyle choice, and an issue of personal freedom. If you can do that, you’ll sell it to them. To that extent, I actually think blogs that heavily feature the shooting life are more useful for reaching that generation than political gun blogs like mine.

I think everyone on the right needs to understand the OFA machine. This is something I’m very curious about, but I don’t have time right now to try to dig to understand more of how it works. But every center-right group, including NRA, needs to start thinking more seriously about reaching younger voters, and using technology as a force multiplier in GOTV efforts. This means investing a lot more in technology spending, and bringing people on board who deeply understand how young people consume and share information. The days of raising money, awareness, membership and action, by sending oodles of direct mail or making phone calls, if not dead, is nearly so. If NRA and other groups keep messaging to the old, they will die with the old.

Attitudes on Gun Rights

Clearly positive attitudes are not spreading very far and wide among political elites in the Golden State. Says Burke Strunsky, Deputy DA for Riverside County:

But the problem is, the handgun is a lethal weapon–that’s too damn handy.

Yes. Yes it is. Which is why the ownership of a handgun is constitutionally protected.

Laws that mandate a waiting period before buying a gun are well grounded in the fact that humans tend to act impulsively. These waiting periods are wise and necessary. They give people an opportunity to reflect and cool down, to use their heads first and not their handguns.

Because every time I’ve gone to buy a handgun, I’ve been in a huff and angry and itching for some murder. How many people buying a handgun are doing so because someone else is in a huff and angry, like, say an abusive ex-husband? And why do waiting periods make sense at all for someone who already has a gun? Does he imagine this happens: “Sorry, my current handgun is black, but if I’m going to murder my wife, it just has to be stainless. She deserves nothing less!”

NRA v. BATFE

Steven Halbrook notes that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals got the history wrong, but I hadn’t considered this one silver lining:

The government thus asserted that the plaintiffs were not injured and lacked standing. The court disagreed, finding the inability to purchase a handgun from a dealer to be a concrete, particularized injury.

So the Second Amendment protects some right to purchase a handgun in the 5th Circuit. We think such things are obvious, and they should be, but these are the courts we’re talking about. Halbrook also points out the skewed logic of the decision:

Now for the irony of this exercise, the law allows a person aged 18 to 20 to buy a handgun from a non-dealer and allows a person aged 21 or over to buy a handgun and give it to a person aged 18 to 20. Thus, since persons aged 18 to 20 are too untrustworthy to have Second Amendment rights, they do not have to go through a background check when obtaining a handgun. However, anyone purchasing a firearm from a dealer is subject to a background check for criminal convictions, mental commitments and other prohibited categories giving rise to a denial to purchase firearms. The court rejected the argument that this undermines the reasonableness of the fit between the restriction and the objective to keep firearms out of the wrong hands.

The courts have been basically looking for any excuse not to toss any laws out under the Second Amendment. What other right should work this way?

Brady Campaign in California Fighting Small Business

A California FFL is facing opposition from the Brady Campaign because he wants to work as a gun broker out of his home. Neo-prohibitionists at The Brady Campaign suggest that “unlicensed dealers,” are a horrible and dangerous bazar for criminals who want guns. Then, when someone decides to seek a Federal Firearms License to become a licensed dealer, they turn around and argue that licensed dealers are dangerous. So which is it? Or is it just that selling guns, a constitutionally protected right, I might add, is an unqualified evil? I think neo-prohibitionist is a fitting term to describe them.

Why Are Gun Control Advocates So Racist and Sexist?

I guess it’s not just violent too. Recently a Brady Board member opined “Angry white men are losing their influence,” and then proceeds to go on a racist and sexist diatribe the likes of which is hard to be believed. Is Tam an “angry white man?” Is Jennifer? Is my co-blogger? The cornered cat? Are the large percentage of my fellow NRA Election Volunteer Coordinators who are women? Is Pastor Ken? On the academic side of the Second Amendment, is Professor Johnson? Professor Cottrol? And let’s not forget about our women who toiled tireless on behalf of the outcome in the Heller decision.

I am sure some on the gun control side will be shocked and offended at my suggestion that Joan Peterson’s epic tome on the racial aspects of this issue are, in fact, racist and sexist. If someone said that Free Speech is an issue of angry males, how are you not implying free speech isn’t important to blacks or women? If this election had gone the other way, and one of us had said that this result was an indication that, to turn it around, angry black women were losing their influence, would you not decry such a response as racism and sexism? What if someone said the 4th Amendment, which protects from unreasonable search and seizure, was among these “angry white male” rights Joan speaks of. Oh wait.

The fact of the matter is that President Obama won re-election based on traditional political metrics that have long been at play in this country. What does the election say? It says when you run a challenger against an incumbent President, unless you really have your act together as a candidate, and fortune and circumstance smile upon you, you’re likely to lose. President Obama won the election because he did a better job of holding his base together, and his turnout machine was better than Mitt Romney’s. Period. It doesn’t speak of the rise or ascendancy, or descendancy of race or gender, and I think to suggest otherwise is to attempt to throw poison back into the well of racial animosity we’ve spent many decades trying to clean up. And which side is doing that here? Which side is dragging race into this, and constantly trying to paint 1/10th (1/5th if you’re Bloomberg) of the Bill of Rights as only being important to white males? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Is this what living up to progressive ideals means?

Secession Rumors

Apparently the White House is getting flooded with secession petitions, and this is making its way around the boomersphere (those long e-mail chains you get from your parents). It made its way onto a private group I’m in on Facebook. I find this rather disappointing, not because I don’t think the discussion needs to be had, but because I’d rather these people putting energy into petitioning their state legislatures (who can do something to this effect) rather than petitioning Obama (who can do nothing even if he wanted to, which he does not).

I don’t think the time for breaking up the United States is here right now, but I think it’s healthy for the discussion to happen. Here’s a map of places one candidate or another carried the vote by 20% or more.

Can a house so divided stand?

Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day, also known as Armistice Day, remembering the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, when the guns fell silent. In honor of those who served, a link to this excellent photo series of street scenes from D-Day overlaid with the modern day view.

Passing the Boot

Volunteer Firemen have a tradition of raising money by asking passing motorists at stoplights to make a donation by holding out their fire boots. Bloggers have a similar tradition of the tip jar, and sometimes a blogger runs into some difficulty, and we pass the tip jar around. View from the Porch is a daily read for me. She has unfortunately run into a medical issue thats starts with “c,” ends with “F*ck!,” and has a bunch of doctors in the middle that cost money. Even if, as Tam puts it, that skin cancer is more like cancer’s farm team, it’s still a horrible thing to go through.

So if you like her work, “hit the friggin tip jar,” as another blogger is fond of saying. Help her get well and not worry about expenses.

Still Irrelevant

I’ve been busy the past few days and I haven’t checked my Google Alerts for a bit. I noticed this:

Well, well, look who the media’s been talking about in post-election week. more than 3x the number of outlets talking about a gun rights organization as opposed to a gun control organization. Even if the media thinks we took a shellacking in the recent election, they certainly aren’t crediting the win to the irrelevant gun control groups.