| Piss poor Stategery, IMO. Just look at the damage it is doing in such a small community like FR.
There was thread here, maybe a year or so ago now, from a guy who came to warn everybody that a legislator in South Carolina had introduced a bill that would repeal the law that forced local sheriffs to issue CCW permits. Second Amendment advocates had worked for years to get that law passed, and here comes this guy to repeal it. He urged all Freepers to call and write NOW to "defeat bill number so-and-so." And sure enough, everybody piled on. The legislator was pilloried. People promised to call and write. Here was another assault on our basic freedoms. For some reason, I just didn't trust this guy. Something about his note set off my "doesn't know what he's talking about" alarm, and I set out to find this bill — if it existed on line. It took a while, but I did find it, and it did exactly what the fellow claimed, and in an apparently under-handed manner. Buried in the middle of it was a single clause that merely said, "Section blah-de-blah is hereby repealed in its entirety." You had to actually go look up the other law, and see what Section blah-de-blah really was, to find out that it was the section that authorized the CCW permits, provided for a bureaucracy to print them and keep track of them, made the local sheriffs responsible for issuing them, and basically said that the sheriffs could not deny a permit to anyone without a really, really, good reason. So was this new bill what the guy told everybody it was? Would it end the right of the people to carry concealed weapons? Not exactly. The main thrust of the bill was to eliminate the requirement that people have a permit in order to carry. You could just carry — no permit required. After making that the law, the bill went on to repeal all the machinery for printing and registering permits. And here were hundreds of Freepers ready to go to war to keep this bill from becoming law. All because they didn't take the time to understand the larger game. Let's not have that happen here. |
There are hotheads everywhere who will jump to the barricades on the slightest pretext. Sometimes they don't even know what they're doing.