What's gun control worth?

[nancylebov]

I've seen the theory a time or two that the Democrats could have won the 2004 election if they'd given up on gun control. However, I think everyone I've seen promoting that theory is against gun control anyway.

So, do those of you who are want gun control and who also would like the Democrats to win think that it could conceivably be worthwhile to give up on gun control, or is gun control a non-negotiable core issue?

On the other side, if Democrats said they were giving up on gun control, would pro-gun-ownership people believe them?

Comments

"gun control" is a red herring

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

It's a bogeyman, a Goldstein, there is *not* and never was the "ban all guns" majority on the Left that the NRA and Olin, makers of Winchester Ammo, pay for the world to believe and fear.

When I did a poll on the subject at Kos, out of 60+ responders, all of whom considered themselves liberals and/or Democrats, less than 15% were against *all* firearms all the time, and of those, only about 3 or four individuals thought it was the right thing to try to legislate their beliefs. The rest were about evenly divided between those who had guns and those didn't but didn't care about them and didn't mind other people having them. (With about 3 or 4 people saying "everyone should be able to own any weapon at all, unrestricted.)

The Right has managed to convince people of things which didn't happen, and that there were massive numbers of people on the left trying to legislate things that they weren't.

I first started noticing this in 1982 or 1983, in our jr high Scholastic, when they had a "he said/she said" gun control issue, and the pro-gun control person talked about how some weapons should be regulated and some persons should be regulated, just as with alcohol, and the anti-gun control person said "we can't let them take all our guns away the way the want to," and I (innocently) couldn't understand why the NRA spokesman couldn't understand what the Brady Bill spokesman had actually said.

The problem is not in changing what *we* say, but what *they* hear, when it comes to the terrified gun-clutching hunters - like the owner of the SUV with the bumper sticker that said, "Don't Let John Kerry GORE Your Guns! Bush/Cheney 04" next to an NRA sticker I once saw.

And to do that, you'll have to break through a jamming field they've been building for over a quarter of a century, in which every thing we say is automatically to be disbelieved, because we are lying liars who are trying to lull the American People into surrendering just a little of the 2nd Amendment, so we can yank it all away from them in one fell swoop and impose a socialist tyranny on the helpless citizenry ("just like the Nazis, who also were in favor of gun control.") Of course we'll *say* that we don't want to ban all guns from all users - that's just what we *would* say, being godless liberals.

Re: "gun control" is a red herring

[lightningb.livejournal.com]

As an example of this, note the response to Kerry's little goose hunting trip. He'd have been well advised to stay home.

The agenda on this issue is controlled by the frothing loons on both sides -- best to stay away from it. I'd say it should be considered as a local issue -- and force the folks who claim that illegal guns all come from Virginia or that legalizing guns leads to massive decreases in crime to document their claims.