RiverCity.45 wrote:Notice that no anti-gun legislation has passed in the federal government since a democrat took office as president and the democrats took a majority in Congress? Gun legislation has, in fact, strengthened the RTKBA since that time.
I know that might be unsettling for some folks who rabidly cling to their misguided beliefs. Sorry. All that hysteria was for naught.
Woah just a minute....
I know there are pro-2nd Amendment democrats in congress, but they are in the
minority of their party, not the majority. The last time we had a democrat in the White House with a democrat majority in both houses of Congress, we got the AWB and a bunch of other misguided firearms related legislation. You point out, rightly so, that democrats haven't passed any gun-grabbing legislation since 2008, but you are staking a claim to an alleged democrat party resolve to protect the RKBA which is simply not true.
The reason they haven't passed further restrictions is because 1993 taught them that it would be political suicide to do so. The reason the very liberal majority of the democrat caucus hasn't forced through more RKBA restrictions is that they have squandered nearly all of the political capital they had back in 2008 on very very unpopular legislation, and in so doing, have put their own reelection prospects at risk. Heck, even
liberal political publications and websites are concerned about that possibility, and fervently liberal politicians are now trying to position themselves as "moderates" because they know what is coming in November.... payback being a harsh mistress.
But if you think that the majority of democrats in Congress wouldn't ram through some kind of additional RKBA restrictions if they thought they still had the political capital to do so, then you're being naive. The last time I checked, the "blue dog" democrats who support the RKBA are a minority wing of their party. It is only by virtue of blue dog democrats cooperating with republicans on the RKBA that we don't have
further gun restrictions in place.
Republicans are not monolithically perfect on the RKBA either. And a few of them are downright hostile to it. But on balance, if you polled all democrat politicians with the question, "would you support further restrictions on gun rights if there were no political price to pay for it,"
most would answer in the affirmative. If you asked the exact same question to republicans,
most would answer in the negative. Why? Because
most democrats do not support the RKBA, and
most republicans do.
Right now, the only reason we
don't have further restrictions is because the democrat caucus minority of blue dogs, allied with the republican caucus majority who are pro-RKBA, are making sure that it doesn't happen. If there were no more blue dogs in Congress, and democrats controlled both houses of Congress
and the executive, what passes for gun rights in California, New York, Illinois and D.C. would be what the national picture would look like. Those are democrat dominated states. The state of the RKBA in those states is what you get when "liberal" democrats have unfettered power to severely curtail the RKBA without a political penalty for doing so. That is the truth, and you can't
credibly deny it.
EDITED TO ADD:
You said:
Gun legislation has, in fact, strengthened the RTKBA since that time
Maybe at the state level, but not really at the national level. What we really have on the national level is two very important SCOTUS decisions.
IF those decisions had gone against the RKBA (and praise God they didn't), don't imagine for one second that the current majority wouldn't have pounced on that. You wan't proof? Go back and reread all the comments made by democrats after the
Heller decision.