Guns and Democrats

ELECTORAL MAP OF 2008 VOTE BY COUNTY SHOWS THAT DEMOCRATS STILL HAVE SOME WORK TO DO DESPITE OUR NOVEMBER VICTORY (Click on map to view)

Shortly before the November election, Hal Herring wrote an excellent essay for the High Country News www.hcn.org about Democrats and the issue of gun control. Of course, Democrats won the Presidency and a Congressional Majority despite a strong effort on behalf of John McCain by the NRA but there are still vast areas of the country that vote Republican. Guns are not the only issue involved but most of the red territory has high gun ownership rates so it is a major factor. Take a look at the national map color coded to show red and blue counties. You will still see a lot more red than blue since the Democratic vote is concentrated in the major urban centers. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/countymapredbluer1024.png

Democrats won many critical states by playing down any support of gun control. Taking gun control off the table would help to make Democrats far more competitive with rural voters and assure a dominant role for the Democratic Party in American politics for at least a generation. Furthermore, it would be a sound policy decision since gun laws are ineffective at curbing crime and the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms.

Herring writes:

At this year's annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in September, National Rifle Association President Sandy Froman endorsed Arizona Sen. John McCain in the presidential election. This came as no surprise; the Democrats have long been denounced by the NRA as the anti-Second Amendment party — Nanny-State know-it-alls, Big-Government gun-controllers out of touch with the majority of Americans, yearning to impose their vision on a population that wants none of it.

In this election, however, it's not that simple. The U.S. is facing a host of challenges, most of them brought on by the antics of a Republican administration that governed as a team of mendacious plunderers, with no regard for the future, or even for the beliefs that their own party once espoused. The Constitution — the very document that guarantees the right to keep and bear arms — has been treated with scorn. The economy, manipulated by the kind of "crony capitalism" we once despised in less-enlightened nations, is a shambles, at least for the middle class, and our energy policies are the laughingstock of the developed world. Today's Republicans are not just the party of the Second Amendment; they are also the party of the big energy companies. Is it possible, then, that gun-rights advocates might consider voting for someone who is not a Republican?

It's unlikely, unless the Democrats start acknowledging the gun vote and respecting the views of Second Amendment proponents. Gun owners represent at least 4 million of the nation's most dedicated voters. Election after election, they help change the outcome, sometimes electing politicians who are inept, corrupt or unabashed lackeys of corporate interests — people whose only appeal to gun owners is that they promise to leave the Second Amendment alone.

Now, however, the Second Amendment is more resistant to those politicians who might want to mess with it. The Supreme Court's recent Heller decision just declared Washington, D.C.'s restrictive firearms laws unconstitutional, thus weakening the power of state and local politicians to control guns or limit gun ownership. Given that — and given what is at stake in the U.S. today — it may be time for Democratic and independent voters to simply give up on gun control. We have so many more pressing issues to deal with.

For two decades, many liberals have thrived on despising the NRA and its members. Those who believe in gun control often hold enormous prejudice against those who don't. But there are already reams of laws pertaining to the use, abuse, purchase and sale of firearms. What new regulations would the gun-controllers create, and how would they work to address the problem of gun violence? Do they want to prohibit private ownership of firearms altogether? Many would like to ban handguns, without considering just what this would entail, what inequities of power would result, and what new, potentially dangerous, powers would have to be awarded to government to accomplish it. Like activists who want to ban pit bulls, the gun-control advocates remain relentlessly unspecific about what they hope to achieve. It has become clear, too, that these advocates hold a double standard regarding the U.S. Constitution: The First Amendment is vital to the health of a free nation, as is the Fourth, but the Second is respected only by the un-evolved and the violent. Only the parts of the Constitution that their side respects are valid, in this view.

According to Dave Workman, the senior editor of GunWeek, a publication of the Bellevue, Wash.-based Second Amendment Foundation, "The Clinton-era 'assault weapons ban' was more symbolic than anything else. The reason it was so overwhelmingly supported by the gun control movement was because it represented a federal ban on firearms based on cosmetic circumstances — what they looked like — not on their lethality. It was to condition the public to accept a piecemeal destruction of the Second Amendment."

Workman believes there was much to learn from the Clinton election. "When George H. W. Bush took the gun vote for granted in 1992, most of the gun owners voted for Ross Perot, or else they sat it out," he says. The election of Clinton, though, and what followed, cemented the gun voters' dislike of the Democratic Party. The Brady Law went into effect in 1993, and the "assault weapons ban" passed a year later. That was enough, says Workman, for the gun voters to see "how this was all going. They mobilized and threw out many of the Democrats, costing them control of Congress (in 1994)." The National Rifle Association first endorsed a presidential candidate — Ronald Reagan — in 1980, but gun politics as we know them today were born in 1994.

Herring continues:

The gun-rights advocates have their own contradictions, though. As a group, they have failed to explain why, if they despise government power, they consistently vote for a political party that has claimed government authority over decisions like abortion rights, religion, and marriage rights. Few gun-rights proponents address the attacks on civil rights made by the current Republican administration, or explain why those attacks shouldn't matter when it's time to endorse a Republican candidate for president. Although gun rights and social conservatism may appeal to the same kinds of people, they are actually two opposing ideas. To hold them both smacks of a citizen who does not really value liberty at all, but wants a government empowered to enforce his or her values on everyone else. How is this different from the way gun-control advocates want only their values respected?

Single-issue gun-rights voters are especially destructive when it comes to environmental issues. Year after year, Republican politicians swear allegiance to the Second Amendment, an act that costs them nothing, but guarantees the gun vote. Then they support measures to exploit, degrade, and even sell off the public lands and waters that hunters and fishermen depend on. Neither the NRA nor the gun voters themselves do anything to protest this. The gun vote has gone to anti-environment politicians for so long now that millions of non-hunting American no longer associate hunters with conservation, despite the fact that sportsmen have painstakingly restored wildlife and habitat, rivers and lands, with their gun and ammunition tax dollars, their license fees and waterfowl stamps. This will eventually backfire on gun owners — and on conservationists. In a society increasingly disconnected from nature and hunting, with places to shoot growing increasingly scarce, fewer citizens grow up in a traditional gun culture. That means fewer hunters will fund assets like the Federal Wildlife Refuge system, and fewer shooters will respond to future, inevitable challenges to the Second Amendment.

It is not too late for a new vision, one as unique as the nation itself. If the Democratic Party would recognize the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court has interpreted it in the Heller decision, and reassure gun voters that the years of backdoor maneuvers to promote gun control are over, the Republican deadlock on the gun vote could eventually be broken. It seems a small price for the Democrats to pay. All they have to do is recognize the Constitution.

Read the full essay at http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.19/why-we-all-need-the-democrats-to-abandon-gun/