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>Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 13:29:22 -0400
> Mike Lorrey <mlorrey@datamann.com> extropians@extropy.org Re: MEDIA/POLITICS/GUNS "The changing politics of Guns"Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>
>Brian D Williams wrote:
>>
>> "The Changing Politics of Guns"
>> Democrats back off on firearms
>>
>> An interesting article on the front page of todays "USA Today"
>> (www.usatoday.com).
>>
>> According to the article the NRA is now considered the nations most
>> powerfull lobby, surpassing the AARP.
>>
>> The rest of the article is your basic extremocrat tabloid anti-gun
>> bias.
>>
>> Extropian Angle? Grassroots organizations can be effective.
>
>Yes, they can, but they also need to have their arguments very well
>grounded, beyond large membership and massive funding. The grassroots
>groups on the anti-gun side have failed miserably despite greater
>funding and greater media support simply because their ideology is bad.
>Both the HCI, which has renamed itself to remove the 'handgun control'
>label from itself. It's now camouflaged as the 'Brady Campaign'. Its
>primary funder, Monster.com founder Andrew McKelvey, who was on its
>board of directors, has gone off and started his own group, Americans
>for Gun Safety, with an initial $16 million in funding...
>
>Both have acknowledged in internal memos and surveys that their focus on
>registration, gun bans, and restrictions against law abiding citizens
>owning guns has badly backfired on them, and acknowledge that the vast
>majority of the populace believes that there is an individual right to
>keep and bear arms that these groups want to confiscate. Additionally,
>the Democratic Party is removing gun control planks from its party
>platform, and is trying to shake the reputation it has acquired that the
>party is "against religious people, gun owners, veterans and the
>military, business people, and white people in general, especially white
>males".
>
Actually, despite his typical spleen-venting and paranoid mischaracterizations here (the stated policy of the gun control groups he mentions - check their sites - is not to ban handguns or non-assault weapons, such as rifles and shotguns, from all citizenry, but to keep them (as much as is possible) out of the hands of the proven criminally and/or mentally irresponsibles without infringing on the right of sane and law-abiding adults to purchase, keep and bear), Mike and I ( and these groups he derides) are in agreement that sane and law-abiding adults should retain the right to keep and bear; the sorts of black eyes that the progun lobby suffer are exemplified by attempts to allow people who fall outside of these characterizations to do so, such as the defence attempt to present Atty. Gen. Ashcroft's testimony in favor of the right to keep and bear, in a Texas case, in support of a man under a restraining order for spousal abuse who subsequently, in a fit of petulant rage at t!
hat order, drew and waved his handgun at his horrified wife and daughter. That guy is outta self-control, and if necessary, his beloved weapon should be removed from his cold, dead fingers by the local constabulary before he guns his terrorized family down with it.
I also appreciate Mike's removing this discussion to its proper venue on exi-freedom.
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