When Is a Gunowner Database Not a Registry?
November 20, 2004

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The bitter presidential election campaign that began so long ago is finally over. The people have chosen to reelect the Bush-Cheney ticket for a second term. This time the Republican candidates won both the popular vote and are expected to win the Electoral College vote in December; by either measure they won enough votes to insure four more years.

Of course, the people who were enraged by the outcome of the Bush-Gore race four years ago-and have been spewing their anger and hatred ever since-are still angry. Like many Democratic Party leaders, they still don't get it.

More than one Kerry voter-probably also Gore voters-are wondering how so many Americans can be so wrong. They cannot fathom how anyone could vote for President Bush and Vice President Cheney. They don't represent everyone who voted for the Kerry-Edwards ticket, but they are the hard core of the opposition who helped make much of the recent campaign so vitriolic.

Among them, you would probably have to include Michael Moore, George Soros, the Hollywood elite on and off stage, the anti-gun community, and a generous amount of the general media. They were convinced that they were right and the rest of the country was wrong.

What probably enrages them the most is that Bush won reelection against the deck they had stacked. Soros spent millions to defeat Bush; he financed 527 organizations that battered the Bush Administration by circumventing campaign finance laws; he also set up websites targeting Bush.

Moore raised money to finance his spurious anti-Bush propaganda movie, which millions paid to see in theaters and which still sits on the shelves of every video/DVD movie rental outlet in America.

Broadcast and print journalists did their worst-or best, depending on your viewpoint-to make the Bush-Cheney Administration look as bad as they could, while sugarcoating the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Even the pollsters got into the act.

But in the end, as the returns started coming in, they were still surprised by the vote tallies.

"Obviously, I am distressed at the outcome of the election," Soros said on his website, before heading overseas to make enough money to replace what he spent trying to deny Bush four more years.

Throughout the primaries and the long run-up to the Nov. 2 balloting, John Kerry and John Edwards kept claiming that America is dangerously divided and they kept harping on "the two Americas theme."

In their minds, and the minds of all of their supporters in the Democratic Party, the media and the Brady Campaign and Americans for Gun Safety, they define the two Americas in economic terms, a division between the rich and the non-rich, the haves and have-nots, the red states and the blue states. They were aware of the political history of the gun rights movement, but they thought they could finesse it with "Kerry, the hunter."

Others looked at the maps of the United States divided by color and saw different answers. Many, particularly religious leaders both black and white, saw the division in moral terms that the Bush campaign tried to identify as "values."

I see the colors not in economic terms, but in cultural, or values, terms. When you look at the map you see that, population aside, the greatest land mass and the vast majority of the states are red. Except for that upper pocket in the Midwest, the blue states are on the Pacific Coast and the Northeast.

The blue states are the areas of the country in which a majority of the population is defined by Prof. William Tonso and other scholars as the "cosmopolitan" culture. In this case cosmopolitan is more easily identified with elitist and trendy European values. Family, religion, customs, pastimes and activities are largely different from the "bedrock" red states that are more analogous to traditional American values.

The traditions and values of Hollywood, the media, academia and Democrat leadership are so different from those of the bedrock American mainland that they cannot understand what motivates the more conservative Republican core.

There are many of these "values," but among the core ideals of bedrock America is personal independence, a suspicion of big government, thriftiness, freedom of worship, and the right to keep and bear arms for sport and protection.

When any of these values are threatened by the cosmopolitan elite, exemplified by Kerry and Edwards, the heartland Americans circle the wagons and close ranks.

Of course, America is a homogeneous country; there are vast areas of overlap. In New York state, where I live, the majority went for Kerry, but not everybody by a long shot. When you check the returns, you can identify the towns or districts that went big for Bush and more conservative Republican candidates.

Americans who saw their culture, their values and not just economic factors at risk, closed ranks behind Bush, even though many were dissatisfied with some of his policy decisions, including the war in Iraq.

These people saw that Kerry was not really a hunter or gunowner, at least not like them. His long anti-gun voting record aside, he didn't look right in the costumes and he didn't speak their language.

Gunowner activists got out and worked for Bush and other pro-gun candidates, and they helped swell the huge turnout. Other people with a bedrock culture turned out to vote for Bush and to vote the straight bedrock ticket on other issues, including same sex marriage, which was on the ballot in 11 states.

The election really turned on values and cultural questions like gun rights. And it appears that Kerry represented a different culture to a majority of Americans. He was more in tune with his supporters in Hollywood and the media who thought the hunting masquerade was a great trick they were playing on the rubes.

Have they learned anything? Time will tell.