To "chip away" at "tough Massachusetts gun laws" would have been an exercise in futility. Since anything Romney could propose along those lines as governor of the state hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of getting past the Massachusetts General Court (i.e., our legislature) plus Senate.
These "laws" are still on the books in my state. And they are draconian: You can go to prison for years on grounds of insufficiently "safe" gun storage (as the "law" defines "safe," not to mention "storage") in a private home....
Romney knew he couldn't get anywhere thataway: Marxists detest the idea of firearms in private hands as a matter of principle. And he was sane enough to recognize that you don't easily disabuse Marxists of their favorite hobby horses....
What he did on this matter in the state was done by gubernatorial executive order — i.e., no more police chief decisions, but the "shall issue" precept.
Romney is a natural-born tax cutter. The most deplorable tax, to his way of thinking, is the income tax, which falls on all alike — even though the 16th Amendment proclaims it is a "voluntary tax." He is especially alive to the devastation that the income tax does to entrepreneurial activity, that is to say to the formation and sustainability of private business enterprises — the folks who create jobs and give hard-working Americans a chance to realize their own American dreams, unmolested by the federal government....
Equally I feel sure, he detests the individual income tax: The idea here being the revolting proposition that the federal government "owns" all the productivity of its citizens, and thus the essential problem for it is: How much of the fruits of American ingenuity, creativity, and sheer labor do we allow the people, who created all these social benefits, to keep for themselves and their families?
Romney dealt with this problem by shifting away from income taxes — which fall on all alike — by increasing fees for particular users of benefits, which are optional. I.e., increasing fees for such things as hunting and fishing licenses, firearms licenses, et al. One can always "opt out" of such fees in a way that an income-tax payer cannot by simply refraining from engaging in a "taxable activity." If you breathe, you pay income taxes. If you don't engage in hunting, fishing, etc., you don't have to pay a thing.
Dear brother in Christ, politics has been exceptionally well-defined as "the art of the possible," not the art of a perfect world — which will not come before the Second Coming of Christ anyway.
I applaud Mitt Romney for having made the RKBA accessible in Massachusetts. The fact that this act was not "made perfect" by the repeal of unreasonable gun laws is not a blame to charge at his doorstep.
I gather the "shall issue" precept was delivered by gubernatorial Executive Order, not by any act of the Massachusetts legislature.
If we had to depend on the latter, probably my last firearms license renewal would have been highly "problematic." Not that anything about me had changed; but that absent his intervention, that "progressives" would have extinguished my RKBA by now....
What Romney did as governor was to take the firearms licensure decision out of the hands of private men (i.e., local police chiefs), and put it into the form of just and equal laws.
I applaud him for that — to me, this reveals that his political instincts are right on the (constitutional) money....
The snarky caricatures made of Romney are both false and unbecoming of true conservatives who wish to take the message to Washington this fall, and to re-inject fundamental conservatism back into the mainstream of political thought.
Well done!
FReegards!
VEry well said, betty. And again, diirect testimony from a conservative (and well known and loved here on FR as such) citizen of Mass when this all went donw.
People can choose what they will believe, but knowing you all these years (and others with whom I have spoken in Mass) I choose to trust you and not the hyperbole...and to trust my own research into the matter which any one of us can do.
Here’s some more potential good news.
Arizona to Hawaii: Provide verification of Obama’s birth
http://www.jeffhead.com/verifybirth.htm