How Liberals Can Win Some Elections for a Change - Sshhhh!

I have a strategy for liberals to win some elections, but it relies upon their smartening up about an issue that is a "poison pill" in middle America. It's a strategy guaranteed to work, if they are willing to take the advice.

Let's start with the premise that there are more than enough gun rights supporters to swing an election. How do we know this? Because there are about four million NRA (National Rifle Association) members, give or take, and 99% of them will vote in an election -- they want to vote, will not miss an opportunity to vote. In the last election, the Democrats had their highest popular turn-out in history -- and lost by three and a half million votes -- or a half million less than the membership of the NRA alone.

There are other large grass roots lobby groups in Washington of course, one or two even larger than the NRA -- the AARP, for example. The AARP, we know, is a liberal front and favors gun control, but that is its management only -- among their grass roots, most members don't even know the AARP has a political agenda. I guarantee that nowhere near 99% of AARP's membership votes. And many who do, vote Republican -- because they joined the AARP for coupons, not politics. So out of the entire AARP, only management and an undetermined fraction of the membership can be counted on to vote liberal -- for its own gun control policy.

Let's go back to the NRA for a second. The NRA, with its four million voting members, is not by a long stretch the entire body of pro-gun voters. How do I know this? Because if you know many other gun owners, you know as I do that there are a large number of gun owners who refuse to join the NRA. And they are eager to tell you why: they think the NRA is TOO WEAK, too compromising, and has SOLD OUT. So a significant group of additional gun owners won't join the NRA because they claim to be EVEN TOUGHER on gun rights. They may join other organizations like GOA (Gun Owners of America), and you can bet they definitely vote, as well -- to prove they are tougher than the NRA, for one thing.

In short, there are many millions of voting pro-gun Americans, all of whom are alienated by gun control candidates. The Democrats push almost all of those candidates, and many of them lost handily in the last national election.

When gun rights supporters hear a liberal making promises, they hear an unspoken phrase at the end of every sentence: "and I'll ban some more of your guns." Democrat candidates promise to do better for you on jobs (and ban some more of your guns). They'll fix your health care (and ban some more of your guns). They'll give you better deals on health insurance, Social Security and peace on earth (and ban some more of your guns). Of course, they'll also rush to get out of the post-9/11 conflicts we entered -- something else most gun owners don't like. But even then, they can be counted on to ban some more of your guns, and if you're not careful, they'll even try to sell gun control as some sort of domestic "war on terror." Actually, of course, gun owners know it's a war on the Second Amendment. No one is being fooled.

And that's why we can't vote for Democrats despite what we think of them on "jobs" or "health care" -- we won't trade away the Second Amendment. What the Democrats aren't saying makes them appear dishonest -- hiding the facts of their rabid gun ban agenda while wearing camo vests and saying "nobody wants to take your guns." We see through the act.

The answer of course is therefore simple. One strategy for winning future elections is to drop their war on the Second-Amendment. All the Democracts have to do to win several million more American votes -- from voters who actually like some of their positions on jobs, health care, drug companies, and corporate greed -- is to give up on the failed policy of unconstitutional abridgement of gun rights. I don't mean to PRETEND to do so -- I mean to drop it. "Gun control" was more responsible for the Democrats' 2004 losses than perhaps they understand. By showing off John Kerry in a camo vest with a goose gun, the Democrats actually spotlighted the Big Lie -- it put guns at center stage, and NOBODY believed Kerry was no threat to guns. In fact, every time the Democrats bring up their supposedly happy relationship with the Second Amendment, they always add the same sinister, unmistakeable phrase -- "... but we ARE for REASONABLE GUN CONTROLS." They can't leave it alone. Perhaps they are addicted -- the definition of addiction being a "self destructive habit." Certainly, gun control continues to shoot Democrats in the foot -- because they can't seem to relegate it to the ash heap of history. And as long as there is a Second Amendment to go with the other nine, the law of the land will prevent the Democrats' policies from seeming "reasonable."

The votes are there to be had in Middle America, if we don't have to abandon our Second Amendment protections against gun infringements in order to elect a Democrat. Infringe is a word that means "around the edges." The Democrats would like to trample gun rights, as a matter of the party's perennial platform, a lot more than just around the edges (is there anyone who doubts that?) -- and the Second Amendment doesn't allow for any tampering AT ALL. We know, because we can read. We can read the amendment, which protects guns NOT for hunting but for SECURITY, and we can read the papers of the Founders which all confirm that the intent was an individual right of all citizens of good character to keep and bear arms IN THEIR OWN DEFENSE against enemies foreign and domestic.

Yet the Democrats so far won't abandon this poison pill as the failed policy it is. They won't take the plank out of the platform, even to win back the American people. That is especially telling. Surely, there are much more important concerns for the Democrats than stealing one of our liberties out of the Bill of Rights? Trust me when I say that there are many people who are listening to moderate Democrats and who would vote for some of them in large numbers -- IF ONLY IT DID NOT REQUIRE THEM TO UNDERGO ANOTHER TERM OF EGREGIOUS GUN CONTROL. Take guns off the table, or better yet, vow to re-visit and repeal certain unconstitutional infringements of the right to keep and bear arms which are already on the books, and the floodgates of Middle America will open.

Now that I've told my little secret -- we'll see just how addicted to destroying themselves in the vain effort to demolish the Second Amendment (while fighting to the death to defend the First, bizarrely enough) the Democrats are.

Side Note: Instead of always arrogantly reprinting the text of the First Amendment on their editorial pages, all American newspapers should print all ten articles of the Bill of Rights in rotation -- it may help them never to forget what should be obvious -- that if one article of the Bill of Rights is sacred, then all ten articles are equally sacrosanct in American life. And if one may be torn down little by little, the others will surely follow. In fact, the Second is the article which helps guarantee the other nine...