Like your guns? Might want to vote then.

[gdcpony]

With so many state elections coming up and arguably more at stake than in 2016, I figure a call to vote belongs in any pro firearms page. Those who disagree,will find out when Congress and so many governors are anti-gun that they maybe should have listened. So I post something I posted a while back (April'ish). I sit in Norway now but have already sent in my ballot. It has another form of "activism" in the second half, but the Voting part is what matters now. Get out there and get your friends out there too.








To my fellow gun owners:

What follows is hard to type and will be harder to read. We all sit behind the key board or staring at a phone where we can speak our minds and, within reason, not worry about reprimand or having to carry through on our assertions.

I love stats and probabilities and the likelihood of something happening. At least usually I do. Not so much recently though. I have been looking at (and with a purely objective view) the position we as owners of firearms are in. Well, it comes out like this. WE ARE LOSING! And to make it worse, it is no longer bit by bit, but chunks by chunks.

You may sit there and say “how can that be when the ‘gun friendly’ party is in control of the federal government” but it is true. In fact, we are losing faster than prior to the election. We are losing in the forum of public opinion, the legislative arena, and the courts.

I looked and looked and have yet to see one major victory we have scored. Hearing conservation act? Nope. National reciprocity? Yeah right. The end to "Gun Free Zones" (which are killing Americans). I wish! I have found a couple minor little successful defenses, but no victories. Let me know if I am wrong. I would love to be proven wrong on this. What I do see are us losing hard on state and local levels. Age limits, bans, confiscations, new restrictions and registrations. Heller might as well as never happened with recent rulings backing the bans and restrictions in place. We have all read them, seen them, many are now experiencing them.

I sit on temporary orders to training in California. I had to leave behind several firearms that make me a felon here. And now there are more areas I must pray I don’t get orders to almost monthly. I wonder if my home state of Ohio will soon join the list. Will we soon be worried about whether attaching a collapsible stock to a lever gun makes it illegal? Do I need to register my Handi-Rifle as an “assault rifle” because it’s black?

A personal projection- take it or leave it- I worked out says we will see a AWB again in less than 10 years. Complete with Mag limits and with registration attached. Confiscation will be 3 years after that. “Assault Weapons” first of course, then those weapons (I am thinking many PRS guns fit this realm) with features that make them tactical in nature. Of course, this could be avoided if by then 60% of the states and 75% of the cities of 100k or more in population have already instituted such. That would delay it until the second term of the next president if things keep going the way they are.

Now you can sit behind your key board and cry “Molon Labe!” all you want. And I am sure some will resist. However, I know that unless organized on a national level and funded, it will be crushed isolated instances. Most will surrender them, move away to the ever-shrinking safe zones (yeah, I used that phrase intentionally), or hide them away. All of which make the grabbers happy. You do resist forcefully and the image of the “gun nut” is reinforced and you give them reason to further any more rules.

We have no media to speak of on our side. Look at the hit count of pro-gun and anti-gun videos. 10-1 against us in the ones I found on simple searches of Google and YouTube. Look at sponsors dropping anyone who stands against gun control. The grabbers also have foreign support as we are pretty much the thorn in the side of the UN and their push for gun control. BBC and such will always side with them. So we become further shoved into a corner with no voice to be heard. Even sporting goods stores and department stores are leaving our side for safer waters.

How many actually listened to the speeches the kids made during their march after Florida? It was hard, but I got about 75% of them. These are the voters of the future and they will vote. They will keep marching. They will convince their parents (or grown up buddies more or less) to vote as well. Their emotional lines will not be reasoned away with logic. Many of us have tried that approach and failed. The only real way to fight them is either to march ourselves (wonder what half a million AR carrying marchers going through the capital would cause DC to do?) or simply vote our side.

It does kind of baffle me though. Depending on where you read, as these numbers are hardly accurate in most surveys, there are over 100 million gun owners in the US. That is a low number of estimates. So that means we have 100 million votes. I am not talking the national votes. Those mean little in the whole scheme of things as we are fast learning. After all, the largest impact we are feeling and have felt has been regulations at the lower levels. So where are our votes in those elections? I have figured that local and state elections often see less than 20% of the voters out. Should sound good for us, except that we are showing up just as little. Chances to swarm the liberals that seek our rights are being squandered. A vote is a vote and a thousand or maybe a hundred (or even 10 in my town) can make a huge difference in a local election. It also has the benefit of being legal.

Still reading? Great! Maybe we can do something about this?

