The Senate Fight Shaping Up

I got my second e-mail alert from NRA today asking people to call their Senators:

Every gun owner’s voice must be heard…STARTING WITH YOURS!!!

Call the Capitol Hill switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Senators by name. Or, email your Senators by going to NRA-ILA’s “Let Your Voice Be Heard” webpage.

NRA is generally loath to sound the alarm if things are going well, lest they be the boy who cries wolf, which tells me the votes in the Senate are not going in the direction we want.

Whether you call or email, make sure you tell your Senators to vote NO on any gun ban…NOon any magazine ban…NO on criminalizing private firearms transfers…and NO on any gun registration scheme.

It’s funny we were so close to getting national reciprocity, and now we’re fighting bans on semi-autos, magazines, and facing the very real possibility of shutting down private sales and national registration. Some gun owners were protesting this was not going to amount to much, because the anti-gun people have no real base of support. That doesn’t really matter. What matters is gun owners have been asleep at the switch for most of the Bush years, first term Obama didn’t do anything to wake them up, and these are the consequences. Those of us that follow this issue and shoot regularly are a small minority. Most only get involved in this issue when motivated by fear or anger.

We are not facing the anti-gun crowd, save Bloomberg. We’re facing the left-wing of the Democratic Party, and they mean to destroy us. They are betting this trend is real, that the country will be increasingly urban, left of center, and more in favor of gun control. They are betting the farm that we’re on our way to extinction. Are we?

17 thoughts on “The Senate Fight Shaping Up”

    1. I would echo that as well. NRA is trying to spin universal background checks as a registration scheme, which it is. Why are they doing that? Because the truth is that a lot of their members wouldn’t call if they thought the issue was just background checks. The big problem with a lot of these issue is people don’t really understand the implications. If you poll them, they’ll tell you they love background checks. If you ask them if they should be able to sell a gun to their friend or cousin without going through an FFL, they’ll tell you that of course they should be able to.

      That’s the real problem with politics by polling.

    2. Not no but hell no to universal background checks. No national registration scheme. PERIOD!

  1. I have done several calls in the last several months Both my senators are strong Democrats and will vote to ban guns if they have the choice.

    But I made the calls today despite the futility of changing their minds. I even told them I am going to Annapolis to protest O Malley’s bills also

  2. “It’s funny we were so close to getting national reciprocity, and now we’re fighting bans on semi-autos, magazines, and facing the very real possibility of shutting down private sales and national registration.”

    I don’t remember if I ever used the metaphor here, but in some other venues in the past, when someone would chide me for cynicism or pessimism in the face of the wonderful progress they thought the RKBA movement was making, I’d harken back to when I and my workmates would play Risk in a nearby bar one night a week.

    I had a buddy who, if he didn’t show up to play, it would usually result in me winning. But if he showed up, invariably I’d get to a point where I thought I was going to run the board on the next turn, but he’d seem to come out of nowhere will all kinds of resources and wipe out me and all the other players.

    The metaphor being, don’t be surprised if just when you’re confident of certain victory in the foreseeable future, you get wiped off the board. No victory is secure until your enemies are dead and their ashes scattered. Then suspect you may have missed someone.

  3. ‘Don’t forget “NO universal background checks.” ‘

    Erin’s comment above illustrates another point I’ve made a couple times now: Don’t be overly communicative in what you write.

    If enough people write “No” to Issues A, B, C, and D, but forget to mention Issue E, it will send the message that most people are soft on E, and what do you think we’re likely to get? Issue E for sure.

    The best message is just “NO.” To everything. And let them worry about what’s included in everything.

  4. The whole nonsense about universal background checks will probably pass the Senate, though I am not so sure about it passing the House. As for the AWB I doubt that type of law can even get to 50 votes let alone the 60 needed to stop a filibuster. The magazine limits might have more support than the AWB, but even that particular piece of legislation most likely will not pass neither Senate nor House. This doesn’t mean that we are out the woods yet but it does mean that we are going in the right direction.

    1. Completely different matter entirely.

      Just because he doesn’t pass the neo-con acid test doesn’t make him a poor candidate for the office. I’m actually pretty surprised that Obama chose him. I’m pretty sure he’ll make it through.

    2. Most voters don’t care about Hegel or his positions and aren’t going to single-issue vote their Congress critter out over an advise and consent vote concerning him even if they do.

      Gun bills actually touch potential voters.

      1. Exactly.

        I won’t repeat the whole long story, but I was once involved with campaigning for a [non-gun-related] issue in PA that was so popular that the lowest popularity it polled with any demographic was 85 percent; while polling over 90 percent overall. But it never went anywhere.

        As a legislator instructed me at the time, it was a “process” issue, and process issues are never hot-button issues with voters, no matter how they may answer polls. No legislator ever lost their seat over a process issue. So, the legislature would continue doing what it always had done. That was 20+ years ago, and he was right.

        Hegel will never be more than the makings of a rant and rave or two on talk radio. No one will gain or lose a seat because of his confirmation.

        Our trick is to make our issue hotter than anything they’ve seen for quite awhile.

  5. I noticed how in the NRA-ILA alerts they were correctly phrasing the issue as “criminalizing private transfers”. This is not about increasing access to background checks, which when phrased that way would have moderate support from gun owners.

    1. And now that Fiendstein dropped the registration requirement from her AWB, it is universal background checks that will create the most new criminals.

  6. first thay want you to register your guns then ban then then confiscate them.then they come in and take over without a fight.the only reason the u.s. has not been invade is we the people how one guns will stand up and fight!!!!

Comments are closed.