Which Democrat? Which Gun?
Will Candidates’ Positions Matter?
November 20, 2003

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Some Democrats involved in national politics are undergoing a kind of epiphany on the gun issue. To some the awakening has come late—after the 1994 congressional elections and again after the 2000 presidential elections. To others, such as Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, it came as early as 1980. Frank was nationally vocal in the ’80s about the fact that the gun issue cost Edward Kennedy his bid for the presidency in Iowa when he tried to challenge then-President Jimmy Carter.

Not all Democrats are going to change, of course. Some will never change on the gun issue, like the Democrats elected to the US Senate from states such as California, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. You know their names: California’s Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein; Delaware’s Joseph Biden; Illinois’ Richard Durbin; Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes; Massachusetts’ Edward Kennedy and John Kerry; New Jersey’s Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg, and New York’s Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

But others have realized that the gun issue is a losing proposition in several states, and even in some congressional districts in the states mentioned above. They have been counseling their fellow Democrats to downplay if not abandon the “party of gun control” image. In some cases, the advice is a bit Machiavellian, in that it implies that by switching their vocabulary from “control” to “safety” they can win election victories and maintain the same anti-gun political agenda.

Major Topic
This change of tactics and language, if not in actual platform, has been a widely discussed topic over the past several months, and it has thrown the anti-gun strategists and the media into a bit of a frenzy. Imagine how the Brady Bunch must feel after all of those Clinton-Gore years in which they were paraded on the dais at nationally televised Democratic National Conventions.

Certainly the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, Americans for Gun Safety and other cardinals in the anti-gun church are concerned. Certainly they can exploit the victimhood of a Carolyn McCarthy in a densely populated Long Island, NY, district, but today the antis have fewer friends in Congress since 1994.

Their victory on the Brady Act and the Clinton Gun Ban has proven to be a Pyrrhic one. Dozens of the staunchest anti-gunners in the House are no longer there.

All of which is causing party strategists and aspiring presidential candidates—some declared officially and others feigning unofficial interest—to straddle the issue. They cannot ignore what happened to Gore in his home state of Tennessee as well as in Arkansas and West Virginia. Nor can they ignore the words of Bill Clinton when he told the media that the gun issue cost the Democrats at least two dozen seats in 1994.

Politicians being what they are, most would like to pretend to be what constituents want, while pursuing their own agenda which may not be what constituents want.

Remember that Bill Clinton tried to soften his anti-gun image by going duck hunting. Now, we have Sen. John Kerry playing the pheasant hunter just two months before the Iowa caucuses.

Thus shotgun in hand with cameras recording the event, Kerry was reported running a three-ring circus in late October.

In Ring No. 1, he’s trying to get traction by attacking the gun platform of rival Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont who has been a frontrunner in fund-raising and in much of the early campaign;

In Ring No. 2, he’s attacking the National Rifle Association and proposing renewing and extending the 1994 gun ban at the same time, and

In Ring No. 3, he’s blasting away at pheasants with a 12-gauge shotgun.

All three rings feature acts that are designed to please his audience in the media and get him ink and tube time even though most of the voters aren’t paying much attention to the presidential hopefuls now.

The media can thus keep Kerry and Dean and a few of the others in the limelight, if not for the whole country, at least in important political early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

So, on Halloween, The New York Times could report that “Senator John Kerry blasted away at Howard Dean on Friday (Oct. 31), accusing him of currying favor with the National Rifle Association and opposing an assault-weapons ban that Mr. Kerry and other supporters of gun control fought for in the 1990s.”

Apparently not finding any irony in the scenario, the next paragraph in The Times story said:

“Then Mr. Kerry took his 12-gauge shotgun and blew two pheasants out of the sky in two shots.”

Reading that, you can see the folks in The Times’ editorial tower sitting back in satisfaction, saying “What a great candidate!”

The Times went on to say that Kerry has been an off-again-on-again hunter since the age of 12. That statement apparently is supposed to convince the masses that if Kerry can be a hunter and support gun bans, no gunowner should be afraid of voting for Kerry.

The Times continued its report by noting that “with reporters in tow, before even cleaning his gun Mr. Kerry seized on a report that Dr. Dean, when running for governor of Vermont in 1992, told the National Rifle Association in a signed questionnaire that he opposed any restrictions on private ownership of “assault weapons.” With a seemingly straight face, The Times reporters continued, “So it was that Mr. Kerry spoke out for gun control one minute and then led photographers on a classic hunter’s photo opportunity the next.”

(While The Times was trying to sort out the past and present gun positions of Kerry and Dean, its staff displayed their ignorance by referring to the shotgun as a rifle, but later ran a correction.)

Kerry got another shot at Dean when the latter made a remark that he wanted to be “the candidate of the guys in pickup trucks with Confederate flags and gun racks.”

Kerry not only got the opportunity to paint Dean as a gun nut, but to imply that he was, if not a racist, at least insensitive to racial issues.

Which brings us for the moment to the philosophical gymnastics of the Democrats. They have to win their party’s nomination and the campaign by appealing to two different constituencies. The first, in the Democratic caucuses and primaries, will be die-hard, very liberal, yellow-dog Democrats who vote in primaries. Their views are far to the left of the people who will vote in the general election.

It is this latter group of voters—many of them traditional Democrats—who abandoned Kennedy in Iowa in 1980, House Speaker Tom Foley in Eastern Washington in 1994, and Gore in many states in 2000.

In the end it may not matter which Democratic candidate wins the nomination, what guns he or she might or might not ban. The voting public has changed a lot since Sept. 11, 2001.