http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=476494&mesg_id=476510In my replies in this subthread, I demonstrated that Bill Clinton did not say, and to my knowledge has never said, that gun control cost Al Gore the election.
I am completely at a loss; why would my demonstration of the falsehood of the statement made about Bill Clinton be deleted, but the false statement itself (one that is repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam in the Guns forum) still stand?
This is what was deleted from the thread; my characterization of what was initially said about Clinton is absolutely accurate.
iverglas
Fri Nov-04-11 03:11 AM
Response to Original message
3. "I have long thought this one issue cost Gore ..."
You disagree with Bill Clinton then, eh?
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rl6214
Fri Nov-04-11 04:01 AM
Response to Reply #3
4. How do you see that?
clinton did say in his memoir he thought the gun control issue cost gore the election
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iverglas
Fri Nov-04-11 04:03 AM
Response to Reply #4
5. no, he did not
Inform yourself and stop parroting right-wing gun militant websites.
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LAGC
Fri Nov-04-11 05:34 AM
Response to Reply #5
6. You might want to read Bill Clinton's own memoirs.
"The NRA had a great night. They beat both Speaker Tom Foley and Jack Brooks, two of the ablest members of Congress, who had warned me this would happen. Foley was the first Speaker to be defeated in more than a century. Jack Brooks had supported the NRA for years and had led the fight against the assault weapons ban in the House, but as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had voted for the overall crime bill even after the ban was put into it. The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you're out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated nineteen of the twenty-four members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage and could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House Speaker." -- Bill Clinton, My Life, pp 629-30
Gun control keeps losing elections. No two ways about it.
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iverglas
Fri Nov-04-11 05:55 AM
Response to Reply #6
7. you might want to read what you posted
You can try reading this too:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=444520&mesg_id=445518And now try copying and pasting the words "gun control" from any of what you posted or what I posted.
Do you really not read what you find on those nasty sites?
"The NRA had a great night. ... The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you're out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated nineteen of the twenty-four members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage and could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House Speaker."
"The NRA" and "The gun lobby" are not "gun control".
Bill Clinton is really not a fool, and neither am I, no matter how much gun militants like to think the rest of the world are fools and can be fooled by their dirty tricks.
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LAGC Donating Member
Fri Nov-04-11 06:12 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. I think you're just arguing over semantics.
Bottom line is, in close elections, gun control positions lose candidates their seats every time.
Why give the NRA more ammo? Gore's support for a handgun ban alone cost him his home state of Tennessee in 2000. Had he won Tennessee, Florida wouldn't have mattered.
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iverglas
Fri Nov-04-11 06:19 AM
Response to Reply #8
9. I think you just lost
Words are words and have meaning.
Bill Clinton is not a fool.
In all those opportunities to say "gun control cost us the election", he has never said it, and he has said a very different thing.
The fact that the NRA has the word "rifle" in its name, and that the pressure group in question is referred to as the "gun lobby" because of its self-identified interests, doesn't mean for an instant that their goals have anything to do with rifles or they are lobbying about guns.
They are a right-wing movement, part of the broader right-wing movement, and a very important part of that broader right-wing movement.
They achieved and continue to achieve the right-wing goal: installing right-wing governments.
They don't want Gov. Walker in office in Wisconsin because he's going to let them prance around the capitol building with pistols concealed about their persons.
They know it, Bill Clinton knows it, I know it, and you know it.
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LAGC
Fri Nov-04-11 06:34 AM
Response to Reply #9
10. I don't disagree with you that the NRA is largely a conservative organization.
All I'm saying is: why give them more ammo? Why play right into their hands?
Gun control riles up their base. And they turn out every time.
If the goal is to reduce the number of guns out there, threatening to restrict guns further is NOT the way to go. It just makes many gun-owners and those on the fence rush out to buy some more and knee-jerk vote against any candidate who they perceive as threatening their freedoms.
I truly believe, if the Brady Campaign simply quit the fearmongering, gun ownership would decline on its own as crime continues to fall.
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iverglas
Fri Nov-04-11 06:50 AM
Response to Reply #10
11. I didn't say "largely a conservative organization"
I said it is a right-wing organization and part of the broader well-organized right-wing movement.
No one has ever won against the right wing by giving in to it.
You don't compromise with them, and you don't find common ground with them. You give them an inch and they take a mile. You need only look at what has happened to women's reproductive rights in your country in the last decade to see the absolute truth of that.
You don't take issues away from the right wing. They don't give a crap. They have more where they came from -- they invent them, just as they invented "gun rights" round about the late 1960s. (Of course, at that time, the right wing had not come into its own yet, and "gun rights" actually lost them elections. Check into Spiro Agnew's rise to prominence.)
Winning against the right wing is a long, hard road.
And you don't travel it by walking backwards.
There is not a single reason in the world to give into them on firearms control that cannot be argued regarding reproductive rights, healthcare, any tax policy you want to name, labour rights, sexual minority rights, any progressive, human-oriented cause or policy you can name.
There is no reason in the world to advocate that (what passes for) the left not just abandon any or all of its other goals and ideals rather than firearms control. Every one of them, if abandoned, would attract enough votes at the margin to win. Simply because every abandoned group, just like the large numbers of people who abhor the firearms violence and crime that besets your country and the firearms policies that contribute to it, would have nowhere else to go.
They did 40 years ago, though, in Maryland. They were revolted by the racist gun militant the Democrats ran for governor, and they voted Republican. Watch out for the backfire if that is your plan.
It's a clever game, this fighting on two fronts. "Gun rights" are the right thing to do! Gun control costs votes! They're completely unrelated, and yet whenever one of them is looking a tad shopworn, up pops the other one.
Well the other one is just handwringing from the usual suspects, in my humble opinion. My recommendation is that progressives take their electoral advice from progressives.
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Callisto32
Fri Nov-04-11 06:53 AM
Response to Reply #7
12. No, but they are part of the "gun control issue"
which is what the poster to whom you are responding (rl6214) mentioned. Just because the exact words don't appear, doesn't mean the words used aren't subsumed within a larger context of the issue.
So much for that much-vaunted reading comprehension you like to pretend nobody else has. Maybe you just miss the forest for the trees?
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iverglas
Fri Nov-04-11 07:13 AM
Response to Reply #12
13. oh, who's playing "semantics" now?
No, but they are part of the "gun control issue"
That doesn't even make sense, semantically and all.
They CREATED the "gun control issue".
"Just because the exact words don't appear, doesn't mean the words used aren't subsumed within a larger context of the issue."
You think Bill Clinton doesn't know his "semantics"?
You think that in all the times he's talked about this, he wouldn't have just come out and said plainly what he meant to say -- that gun control was the cause of Gore's defeat -- if that was what he meant?
"So much for that much-vaunted reading comprehension you like to pretend nobody else has. Maybe you just miss the forest for the trees?"
No, I just read the trees that are there, and don't pretend to see a pine forest composed of maple trees.
You can do it to. So can anybody else, and then they can choose to admit it, or not.
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