Posted on 04/05/2007 12:47:51 PM PDT by mrhansen
BOSTON - To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck.
"I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap.
Yet the former Massachusetts governor's hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia.
Last year's trip was an outing with major donors to the Republican Governors Association, which Romney headed at the time.
An aide said Wednesday that Romney was not trying to mislead anyone, although he confirmed Romney had been hunting only on those occasions in his life.
"Governor Romney's support for the Second Amendment doesn't come from the fact he knows how to handle a firearm; it comes from his appreciation of the Constitution and the rights enshrined in it, including the right to keep and bear arms," said campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom.
He went on to cite the pro-gun measures Romney signed into law while serving as governor from 2003 to this past January.
Romney himself made several of the same points to the Keene audience, while also trying to offer some perspective on his hunting experience.
"I support the Second Amendment," he told the man who had asked about his views on the constitutional right to bear arms. "I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life. I've never really shot anything terribly big. I used to hunt rabbits."
Romney added: "Shooting a rabbit with a single-shot .22 is pretty hard, and after watching me try for a couple of weeks, (my cousins) said, 'We'll slip you the semiautomatic. You'll do better with that.' And I sure did."
On the Georgia excursion, he said, "I knocked quite a few birds and enjoyed myself a great deal."
Expressing familiarity with and support for gun rights is key among Republican presidential contenders, who count gun owners, members of the military and the NRA itself among their potential supporters.
It helps explain why Romney joined the NRA last August, signing up not just as a supporter but a designated "Lifetime" member, and why he has softened his gun control positions.
Romney told a Derry, N.H., audience, "I'm after the NRA's endorsement. I'm not sure they'll give it to me. I hope they will. I also joined because if I'm going to ask for their endorsement, they're going to ask for mine."
During a 1994 U.S. Senate campaign, Romney positioned himself as a moderate outsider, warning special interest groups to stay out of the race and saying he supported the Brady gun control law and a ban on assault rifles.
"That's not going to make me the hero of the NRA," he told the Boston Herald at the time. "I don't line up with a lot of special interest groups."
It's a theme he carried into his 2002 gubernatorial campaign. At the time, Romney pledged to do nothing to change the state's firearms statutes.
"We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts. I support them. I won't chip away at them. I believe they protect us and provide for our safety," he said.
True to his word, Romney went on to sign one of the toughest assault weapons laws in the country.
Romney, though, also took steps to protect the rights of gun owners as governor.
The assault weapons ban won the backing of Massachusetts gun owners in part because it included provisions extending the term of a firearms identification card and a license to carry weapons from four to six years. It also created a Firearm License Review Board to provide an appeals process for people whose license applications had been denied.
In 2006, Romney also signed NRA-backed legislation creating exemptions for the makers of customized target pistols who had found it too expensive to sell their guns in Massachusetts because of a state regulation requiring them to test at least five examples of new products "until destruction."
In February, Romney was touting such measures as he and his wife, Ann, toured the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show in Orlando, Fla., with Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president.
"I'm proud to be among the many decent, law-abiding men and women who safely use firearms," Romney said.
Show me the direct quotes.
Se my um I think 48, toward the bottom. He talks about how he’s been a hunter all his life.
And how he does not think you should own an AR-15 or AKS.
If he hunted “once” when he was a boy and then again “once” when he was an adult. He would have hunted all his life.
Now that’s Logic..,,
Dyslexia doesn’t cause bad grammar, and non-punctuation. Try again.
There is nothing about hunting in the 2nd Amendment. So where is the tie in? The 2nd Amendment does not state the right to keep and bear arms has anything to do with hunting.
Trying to tie in the hunting privilige with the RKBA right is the left’s way of tying the caliber of firearms with the size of the game. Restricting firearms eg- “assult rifles” that do not meet their narrow minded definition of hunting necessity is the intent. That would redefine the 2nd Amendment to have limits, which is no way restricted by the current document.
A good mushroom spot is worth fighting over!
Noisy mushroom hunters give away their location.
There is nothing worse than walking miles to your spot and finding that someone beat you to the bounty!
As for Mitt, I think he should be hunting the truth.
1. Romney got caught in an exaggeration. Stretching the truth. Another little fib.
2. The best evidence Romney could provide that he supported the constitutional right to bear arms was: "I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life. I've never really shot anything terribly big. I used to hunt rabbits." So.... he doesn't understand what RKBA is.
3. Romney has an actual anti-gun record.
So you signed up 10 years ago just to post THIS???!?
I sat in a garage two times for a while.
I must be a car.
Hunting is not murdering animals. Hunting is little different than the slaughterhouse processing meat and poultry, except hunting allows the individual to select the bounty to be consumed.
Not everyone who hunts animals is a sportsman however. I do loathe the so called trophy hunter who kills for the antlers and leaves the meat to rot. There are very few of those people thank God. The true sportsman is not a murderer. I take offense to hunting being equated to
murder.
“Noisy mushroom hunters give away their location.”
HEY! MORELS!
“I’ve been a hunter all my life, not frequently, but as a boy, when I worked on a ranch in Idaho, we used to go out shooting rabbits, because they were eating all the barley, and I got pretty good with a single shot .22 rifle, and been quail hunting more recently*. [But now I claim not to be good with a single-shot. It took the power and deadliness of a semi-auto to get those rabbits!]”
Explains it in context “not frequently”. This is overblown by the guys who want to trip him up.
And you can say the same about NRA Life Member 
See post #112. His comments were misconstrued.
Any time a candidate talks about hunting and the NRA in the same conversation, it is pretty strong evidence that he is weak on the Second Amendment. Bad sign for Romney.
Kerry-esque. Like "crawling around on the ground with my trusty shotgun hunting deer".
redoux...
“Can I get me a huntin’ license here?”
“Oh, that’s right. I don’t really hunt except in election season.”
Gee, it's not like he's earned 3 or 4 Purple Hearts or something.
/sarc
Nope.
The 2nd Amendment isn't about hunting. Actually I'd be more impressed if you shot IPSC, which can really help you out if you own weapons for self defense.
We've got some budding Michael Moores here!
Michael Moore-ing 101:
1. Trip, crop, selectively quote the above text to give the opposite impression as that given by the full text.
2. Works with video too.
3. Examples:
"I’ve been a hunter all my life..."
"...been a hunter all my life..."
"I...a hunter..."
etc.
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