Posted on 09/21/2007 11:20:49 AM PDT by HoosierGirl25
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani took his best shot at befriending the members of America’s largest and most influential gun rights organization today in a speech to the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Emphasizing the need state and local government to control crime and gun laws, Republican presidential candidate Giuliani made sure to highlight personal freedoms and said the 2nd Amendment “is just as important as free speech” and every other part of the Constitution.
Giuliani said that gun rights improved under President Bush and guaranteed that they will continue to improve even more if he becomes President. “The bottom line is that we need to step up enforcement against gun crimes and leave law abiding citizens alone,” he said to a grateful applause.
“A person’s home is their castle…[and] people have a right to protect themselves in their home. It’s a right they should have,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
The problem of course is that government believes all its citizens are criminals.
But apparently not outside it.
You can’t have it both ways Rudy, stfu.
Rudy pro gun????
R O T F L M A O !!!!
Gee, I guess he flip flopped on this issue. He sure didn’t believe NYC residents had the right to own firearms and protect themselves. What a putz, I wouldn’t vote for this guy for dog catcher let alone President.
Save the BS Rudy. You are more transparent than a sliding glass window.
If it's all the same to you Rudy, I'll reserve the right to protect myself anywhere I go.
” Vote Rudy as Court Jester 08”
Gotta hike the cuffs of my pants up . . . the bullsh!t is getting deep around here.
I haven’t yet forgiven W for promising to sign an AWB, why should Rudy expect me to trust him after all the damage he inflicted on The Constitution? Rudy needs to go back to New York and put his money where his mouth is. He could start by shutting Bloomie up.
He knew it was impossible for anyone to get elected in NYC without championing the cause of “more gun control”. It’s pathetic, but that’s the position of about 99% of NYC voters. As a result the law-abiding among them wouldn’t arm themselves anyway, even if the state and local laws explicitly allowed them to. When a population has that kind of mindset, the prospect that “only the criminals will have guns” isn’t dependent on the gun laws, it’s a foregone conclusion regardless of the gun laws. Over the long term, that mindset is changeable, but not in the time frame of any political office term.
Blow us gun-owners a kiss, Rudolph.
We likes a li’l kiss when our peters is bein’ pulled.
And, Bill Clinton knew it was impossible to get elected President without sounding like a new, more conservative Democrat.
Sorry, I don’t tuust you with my guns there Rudy.
I'm confused.
Are you saying that it's okay for a candidate to say anything just to get elected?
Or are you saying that it's okay for a candidate to reshape his core principles based upon the office for which he is running? Because remember: he didn't just champion gun control to get elected. He consistently pushed for it after he was in office.
My BULLSH*T meter is pegged in the red arc.How ‘bout yall?
So he kept his campaign promises. Good.
I think his previous positions on guns were frankly a combination of having spent his entire life in NYC and never really been exposed to a pro-2A way of thinking and living, and the political reality that only politicians promoting an anti-2A stance had any chance at all of getting elected. Not exactly big motivation for a politician to undertake a major re-examination of his beliefs on the issue. Now that he’s moving beyond NYC, he’s being exposed to pro-2A thinking and also has motivation to undertake a serious re-examination of his beliefs on this issue. I think he’s really changing his views to a considerable extent, beginning to realize how different reality is in non-urban areas, and how impossible/ineffective/unconstitutional it is to have one set of laws in the cities and another set everywhere else.
He was faced with a huge crime problem when he became mayor and was in no position to change the rulings of the Federal and NYS courts, which make it next to impossible to keep criminals off the streets. And those same courts had been routinely upholding all sorts of gun control laws. He had to use the tools he had available to him to make a serious dent in the crime situation, and he was quite successful in reversing the steady increase in crime that had developed under his predecessors.
I’m not necessarily a Rudy-for-President cheeleader. He’d be a heck of a lot better than Hillary/Edwards/Obama, and I won’t be miserable if he gets elected. On balance, though, I favor Romney out of the current crop of serious contenders, mainly because he has a track record of major success in both the private and public sectors (the Salt Lake Olympics being for all practical purposes a public sector enterprise). Rudy is entirely a public sector creature, and less likely to take actions that will tend to reduce the size of government. Intellectually, he understands the concept, and I think believes in it, but he simply has no practical experience in getting big things done through private sector activity, and thus has only a vague sense of what the private sector can do and how.
He was faced with a huge crime problem when he became mayor and was in no position to change the rulings of the Federal and NYS courts, which make it next to impossible to keep criminals off the streets. And those same courts had been routinely upholding all sorts of gun control laws. He had to use the tools he had available to him to make a serious dent in the crime situation, and he was quite successful in reversing the steady increase in crime that had developed under his predecessors.
First of all, do you really think that gun control works? That his use of the gun control laws were what lowered crime in NYC?
Second of all, just because a judge might uphold a law does not mean that the mayor is forced to use it. I'm not willing to let Rudy off the hook for suing gun companies quite that easily.
No, there was little or no change to the NYC gun laws under his tenure. And there was no possibility of loosening the draconian gun control laws, with the overwhelming majority of NYC voters in favor of keeping them. That was the situation Rudy was faced with, along with all the garbage from federal courts that handcuffs law enforcement in its efforts to identify, arrest, and convict criminals and keep them imprisoned for appropriate terms. Stuck with this backdrop, he did a heck of a good job in reducing crime in NYC. He ought to get some credit for that.
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