Let’s say the Dems decide overnight to genuflect before the Second Half of the Second Amendment. How many NRA members are going to say “Golly Neds, we can vote Democratic now?” Diddly squat. If they don’t hate the Dems for gun control, the same group hates them for abortion. Or school prayer. Or gay rights. Or the words “under God” in the Almighty Pledge of Alliegence, handed down by God Himself.
jsgoddess- Libertarians are statistically insignificant. 400,000 votes is less than 1% of the major parties. They aren’t about to vote Democratic anyway, so way even move toward them?
Wrong move for the Democrats- begin pandering to the right wing. The right move is to continue to present the voice of reason and social justice.
Using terms like ‘gun show loophole’ automatically alienates a large number of firearms owners and their supporters who know that the term is nothing more than the rhetoric of Sarah Brady and her ilk. Not to mention the fact that Kerry has been aligned with Ted Kennedy on this issue.
I have voted for pro-firearms Democrats in the past, and will do so in the future.
You need to catch up with a few things. The waiting period (in almost every state) was history when Brady II passed and created the National Instant Check System. Now the ‘waiting period’ is more like five minutes.
Nobody would. Which is why the NRA supported the creation of the NICS background check.
So, do you believe that there are no Democrats who are NRA members? You believe that all people who are pro gun are anti gay marriage?
Statistic “insignificance” can win an election; just ask Al Gore. Why are you assuming that no libertarians would vote Democrat? I know for a fact that some do, though they are extremely wary about the gun issue. The truth is, a lot of us are completely baffled by the Democrats being pro gun control when it violates the freedoms and personal rights that the party is based on. You know, those rights like having an abortion and marrying within your sex.
And it’s charming personality like this that’s peeling the paint right off the Democratic bandwagon. By your selection of invective, you automatically frame the debate between yourselves (the sensible ones), and everyone else (the gun-nuts). And it isn’t just the gun issue; it’s the damned near the only barb in the Democratic arsenal:
“Hey, dumbass! I know you’re too drunk and retarded to know any better than to fuck your sister, but vote for us! Why? You’re too stupid to understand, just take our word for it.”
In spite of the evidence of your own eyes in this very thread that this isn’t true, it just once again demonstrates the arrogance, and the eager embrace of divisive partisan rhetoric, of the Democratic party.
Johnny, I feel for ya, man. If the Democrats ever wise up, they’ll take the entire country in a walk.
Let me try one more time. I like to think in Venn diagrams. Imagine such a diagram with 4 circles:
Circle A represents those voters who will not consider voting Democratic because they fear gun control
Circle B represents those voters who will not consider voting Democratic because of abortion.
Circle C represents those voters who will not consider voting Democratic because of gay marriage
Circle D represents those voters who will not consider voting Democratic because of other issues such as prayer in schools.
Clearly, the Democratic nominee must get his votes from those voters who lie outside all of the above named circles. Changing tactics on gun control is only going to bring those voters into play who are in Circle A but outside Circles B, C, and D. While such people certainly exist, it is my opinion that their numbers are not large. It is my expectation that if you look at B, C, and D you would find that there are many more inside all three than there are in one but not the other two. I admit that A is less tied to B, C, and D than those three are tied to each other, but I also believe that Circle A is also significantly tied to the other three and that there are many more inside all four circles than exist in A and not the other three.
Let’s say the Democrats switch positions on gun control. But all this does is put the In A, Out of B, C, and D in play. It doesn’t gain all these votes, they would split in similar numbers as the rest of the electorate. All the Dems would gain would be approximately half of those in A but not B, C, and D. I don’t believe these numbers would offset those Dems that favor gun control who might them come into play for the Republicans if such a Dem shift occur.
I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and these days I call Virginia home. Voters in both places tend to be culturally conservative.
Race after race has shown that they will vote for, and elect to office, pro-gun Democrats. Case in point here is Virginia Governor Mark Warner. The NRA refused to endorse one candidate over the other when he ran against Mark Earley the last time around. Warner wound up winning the race, and this issue was surely a factor.
There are many others. I can go down the list in either state of pro-gun Democrats who have no problem holding on to their seats, year after year, in the state legislature.
Democrats as a whole should note this well, and remove the issue from the table in national races. They should do it because it is the right thing to do, in addition to being a strategy for victory. Win-win is a rare thing in politics, but this policy would be just that.
BobLibDem: I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t agree. When I was ‘a kid’, I was a single-issue voter. I lived in the desert, and I went shooting all the time. Although I agreed with many planks in the Democratic platform, I tended to vote Republican or Libertarian beacuse of the gun control issue. Now, of course, I see that there are more important issues to be considered. When you’re 18 or 19 and politicians want to curtail one of your hobbies, you tend to focus on that. I think there are a lot more people than you think, who would vote for a Democrat if only the Party would drop the issue.
