Should the NRA have a say in who Democrats candidates are?

Why don't we just let Wayne "Frenchy" LaPierre, Tom "the Hammer" DeLay, Grover "the Stalinist" Norquist, Zell "the traitor" Miller, etc pick our candidates? Let's just go for it, I'm sure we could win all our elections that way.

It's not enough just to criticize, here's a common sense alternative.<http://www.agsfoundation.com/>

I always thought Dems should take over the Green party.

...with one of the biggest lobbies in D.C.

...just that they are a bit more than just a nutcase organization, given their power in D.C.

Sadly, the NRA does have a say in who the Dems pick.

... but candidates who favor the lost cause of gun control (beyond things most people agree on, such as background checks, short waiting periods for handgun purchases) are dragging the party down and should be jettisoned.

We need to drop the control part and talk about the responsibilities of gun owners and the need for sensible regulation has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt in our brother nations of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the EU. Afterall, the word regulation is in the 2nd amendment. It's not like we added it.

Leave me let you in a fact, progun Dems can never go through the primaries because of the power women and minorities have in the Dem party. After all, the fact is that women and minorities suffer the most from America's failed gun policies.

.... one of those persons who believes government cannot solve any societal problems (else I wouldn't be a Dem :)), gun violence is not a problem that will ever be solved by any legislation, just as drug abuse has not been solved by legislation.

The only problem the gun control Dem crowd has solved is the problem of Reps getting beat at the polls. They've successfully used this wedge issue against us again and again.

Nothing makes my eyes roll farther than listening to deludinoids spout the idea that criminals care about gun laws. No truer words were ever spoken than the aphorism "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns".

"Nothing makes my eyes roll farther than listening to deludinoids spout the idea that criminals care about gun laws. No truer words were ever spoken than the aphorism "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns"."

Bound to upset quite a few on this board however.

It's not as if a 19-year-old in the United States is more evil than a 19-year-old in Australia—there's no evidence for that," Hemenway explains. "But a 19-year-old in America can very easily get a pistol. That's very hard to do in Australia. So when there's a bar fight in Australia, somebody gets punched out or hit with a beer bottle. Here, they get shot."

In general, guns don't induce people to commit crimes. "What guns do is make crimes lethal," says Hemenway. They also make suicide attempts lethal: about 60 percent of suicides in America involve guns. "If you try to kill yourself with drugs, there's a 2 to 3 percent chance of dying," he explains. "With guns, the chance is 90 percent."

Gun deaths fall into three categories: homicides, suicides, and accidental killings. In 2001, about 30,000 people died from gunfire in the United States. Set this against the 43,000 annual deaths from motor-vehicle accidents to recognize what startling carnage comes out of a barrel. The comparison is especially telling because cars "are a way of life," as Hemenway explains. "People use cars all day, every day—and 'motor vehicles' include trucks. How many of us use guns?"

Suicides accounted for about 58 percent of gun fatalities, or 17,000 to 18,000 deaths, in 2001; another 11,000 deaths, or 37 percent, were homicides, and the remaining 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental. For rural areas, the big problem is suicide; in cities, it's homicide. ("In Wyoming it's hard to have big gang fights," Hemenway observes dryly. "Do you call up the other gang and drive 30 miles to meet up?") Homicides follow a curve similar to that of motor-vehicle fatalities: rising steeply between ages 15 and 21, staying fairly level from there until age 65, then rising again with advanced age. Men between 25 and 55 commit the bulk of suicides, and younger males account for an inflated share of both homicides and unintentional shootings. (Males suffer all injuries, including gunshots, at much higher rates than females.)

<http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/090433.html

.. your arguments are so tired one wonders where you muster the courage to bother with them.

Answer this simple question: "Is making handguns illegal going to rid American society of them?"

Once you can answer that question honestly we can talk. Otherwise, you are just pissing in the wind, hoping you can wish upon a star and change reality.

You cannot. The guns are here and there is nothing in the purview of the law you can do about it. But you can certainly relegate the Dems to a losing-forever position over a legal point of view that is useless. Yes, that's a great idea.

Gun control would go to the back burner at least.
I always thought that's how it works.

I never thought gun control should be a partisan issue to begin with.
It should be an independant decision made by the individual candidate.

Why does the republican party always imply that we're against something, just because they're for it (or vice versa)?

