Monday, May 5, 2008

Shooting first: the Democrat candidates gun policies

40 years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy the gun debate in the U.S. has hit rock bottom. After Barack Obama's comments about small town America clinging to guns, Clinton's campaign has sent a mailout to Indiana voters questioning his stance on guns: Where Does Barack Obama really stand on guns?

The media is every ready to criticise the Democrats for having no policy differences and not debating issues. So the response from key bloggers. Ben Smith at Politco knows a major policy division when he sees it. Hillary had made another serious error:

The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a non-existent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.

To make matters worse, a prominent gun dealer said, it’s an expensive German gun with customized features that make it clearly European.
Clinton mailing's gun gaffe (Politico 4 May 2008)
Don't you just love it when they get straight to the heart of the matter.

The Huffington Post see the flier as skewing Obama's comments:
The Hillary mailer, in selectively quoting from this, omitted all of Obama's references to people's economic circumstances, leaving the misleading impression that all Obama did was "accuse" rural and small-town Americans of being "bitter" people who "cling to guns."
It seems that everything is being taken out of context in this election season. Ask John McCain about about his 100 year Iraq war and oil statements. Ask the Reverend Wright.

Anyway I took the bait and went to Barack's official website Obama'08 for the good oil (not the stuff they fight wars over apparently - ask McCain if that was out of context). Now his gun control ideas might be hidden somewhere in the downloadable PDFs but I couldn't find any reference to a guns policy. The closest was a classic Obamaism headed Sportsmen under Additional Issues:
Obama recognizes that we must forge a broad coalition if we are to address the great conservation challenges we face. America’s hunters and anglers are a key constituency that must take an active role and have a powerful voice in this coalition.
I'm not even game to look at the Democrats' policies on the death penalty. But then again Hillary and Barack are/were supposed to be liberals.

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1 comment:

cgoofies said...

My comment is, that gun laws should be lest the same. The two candidates arguing know nothing about guns. I am voting for McCain becaue he will keep things the same. The other candidates are trying to basically change the constitution that our forfathers founded this great nation on. There are better ways to address crime than to look at guns. Criminals will always get guns so will law abiding citizens who are educated about hunting laws and other types of recreational shooting sport. This is going to lead to problems when they are ignorant and try to know what they are talking about. We need a president to be a leader, someone that the paople will listen to and respect a chain of command and give back to this country. In these debates their is going to be chaos and a person will not be in charge because there is so many people thinking they are right. We need to act right and obey the people in charge of our homeland. Putting ideas into people haeds about things they know nothing about is not going to help. I encourage people to learn history about presidents and hunting laws or take classes. Most are free by there state. Then they will see all the good people who are doing something they enjoy.

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