I believe your illustration is somewhat flawed.The Annoyed Man wrote:What happened in New Orleans was an extremely localized phenomenon. Many of those people in New Orleans historically viewed the gummint as their savior and the sole answer to all of their problems - including their income problems (or rather, the problems they didn't have as long as the gummint kept sending them welfare checks). They did not view government as a pesky but necessary evil, so they are all too glad to comply. They were not - at least until after Katrina - conservatives. Look at the people they kept electing to public office down there. Those elected leaders represent the spiritual and moral soul of pre-Katrina New Orleans - former Governor Kathleen "I will NOT ask a Republican president for help" Blanco, Mayor C. Ray "School buses? We don't need no stinkin' school buses" Nagin, Representative William "I keep the bribes in my freezer" Jefferson.Calabash-kid wrote:New Orleans and Katrina. There will be an emergency that will be the excuse just like New Orleans. How many of those people fought the police when they came?
Jerry
Post Katrina, a social conservative, Bobby Jindal, has been elected as Governor. He's far from perfect, but he is also far from the Blanco mold. For you Ron Paul fans, Jindal has an A rating from Gun Owners of America, Paul's favored gun rights organization. With a governor in office who shares Ron Paul's views on gun ownership, I seriously doubt you will see another gun grabbing attempt in Louisiana as long as he's in office.
Katrina was a large scale emergency, crossing state boundaries, but different locales responded differently to the crisis, and the gun grabbing wasn't state wide in Louisiana, it was just in the vicinity of New Orleans. It is important to note that, in neighboring Mississippi, where Katrina related damage was nearly as severe, there were no gun grabbings, and there was no whiny insistence on government entitlements, and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour well understood the relationship of local to federal government, posse comitatus, and his responsibilities to his citizens during the crisis. I am also fairly confident that, had Mississippi been saddled with a blistering canker of a governor like Blanco, any order given to LEOs to go forth and confiscate guns along Mississippi's gulf coast would have been responded to by LEOs with a "Heck no! YOU go do it. I don't wanna get shot!"
As I posted previously, the NO gun grabbing effort was an eye opener for the public at large, and I seriously doubt that it can be repeated. It was only successful because it was a localized effort, and even the courts later ruled against them. A national effort to pull off a NO style gun grab would be doomed to failure, and result in a lot of killing on both sides - for which the government would be eventually held accountable. The political fallout from such an effort would likely result in a complete, top-to-bottom housecleaning, if not an outright overthrow, of federal government. A similar localized effort might be successful in San Francisco, but it wouldn't work in Los Angeles, where small business and shop owners confronted "Rodney King" rioters outside their front doors with AR15s, and in some cases engaged looters in full scale firefights. It might be successful in DC, but not in Dallas.
You've all seen the "red state, blue state" map. The map shown below shows a red/blue breakdown by county, rather than by state, in the 2004 presidential election, and it represents a more accurate national distribution of conservatives and liberals than the red state/blue state map. The blue counties are those were a gun grabbing effort might be successful. The red counties (about 90% or more of the U.S. land mass) are those areas where a gun grabbing effort would most likely fail. (By the way, Alaska, which is not colored on this map, came in completely red in actual fact.)
Please note that, in Texas, one of the blue areas is Austin. Please note that Austin is surrounded by a vast sea of red. I don't think Austin is going to try and take away Texas's guns.
Making the assumption that Republican = Pro-Gun and Democrat = Anti-Gun is a generalization without true merit, IMO. Political opinion covers a very large spectrum of issues of which RKBA is a very small part. I know oodles of people who vote mainly Democrat that are pro-gun and believe in the RKBA. Your map also does not take into account the independent vote, which is proportionally greater here in Austin (and some other locales) than in most parts of the state. Also, your example cites the 2004 election, in which there was serious disapproval of the Republican candidate, which still exists and is even greater now than it was then. Just because someone votes against a Republican candidate that they have no faith in does not make them anti-gun nor a through-and-through democrat (again, I believe the assumption that Democrat=Anti-Gun is wrong). I have family members in the Midwest whose gun collections would dwarf most of the members' collections on this forum (except maybe El Gato
), but have been lifelong Democrats. They are very involved in politics on a much more local level, and as has been pointed out in this thread, that is where the real changes happen. Another example that demonstrates that this is not simply a party issue was one of the amicus briefs filed in the DC vs. Heller case, where large numbers from both sides of the aisle in Congress expressed disapproval of DC's strict anti-gun laws. Belief in the Second Amendment doesn't fall as starkly across party lines as you may believe.