Guns
God
The Flag
And Abortion

Many people forget that the NRA withheld their support of GWB last year until he let the assault rifle ban expire.
They fear him as much as any politician, as he seems always ready to declare Marshal Law.

it's good vs evil. It''s Tom DeLay vs submissive Dems.

Remember thats all the NRA is. A bunch of people with similiar views grouping their money and voices together in the same way the employees form unions.

Now of course the original question is a bit silly. No, one group, even a large group shouldnt choose the candidates....The candidates should be chosen by the citizenry which happens to include NRA folks as a subset.

Should the Democratic party ignore millions of voters? Well thats not my decision, but it didnt work out very well in 1994, 2000 or 2004.

Dems need to stand up for their base or just becaome Republican lite. Large majorities of voters are for reasonablle gun regulation. Most blue state republican are for gun regulations, like Swartzeneggar,

Anyhow here the evil Heston speech:

December 20, 1997

What an honor it is to address the Free Congress Foundation. At a glance
"Free" reads as a verb rather than an adjective. "Free Congress." Not a bad
directive for Mr. Clinton. Anyway...


I like it when the party of Lincoln honors our free heritage. This nation
has been blessed by the minds and mettle of many good people, and indeed Abe
was among the best. A man of great moral character, a trait often lacking
among our leaders. This is disturbing, but not without remedy. One good
election can correct such ills.

Above all, I hope those of us gathered here tonight have more in common with
Mr. Lincoln than just party affiliation. Better that we grasp a common
vision than simply wear the cloak. Even our President pretends to be a
conservative when it suits him. We must be more than that.

I know... it's not easy. Imagine being point man for the National Rifle
Association, preserving the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I
was elected, and now I serve... as a moving target for pundits who've called
me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a "brain-injured, senile and
crazy old man."

Maybe that comes with the territory. But as I have stood in the crosshairs
of those who aim at Second Amendment freedom, I have realized that guns are
not the only issue, and I am not the only target. It is much, much bigger
than that - which is what I want to talk to you about today.

I have come to realize that a cultural war is raging across our
land...storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our
self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.

How many of you own a gun? A show of hands maybe? How many own two or more
guns?


Thank you. I wonder - how many of you own guns but chose not to raise your
hand? How many of you considered revealing your conviction about a
constitutional right, but then thought better of it?

Then you are a victim of the cultural war. You are a casualty of the
cultural warfare being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs
and ideas. Now maybe you don't care one way or the other about owning a gun.
But I could've asked for a show of hands of Pentecostal Christians, or
pro-lifers, or right-to-workers, or Promise Keepers, or school voucher-ers,
and the result would be the same. What if the same question were asked at
your PTA meeting? Would you raise your hand if Dan Rather were in the back
of the room with a film crew?

See? You have been assaulted and robbed of the courage of your convictions.
Your pride in who you are and what you believe, has been ridiculed,
ransacked and plundered. It may be a war without bullets or bloodshed, but
with just as much liberty lost. You and your country are less free.

And you are not inconsequential people! You in this room, whom many would
say are among the most powerful people on earth, you are shamed into
silence! Because you choose to own guns - affirmed by no less than the Bill
of Rights. But you embrace a view at odds with the cultural warlords. If
that is the outcome of cultural war, and you are victims, I can only ask the
gravely obvious question: What'll become of the right itself? Or other
rights not deemed acceptable by the thought police? What other truth in your
heart will you disavow with your hand?

I remember when European Jews feared to admit their faith. The Nazis forced
them to wear yellow stars as identity badges. It worked. So - what color
star will the pin on gun owners' chests? How will the self-styled elite tag
us? There may not be a Gestapo officer on every street corner, but the
influence on our culture is just as pervasive.

Now, I am not really here to talk about the Second Amendment of the NRA, but
the gun issue clearly brings into focus the warfare that's going on.

Rank-and-file Americans wake up every morning, increasingly bewildered and
confused at why their views make them lesser citizens. After enough
breakfast-table TV hyping tattooed sex-slaves on the next Rikki Lake, enough
gun-glutted movies and tabloid shows, enough revisionist history books and
prime-time ridicule of religion, enough of the TV anchor who cocks her head,
clucks her tongue and sighs about guns causing crime and finally the message
gets through: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle
class, Protestant, or-even worse- admitted heterosexual, gun-owning or-even
worse-NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or-even worse-male working
stiff, because not only don't you count, you're a downright obstacle to
social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as delightfully green as you
hand them over, but your voice deserves a lower decibel level, your opinion
is less enlightened, your media access is insignificant. And frankly,
mister, you need to wake up, wise up and learn a little something about your
new America... and until you do, would you mind shutting up?

