Hostility toward gun rights is a question that will face political candidates of all stripes shortly as the 2008 election cycle hits high gear. The outlook, according to a panel that included Gottlieb, NRA-ILA’s Charles Cunningham, and Jim Irvine, chairman of the Buckeye Firearms Association, is not very good.
Gottlieb told the audience that every presidential candidate had been invited to the GRPC, and all but two sent regrets. Republican Ron Paul did attend to deliver a keynote address (see reported in Nov. 1 issue of Gun Week), while one Democrat “ignored us.” That Democrat was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Although Clinton has been running hard in first place so far in the Democrat race for the nomination, Gottlieb’s spirits were buoyed recently when he read an article in The American Spectator that gave several reasons for conservatives and gunowners to be optimistic. The article, written by Grover Norquist, asserted that Democrats were antagonizing too many voters without cause.
Gunowners, specially, Gottlieb said, feel like “a dagger has been pointed at us.”
“It’s always a good thing to tell your team to run scared and play hard,” he observed.
Cunningham said Republicans are probably in for a tough time in 2008, and he indicated there is a strong likelihood that the White House could go Democrat, with both houses of Congress remaining under Democrat control as well. On the plus side, many of those Democrats ran as pro-gunners, and their word may be put to the test.
As for Sen. Clinton, Cunningham noted, “It is very likely that she’s going to be the candidate’t stand another Clinton presidency.
“If there’s another Clinton presidency,” he added later, “and Democrats control both Houses, that’s when these people who won’t now talk about gun control will go after us hard. Right now they won’t go after us because they know there is a likely veto, or not pass the other house.
“Once they have the wall broken down at the White House and they are assured of a signature on bad bills,” Cunningham predicted, “they’re going to do everything they did just like in 1993 and the White House will be in a position”
In Ohio and Kentucky, Irvine reported, the picture is equally not good for Republicans. He said it appears two strongly anti-gun Democrats are “rock solid” in their districts and will be re-elected, while Ohio will lose one pro-gun lawmaker.
Anti-Gun ‘Fifth Columns’
Sunday’s conference agenda
was no less informative for the audience, which was updated on
Microstamping legislation, guns in the workplace, shooting and
hunting on public lands, the war on gun dealers and the “false
flags” of faux outdoor groups.Michel again was on stage, this time discussing the Microstamping legislation that
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law just days later. Michel called Microstamping “an unproven and easily defeated technology.” He said the most significant thing that will happen is that it may make it impossible for gun manufacturers to do business in the state.
That is what anti-gunners are ultimately after, he suggested. Their first steps were to push loaded chamber indicator mandates and magazine disconnects, which are showing up in many production guns now.
It’s all about costing gunmakers, and ultimately consumers, more money, making it economically prohibitive to build guns and equally prohibitive to purchase them.
Retired Tennessee police Officer Donald Kruse took a different tack, telling listeners that as a hunter and shooter since his youth, he has joined NRA, SAF and the CCRKBA, but was not about to join the American Hunters and Shooters Association. He said this organization fronts as a pro-gun and pro-hunting group, but is run by supporters of gun control causes.
“An unsuspecting person,” he said, “might think this is a great group to join.”
One problem Kruse sees with this group is that its name might lull unsuspecting politicians into joining, believing they are supporting a pro-gun group and claim to sportsman constituents that he is a member of the AHSA if anyone questions his gun rights credentials.
Kruse also said he will not join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) or support the American Medical Association, because both groups are decidedly anti-gun.
“Why would these anti-gun people start groups like this,” he questioned. “They cannot back their rhetoric up with facts, with the truth”
“We all need to be on guard against the wolves in sheep’s clothing,” he said.
When Rights Collide
Chuck Klein, author of Guns in the Workplace, led the next panel, telling his audience that “There is no question in my mind that any person in this room wouldn’t hesitate to place their life in jeopardy to protect me or the person sitting next to them. There are a lot of anti-gunners out there who would say they would defend others but none of them carry the means with which to do it. They might talk the talk, but they can’t, they are incapable, of walking the walk.”
With that, he launched a discussion on
how the right of self-defense, reinforced with expanded concealed
carry legislation around the country, has run into property rights
and employers’ rights.His book deals with carrying firearms in the workplace, and he said that the main theme of the book is that “if a state government through its testing and screening process has decided that you are qualified and safe enough to carry a concealed firearm in the public arena, then by what standard or background checks does an employer determine that you are not qualified to carry in his workplace?”
To counteract this, he suggested that activists promote the concept that employers be held liable for injuries that occur in the workplace as a result of people being denied their right of self-defense. This principle certainly applies to college and university campuses, said Michael Flitcraft, a campus coordinator of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at the University of Cincinnati. One of the organizers of October’s controversial “Empty Holster Protest,” Flitcraft said the effort called attention to the fact that crime is rising on college campuses and people are getting hurt. But instead of addressing the issue, college administrations uniformly oppose the notion of legal concealed carry on their campuses.
Flitcraft’s ultimate goal is to see measures passed in all of the states, or by Congress, that would okay concealed carry by legally armed students and instructors on college campuses.
No Home on the Range
Although the problem should have been solved long ago, there is still an issue in some national forests around the country regarding recreational shooting. A panel consisting of Ohio attorney Michael Moran, Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), and Gun Week Senior Editor Dave Workman tackled that issue.
Moran told the audience that he became frustrated with the political system and the courts, and as a representative of shooting ranges, he has discovered how difficult it is to keep such facilities open. One case in Ohio’s Madison County is a good example of how shooting ranges are being hounded by anti-gunners in an effort to shut them down. There, a facility called the Big Darby Creek Shooting Range, a family-owned business, has been tangled up in red tape generated by a large non-profit group that seeks to have the range shut down on a zoning issue. Incredibly, this group is part of a larger corporation that gets some funding from the Pentagon.
