Writer: Ohio gun owners made up 27% of vote in 2000

On August 10, a columnist in the Minneapolis Star Tribune presented information which affirmed one of the central points made in Ken Hanson's rebuttal to Associated Press reporter Julie Carr-Smyth's recent complaints that Ohio gubernatorial candidates are battling for gun votes while “only” 400,000 out of 11 million Ohioans have a hunting license or a concealed handgun license.

In his rebuttal to the AP story, Hanson pointed out that Smyth was "comparing apples to basketballs" since only 7 million are even eligible to vote, and less than half of that actually do. "Here is a hint, Ms. Smyth," Hanson wrote, "the candidates don’t care about the 11 million Ohioans, they only care about the ones who vote."

From the Star Tribune:

The issue is important because another poll, taken during the last presidential election, showed that nine of 10 sportsmen of voting age in 2000 in Ohio, New Mexico and Florida -- important national swing states, each -- went to the polls.

Assuming that's true, sportsmen that year made up 38 percent of the total vote in New Mexico, 33 percent of the total in Florida and 27 percent of the total in Ohio.

That's right - according to the information compiled by this columnist, gun owners in general (and sportsmen in particular) make up close to a third of the voting public. Ken Hanson's points were dead on when he wrote:

The pool of actual voters is quite small when compared to the state as a whole, which is why Ms. Smyth made her comparisons to the state population rather than voting population. It is the only way she could seek to minimize the importance of the gun vote. Candidates are seeking votes from a small pool of actual voters, and in that pool, gun owners tend to be great swimmers.

When one couples the information from these two writers with the fact that gun ban extremist Toby Hoover has admitted that the majority of Ohioans are not the gun ban extremists she always portrays them to be, the assertions presented in Carr Smyth's AP article are totally exposed for the fallacies that they are.