That's why you didn't raise your hand. That's how cultural war works. And
you are losing.

That's what happens when a generation of media, educators, entertainers and
politicians, led by a willing president, decide the America they were born
into isn't good enough any more. So they contrive to change it through the
cultural warfare of class distinction. Ask the Romans if powerful nations
have ever fallen as a result of cultural division. There are ruins around
the world that were once the smug centers of small-minded, arrogant elitism.
It appears that rather than evaporate in the flash of a split atom, we may
succumb to a divided culture.

Although my years are long, I was not on hand to help pen the Bill of
Rights. And popular assumptions aside, the same goes for the Ten
Commandments. Yet as an American and as a man who believes in God's almighty
presence, I treasure both.

The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of wise old dead
white guys who invented our country. Now some flinch when I say that. Why?
It's true... they were white guys. So were most of the guys that died in
Lincoln's name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of
white guys? Why is "Hispanic pride" or "black pride" a good thing, while
"white pride" conjures shaved heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man
March on Washington celebrated as progress, while the Promise Keepers March
on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I'll tell you why:
Cultural warfare.
---------------snip-------more ad nauseum<http://www.americancivilrightsreview.com/docs-folder-guns-heston.html>

BTW, always remember that the real reason Dems lost the last 3 elections was voter fraud and suppression, particularly of black voters.

Except in a few fringe areas.

The party platform fully supports the bill of rights and calls out the 2nd specifically.

btw the term "reasonable gun regulation" is an interesting term. EVERYBODY supports reasonable gun regulation. But NOBODY agrees on what reasonable is.

Here's another view;

The Second Amendment in the Courts

As a matter of law, the meaning of the Second Amendment has been settled since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). In that case, the Court ruled that the "obvious purpose" of the Second Amendment was to "assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness" of the state militia.

Since Miller, the Supreme Court has addressed the Second Amendment twice more, upholding New Jersey's strict gun control law in 1969 and upholding the federal law banning felons from possessing guns in 1980. Furthermore, twice - in 1965 and 1990 - the Supreme Court has held that the term "well-regulated militia" refers to the National Guard.

In the early 1980s, the Supreme Court addressed the Second Amendment issue again, after the town of Morton Grove, Illinois, passed an ordinance banning handguns (making certain reasonable exceptions for law enforcement, the military, and collectors). After the town was sued on Second Amendment grounds, the Illinois Supreme Court and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that not only was the ordinance valid, but there was no individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment (Quillici v. Morton Grove). In October 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of this ruling, allowing the lower court rulings to stand.

In 1991, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger referred to the Second Amendment as "the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime... ha(s) misled the American people and they, I regret to say, they have had far too much influence on the Congress of the United States than as a citizen I would like to see - and I am a gun man." Burger also wrote, "The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon...urely the Second Amendment does not remotely guarantee every person the constitutional right to have a ‘Saturday Night Special' or a machine gun without any regulation whatever. There is no support in the Constitution for the argument that federal and state governments are powerless to regulate the purchase of such firearms..."

Since the Miller decision, lower federal and state courts have addressed the meaning of the Second Amendment in more than thirty cases. In every case, up until March of 1999 (see below), the courts decided that the Second Amendment refers to the right to keep and bear arms only in connection with a state militia. Even more telling, in its legal challenges to federal firearms laws like the Brady Law and the assault weapons ban, the National Rifle Association makes no mention of the Second Amendment. Indeed, the National Rifle Association has not challenged a gun law on Second Amendment grounds in several years.

------------snip----------------
<http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/issues/?page=second>

But for that to take place, the Democrats must layoff the 2nd amendment.

After 12 years as a congresswoman she was bounced out because the progressives sat on their hands. She was replaced by shrieking rightwinger who was bounced the next election.

Now we have a progressive congressman who is in favor of "upholding the second amendment" - the part that says "..in a well regulated militia".

Screw the NRA.

I've heard he has a good NRA "rating" and that he has been supportive of the rights of the people to keep and bear arms.

I think Bill Richardson would be a great canditate for President lets get a Hispanic and a real Democrat elected.

Two different organizations - two different objectives. Sometimes these objectives may coincide - other times they may not.

The Democratic Party is a political organization set up to get candidate members elected to public offices. The NRA is a marketing organization set up by weapons manufacturers to lobby against any restrictions on their product.