Now comes the roughest part. We shoot ourselves in the foot in sooo many ways! Not by being unsafe, but by being… well being us. We stand off and call them “libtards” and “Nazis” and any number of names. Well, ok that didn’t work in my school days to solve a problem, so I doubt it does now. It just ticks people off. If 1/3 of Americans own guns, then we have 2/3 to convince it’s not something to fear. We lose many to the other extreme, but we also lose every time we sink to that level. I am proud to say I have taken dozens of non-shooters to the range. And I helped them pick out a firearm later or even prior to. Since we are bound to hang out with nothing but like-minded people, we get little positive exposure to the “middle ground.” We need to change that person by person. If each shooter took one neutral person to the range and they bought a first gun we would double our numbers! And this says nothing about the fun you had doing it or the new friend you have made.

Think about the one time a complete newbie came up either online or in person and asked for advice. “No, man, don’t do that.” “You get what you pay for.” I personally don’t care if they have an Anderson lower with the cheapest Chinese handguard on their AR. We now have their support if they like it. A Savage Axis with the cheap factory optic? Hey, let’s make it work for you! Another shooter. A pawn shop Llama .45? Does it go bang? If so, lets hit the range.

Then you have our own divisions. Luckily, I am eclectic in my preferences of firearms. Levers, pumps, revolvers, bolts, semi’s. Love them all! However, like most I have my preferences. I don’t own a bump stock. Don’t see the point in a binary trigger either, but I know that banning those is just a step. It is a step towards stripping further our right (1934, 1968, 1986, 1994 ring any bells?) . So the guy who has a closet full of shotguns and no AR and doesn’t care if they are banned needs to understand that the 11-87 might be next.

A long read, and I apologize, but there needs to be a serious change. We won’t make changes with memes and key board machoism. I hope you still aren’t on the “It’ll never happen” team either. Because it can and it might. It takes a little effort to change things.

I ran into a family out collecting rocks (dad was an amateur geologist) last weekend while hunting ‘yotes. I could have ridden past them on my dirt bike and then they might have heard a shot echo down the canyons if I got one to come in. Instead, I stopped to let them know what I was up to so they would not be worried. They were definitely leaning towards the left you could tell as we talked. I had the HandiRifle over my shoulder and the daughter and mother feared this little youth size single shot rifle literally because it was black. I talked with them (luckily, I knew the geo-history of the area) and in half an hour the wife and daughter had sent a couple .243 rounds at the rocks on the mountain side. The dad said he would buy one if it weren’t so hard in CA since it looked like they had fun. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, but at least a small victory was won in our favor. I think if we want to turn things around, we need more of these and less “Molon Labe.”

[USNRet93]

https://thefiringline.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=598819

LOHMAN466-
We make an error, especially in politics, by believing that we can know sometimes stance on one issue by his or her stance on another.

For instance someone may believe in single payer healthcare, free expression of sexuality an gender, a balanced budget, and the individual right to firearm ownership.

I expect there are far more people who are not in lock-step with the platforms of either major party than there are that are. A "progressive democrat" is not necessarily against the individual right to own firearms. a "conservative republican" will not necessarily defend it. These labels are FAR too encompassing.

[Wag]

The Dem candidate for governor in our state is vehemently anti-gun and vows to strip away a lot of gun rights, including the ability to own AR style rifles and "large capacity" magazines.

I'm really nervous about this one but I've voted and sent letters and money to candidates who are gun friendly.

Keeping my fingers crossed..........

--Wag--

[USNRet93]

Originally Posted by Wag

The Dem candidate for governor in our state is vehemently anti-gun and vows to strip away a lot of gun rights, including the ability to own AR style rifles and "large capacity" magazines.

I'm really nervous about this one but I've voted and sent letters and money to candidates who are gun friendly.

Keeping my fingers crossed..........

--Wag--

What's the NM state legislature make-up? I doubt the governor can make unilateral decisions like that.

[Wag]

Originally Posted by USNRet93

What's the NM state legislature make-up? I doubt the governor can make unilateral decisions like that.

You're right, of course. The Gov can't push a button to make it happen, however, they can have a powerful influence on the legislature to get things to go through. We've had a Republican governor for the last two terms and that has helped. She had a Republican legislature for the first term and only the House for the second term. During that time, whether or not she was the cause, several bills to compromise gun rights were defeated but they keep getting introduced and are planned for the first session with the new governor.

We tend to have a liberal legislature, but it can drift back and forth over the center line. For what it's worth, what is considered liberal here in NM is still quite conservative compared to the big cities. Seems like we're too close to the edge from time to time but we've been fortunate in many respects.

--Wag--

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Vote using your mind and conscience on the multitude of issues you think are important.

Thus, closed.