77.5 million reasons to base your choice for President on the Second Amendment
By Chad D. Baus
"Traditionally, whomever is leading in polling one year ahead of the Presidential primaries becomes the eventual party nominee. If tradition holds true...there is a storm on the horizon..."
It's been almost exactly one year since I wrote those words, warning of dark clouds looming for the Second Amendment in the 2008 Presidential election. Today is primary day in New Hampshire, and only the steady march of the calendar suggests that we are closer to knowing whether or not we will have a pro-gun nominee on either side of the ballot.
The polls today look much the same on the Democrat side as they did one year ago, with anti-gun candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama polling at the top. The only pro-gun Democrat in the field, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, remains a distant fourth (behind third-place anti-gun trial lawyer John Edwards), and is likely staying in the race at this point in order to angle for a V.P. offer.
On the Republican side, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Senator John McCain led the polls one year ago. As I and many other Second Amendment defenders have detailed throughout the past year, both candidates have serious flaws in their records that should raise warning flags for gun owners. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's deep campaign pockets helped pull him into front-runner status by summer of 2007, but gun owners' worries only deepened - Romney too has an anti-gun record.
Today, the good news - if we can call it that - is Giuliani, McCain and Romney are sharing front-runner status with two truly pro-gun candidates - Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson. Political analysts can draw plausible scenarios which could still lead ANY of the five to the Republican nomination, which means that as polls open in New Hampshire gun owners have a 60% chance of having an anti-gun Republican on the ballot across from either Clinton or Obama.
It is my humble belief that the key reason for which Republicans have not coalesced around a single candidate is that they are not putting the most important issue first. As such, I am calling on Republicans across the nation to consider the following 77.5 million reasons for which the candidates' record on the Second Amendment deserves priority above all other measures by which they are weighing these candidates.
77.5 Million Reasons to Vote Freedom First
(And that's just the last century.)
Source: http://www.genocidewatch.org/iceg/background.htm
"ALL ACTS OF GENOCIDE ARE PRECEDED BY GOVERNMENT RESTRICTIONS OF PERSONAL WEAPONS." Not one time in the history of humanity have mass murders occurred without the right to bear arms being rescinded first. There can be no dispute about it - the Second Amendment recognizes the right that guarantees all others. As such, I take ALL attempts to subvert our Second Amendment rights quite seriously, because it is, as they say, a very slippery slope.
Without the individual right to bear arms nothing else in politics matters in the long-run...but the polls seem to indicate that far too many Republicans these days are forgetting to put first things first.
To Republicans who support Rudy Giuliani out of a desire to moderate the party on certain social issues, I challenge you to consider how homosexual people are treated in countries where citizens are disallowed the right to bear arms.
To Republicans who support John McCain out of a belief that he really did sponsor Campaign Finance Reform because he wanted to get the money out politics, I challenge you to consider the unchecked power that politicians wield in countries full of unarmed subjects.
To Republicans who support Mitt Romney because he looks the most Presidential...must I even bother to explain how sick that sounds in comparison to the 77.5 Million Reasons for which we must stand firm on the Second Amendment?
Listing all the reasons for which Republicans are considering a primary vote for these anti-gun candidates would be impossible, and I'm am by no means trying to suggest that the above examples are in any way comprehensive. What I know for sure, however, is that whatever the issue, these Republicans are making a choice to put something ahead of a vote to protect the right that guarantees all others. If they truly value what this country stands for, Republicans should make the choice now to Vote Freedom First in their state's primary.
Taking a look again at the field of top-tier candidates from this perspective, we see that John McCain has played with the Dark Side too many times on gun control, supporting an end to private transfers of firearms between law-abiding citizens at gun shows, a ban on inexpensive firearms labeled by racist anti-gun extremists as "Saturday night specials", and a mandate for safety locks on certain firearms. Closing what John McCain's gun grabber friends call the "gun show loophole" is a HUGE step toward ending all private transfers (with the next step would be to end ownership altogether).
As Governor, Mitt Romney signed what his gun grabber friends call an "assault weapons" ban in his state which was worse than Clinton's now-defunct national ban. According to Dave Kopel, Gov. Romney occasionally considered the Democrat-dominated Massachusetts legislature too soft on gun owners. He bragged about his state's tough gun laws in his last gubernatorial campaign and vocally distanced himself from the nation's largest grassroots defender of the Second Amendment. Only recently, he lied about having been endorsed by that same group - the National Rifle Association.
As Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani led efforts to sue gun manufacturers out of business by blaming them for what criminals do illegally with their products - something like to suing General Motors because a bank robber drove a Chevy as a getaway car. Giuliani has advocated licensing all firearms owners and making potential gun-owners pass a written test to exercise their Second Amendment rights. Giuliani worked with Bill Clinton to pass the now-defunct Clinton Gun Ban. And that's only the beginning with Giuliani, who has an anti-gun record every bit as scary as Hillary Clinton's.
Should we believe they have changed or reformed themselves in time for this election? How could we when not one of them - not McCain, not Romney, and not Giuliani - have renounced these positions, but have instead chosen to hide their campaigns behind cheesy platitudes or newly-purchased "life" memberships in the NRA?
By choosing to vote first on the Second Amendment issue, the field of top-tier candidate choices is narrowed to two: Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee. Between those two, Republicans can make their choice based on other issues important to them, knowing that they have first made a decision to protect the right that guarantees all others - the right that ensures that never will there come a day when XX million Americans are added to the list of 77.5 million Reasons.
Chad Baus is a Member of the Fulton County, OH Republican Central Committee and the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman and Northwest Ohio Chair.
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