I work with a staunch Republican. She drinks from a Bush/Cheney cup. But she absolutely believes that abortion should be legal, and she has no problem with gay marriage. I don’t know how she feels about guns, but the point is that the Parties are not as monolithic as they’re often made out to be.
I think that there are many, many people who would favour the Democratic idea that jobs should not be sent overseas. If you’re going to give tax breaks to corporations, why not give them for keeping and creating jobs here in stead of giving them for sending jobs away? There are people who want to keep abortion legal. There are people who don’t give a rodent’s rectum about gays getting married, or at least joining in a Civil Union. But there seems to be ‘one issue’ for many of them that cause them to vote Republican. This year, from my casual observations, it’s the fear of terror attacks and/or the idea that we can’t stop a war once we’ve started it. Overall though, leaving the current state of affairs out of it, I think there are still a buttload of voters who would vote for a Democrat if only the Party would stop trying to infringe upon their Second Ammendment rights.
Democratic voters who are in favour of gun control will not vote for a Republican if the Democratic Party drops the issue; but people who would vote Democrat but for this one issue would no longer have a reason to vote for a Republican.
This country has more problems than gun control. I think that these problems would be better addressed by a Democrat than a Republican. I think gun control is a major reason why otherwise moderate voters vote for Republican candidates. If the issue is removed from the Democratic platform, then I think the Democrats will have an easier time of persuing the more important goals.
But how many votes would they lose? Is the number of pro-gun control Dems who would be turned off by such a switch more or less than those anti-gun control types who would then be in play? It’s going to vary by region of course. And would NRA types believe such a change or stay with what they perceive as a safer choice?
Well, the NRA endorses Democrats in every election cycle. Many of these Democrats win.
Individual candidates can advocate what they wish, of course. But election results have shown time and time again that the American public, as a whole, don’t want any more gun control than already exists, which is considerable.
I don’t think they’d lose any. Pro-gun Democrats will still vote for Democrats, since their voting for Democrats anyway. Hard-line Republicans will still vote for Republicans; but It is likely that pro-gun moderates will switch from voting for Republicans to voting for Democrats. A gain for Democrats.
As for the NRA, they will trust the Democrats more if the Democrats who are elected do not revert to anti-gun voting after being elected. If the Democrats remove the issue from their agenda, and back it up by their actions, the pro-gun Democrats (and the NRA) will see that they stand by the will of the People.
All right fellows- what is your guess as to the percentage of the electorate that will not vote for a candidate that favors gun control? I’m thinking about 5%.
The gun-control issue, even if it is not a sole issue for very many voters, is a factor in the voting of very many people.
Many of them live in states Democrats should be competitive in. Ohio is a big hunting state. Pennsylvania has more NRA members, per capita than any other state in the union. Indeed, only California has more members, and it’s a much bigger state.
Hunting is similarly popular in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee…
It could be a case of GMTA, or it could be a case of Dems who are not that opposed to gun control waking up after these election results and deciding this is one plank the Democratic Party needs to pull out of its platform.
I have a thread going on “Lessons Learned” about what Dems can do in the wake of the 2004 election to improve their position both tactically and strategically (without getting too much into issues.) One of the suggestions I and a couple of others have come up with was dumping opposition to gun control, so I thought I’d float that particular proposition in a thread of its own to see what happened. But yours had been posted prior to mine, so I had mine locked.
I don’t like guns. I don’t want to own one. I think the people for whom guns are a big deal are a bunch of dickless wonders who needlessly endanger others to make themselves feel tougher. But I don’t consider gun control all that critical compared to protecting the environment, or a woman’s right to choose, or having a president in office who won’t get us into some stupid, needless wars. So I’m willing to give gun control up if it’ll give us some of the voters we need to do those other things, and I think it will. I suspect most other Dems feel the same way at heart.
What state would Kerry have lost if the NRA hadn’t favored one candidate over the other in this race?
I don’t think any. But he would have had a much better shot in Ohio and West Virginia, and he wouldn’t have had to defend Pennsylvania like he did. Bush wouldn’t have come as close as he did.
No. The organization that is the NRA, as opposed to its members, would absolutely HaTE it if the Dems put a plank in their platform supporting the right to bear arms and officially giving up on gun control because that would render the NRA useless, and eventually lose it most if not all of its political clout. They will fight desperately behind the scenes to keep the Dems interested in gun control, and will probably try to persuade their members that the Dems are not sincere so they’ll still have the bogeyman that has made them so successful.
This was my feeling exactly, but everyone seems so hell bent on compromise here to gain votes. Well, the dem party has been compromising for 30 years now. Liberalism is barely just a pretense now. Consession, consession. How far right can a party drift. Rep light is a real nice tag. The other valid point here is that by being blatant about it, the Rep party and all conservatives would become emboldened, because what has been happening for 30 years. The right shift, would become very blatantly clear. A shift to the right.
Uh, have you notice which party controls the House, the Senate, the White House and the Judiciary? Business As Usual ain’t gonna take the Dems ANYWHERE, that’s pretty much been established. Time to break outside the box.