Posted on 09/19/2002 3:23:35 PM PDT by vannrox
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Democrats Are Trying to Neutralize Gun Supporters
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2002
Democrats are beginning to understand that being anti-gun can cost gun control advocates an election, a lesson learned the hard way by Al Gore in the 2000 elections when gun owner’s opposition cost him enough votes to hand George Bush his victory. Gore they note, even lost his home state of Tennessee largely on the gun issue.
As a result of this sudden revelation, Democrat candidates are trying their best to show that they are as quick on the draw when it comes to supporting Second Amendment gun rights as their Republican opponents, according to the New York Times.
And shocked gun control supporters are trying to convince Democrats that the tide has not turned against them, falling back on their now discredited claim that most gun ownership advocates are a small minority composed largely of what they see as poor white males living in an unsophisticated rural America.
It’s a tactic that’s clearly not working.
Another lesson some Democrats are learning was taught by Democrat Mark Warner, elected governor of Virginia in 2001. Warner, the Times explained " neutralized the gun issue in his campaign by reassuring white male voters in rural areas that he did not want to take their guns.”
Wrote Times reporter Katherine Q. Seelye "As a result, many candidates this year are eagerly emulating the Warner model. Across the country and across party lines, candidates - many of whom are running on a big day of primaries on Tuesday — are supplicants to their pro-gun-rights constituents.
"They may not be advancing the agenda of the National Rifle Association, but they do not want to alienate the powerful gun lobby. Rather, they are trying to inoculate themselves against the NRA's Election Day forces.”
Democrats are so eager for the gun lobby's endorsement that the NRA is involved in three times as many Democratic primaries this year as it was during the 2000 elections, Andrew Arulanandam, an NRA spokesman told the Times.
Ever the mouthpiece of the East Coast, big city elitists, the Times emphasizes the canard that gun owners represent the despised redneck segment of the population by citing gun grabber propaganda that nice people simply don’t own guns – a sentiment they say is prevalent in most of the country.
"There is no question that candidates running in rural areas — Democrats and Republicans — find themselves forced to cater to the gun lobby," Michael Barnes, an ex-Democrat congressman from Maryland said. Barnes, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, (formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc.) told the Times. "And you've got such a pro-gun administration — Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft are all so extreme on the issue — that there's more focus on it."
Barnes, however, cautioned, "the NRA is running against the tide of demography in the United States."
Not so, said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president. "There's been a sea change on this issue since the 2000 election. Democrats are running away from gun control like the plague, and we are just not being attacked. If they're not agreeing with us, they're silent. They're either looking for the NRA endorsement or they're making sure the NRA doesn't do anything against them."
NRA spokesman Arulanandam added that his organization won’t be endorsing candidates until late October, but said the NRA is leaning toward giving its blessing to more Democrats than ever before.
"Because more Democrats are restructuring their position, that may happen," Mr. Arulanandam said. "But our endorsement process is fairly rigid. We're concerned that we might have a lot of fair-weather friends. These people are obviously paying attention to the changing political winds and right now everyone is currying favor with the NRA, but will they be there when something bad happens and we need their vote?"
The embattled Barnes all but begged his former Democrat supporters to hang in there.
Letting his elitism hang out for all to see, he told the Times: "Democratic members of Congress might be saying the party has to focus on rural white males, but my response to that is, if you believe the future of American politics is winning the votes of rural white males, you're crazy," he said. "The future is the suburbs, especially women."
The Times takes note of those enclaves – the famous isolated "blue” zones that went for Gore in 2000 – as being "the affluent suburbs of big cities” which remain "the most reliably antigun strongholds in the country.”
Seelye cites suburban Maryland, where "all five candidates — four Democrats and the Republican incumbent — for the House support gun control. Mark K. Shriver and Christopher Van Hollen Jr., both Democrats, are each running television commercials” bragging about their ardor in fighting gun ownership. She notes that the winner of their Sept. 10 primary will face Representative Constance A. Morella, an ultra-liberal Republican who is widely proclaiming that she has the endorsements of Barnes’ Brady Campaign.
Get out of that elitist blue zone, however, and the story is different.
In a rural Maryland House district, Representative Wayne T. Gilchrest, a six-term liberal Republican, is being challenged by a conservative GOP member in the Sept. 10 primary. Gilchrest is actually running commercials in which he calls himself a "Marine hero, longtime NRA member who understands the need to protect our Second Amendment rights."
Note: NRA officials revealed that this "longtime NRA member” and "Marine hero” didn’t join the association until June, about three months ago.
Seelye notes that for now, "gun control has vanished from the Democrats' agenda on Capitol Hill. The Senate and the House have bills that would give gun makers federal immunity against civil lawsuits, but analysts predict there will not be any votes on major gun legislation before the election.”
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
dolts.
She also picked pro-2a dem John Cherry at Lt Gov. Cherry is well known for having a sporting clays fundraiser every year.
Goober always ran and got elected to both Congress and the Senate as a rabid believer in the 2nd Amendment. He didn't discover he loved gun control until he became Bubba-1's sidekick. This is why he lost Tennessee.
Bush-1 and Bob Dolt also lost to Bubba-1 for that very same reason. Bush-1 is the one who used executive orders to create the magazine bans,bans on importing surplus military weapons (even American M-1 Garands coming back!,and closed the machine gun list. I think it can be safely said that he was the original prominent politician pushing for the future ban on so-called "Assault Weapons". Bob Dolt lost because he refused to allow the repeal of the AWB to come up for vote in the Senate,even after it passed in the House,and there were enough Senate votes to pass it. Dolt didn't want to take a chance on losing any of the gun-grabber votes,and thought he would get the votes of the gun owners regardless.
Colorado (D) governor Roy Romer was a gun grabber, but couldn't and didn't pass any gun control in the (R) led house during his entire multi-term career. But when Backdoor Bill Owens (R) was elected on a pro-2A platform, he was able to veto shall issue just like Romer, and he was signature #1 on the gun grabbing Amendment 22 ballot initiative, which "closed" the gun-show "loophole" statewide in CO.
So with respect to protecting gun rights by electing R's, your mileage may vary.
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