Anti-gunners, he said, will dream up all kinds of ways to interfere with gunowners, and tying them up in litigation is just one way. Ranges have been under attack in this country for several years, he noted, adding, “If we don’t have any place to shoot, it doesn’t matter if we have guns.”
Van Cleave noted that the effort is still in progress to get a change in laws and regulations that will make it possible for legally-armed citizens to carry defensive handguns in national parks. A petition to the National Park Service asking for the change was ultimately rejected, in a cavalier fashion, and he recalled that “there are people in the Department of Interior who were actually quite livid at the flippant rejection of our petition.”
In its rejection, the park service claimed that right-to-carry laws do not reduce crime, but they offered no data to support that argument, Van Cleave said. The letter also claimed, he said, that armed citizens would be a greater danger if they tried to assist a ranger in an emergency.
Virginia gun rights activists angrily flooded the Interior Department’s telephone lines. When the VCDL asked for background information on the park situation, he said it took the NPS four months to respond. Finally, when asked where they got their information about defensive firearms use, he said, “they had to admit that they had nothing to show.”
The same can be said for shooting in the national forests, an issue that was supposed to have been cleared up earlier this year with a memorandum to forest rangers from the USFS headquarters in Washington, DC. But Workman told the audience that at least in one Colorado ranger district, where the controversy actually started more than two years ago, there remains considerable resistance to allowing recreational shooting.
The memorandum should have stopped rangers and enforcement officers from prohibiting shooting within 150 yards of a road on the argument that a road is an “occupied area” as defined under a regulation known as 36 CFR 261.10. Under terms of the memorandum, roads are not to be considered occupied areas.
Workman said the “moral” to this story is that activists must pay attention to what bureaucrats are doing, so that they do not “make up their own rules.”
Targeting Gun Dealers
Anti-gunners mount several strategies and one of them is to target gun dealers with public protests, as has happened in Chicago, IL, suburbs, reported Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA).
There, at Chuck’s Gun Shop in suburban
Riverdale, Jesse Jackson and anti-gun Catholic priest Michael
Pfleger earlier this year mounted a series of protests that landed
both in jail, and on the pages of newspapers all over the country.
Pearson warned that what Jackson and his cronies have done at
Chuck’s will spread across the country.“People look at Illinois and California and they say, ‘Man, I’m glad I don’t have to put up with that stuff’,” Pearson said. “Let me tell you something. It’s coming to you.”
There were at least three protests at Chuck’s, and when Jackson was finally arrested, Pearson said he was carrying more than $25,000 in cash in his pockets. What that tells Pearson is that this effort is well-financed, at least for its leadership.
Another Illinois resident, Colleen Lawson, founder of Gun Owners Against Violence, told her story. A Chicago resident, Lawson has done battle with Jackson and other anti-gunners. She became involved in the gun rights battle after her life was endangered and she wanted to buy a gun. She learned that in Chicago, buying a handgun is impossible, and she did not want to opt for a shotgun.
She started looking at legislation that prevents her from owning a handgun in Chicago, and learned that Jackson would be protesting at Chuck’s. She called Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition office and asked if they could provide evidence that Chuck’s had been the source of scores of crime guns, and eventually she was referred to information that had been gleaned from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that had been so badly misinterpreted that ATF disavowed it.
Lawson reminded the audience that gun control originally was used as a means to keep free blacks from obtaining firearms for self-defense against white racists. She wondered why Jackson never told Chicago-area blacks about a group called the Deacons, who went armed in an effort to prevent violent racist acts against others in the black community.
She formed Gun Owners Against Violence after noting that the term “gun violence” is misleading.
“Take away the gun, you still have violence,” she said. “Take away the violence, you have nothing but a gun.”
Identify ‘False Flags’
The final panel discussion of this year’s GRPC was something of a warning to activists to beware of organizations that claim to support gun rights and gun safety, but are actually false fronts for gun control.
SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joe Tartaro noted that “People behind the anti-gun movement will go in any direction to correct the political imbalance they see and try to undercut the efforts of the NRA, GOA, CCRKBA and other state and local pro-gun groups.”
He said it is no secret that Democrats lost the 2000 election because of their losses in three key states where gun ownership is widespread. Those states included Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee.
He also said trade unions are working hard to keep their members from drifting to the Republican side of the ballot, and have begun working with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Alliance (TRCA) on a project aimed at these union members called “USA” for Union Sportsman Alliance.
TRCA was created in 1999 with funds largely supplied by the Pew Foundation, and Tartaro said the problem with a group created with influence of union bosses, who traditionally urge their members to vote for Democrats, is that “Their concept of being pro-gun is that you can have a gun for hunting and recreation.”
He also noted that leading Democrats are giving lip service to gun rights, claiming to “support the Second Amendment.”
“What do they mean,” he questioned.
Tartaro cautioned the audience about TRCA’s philosophy, which seems largely aimed at preserving lands for people to hunt, but not necessarily preserving shooting ranges or personal self-defense.
Tartaro was joined on the panel by attorney and self-described former gun lobbyist Richard Feldman, author of the just-released Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist. The book is highly critical of the NRA for its fund-raising practices and some political machinations, and Feldman wrote it from the perspective of a one-time insider who became an outsider and finally a pariah.
Feldman quickly moved to set the record straight by proclaiming, “I’m a traditional liberal. I believe in the liberal ownership of guns and the liberal use of guns.
“And,” he continued, “while we’re on that subject, I am a charter member of PETA, People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.”
Of his book, Feldman modestly noted, “I am sure all will agree with some things, and disagree with others. That’s called the First Amendment.”
His primary message was one learned during the final days of the Cold War when then-President Ronald Reagan coined the phrase, “Trust, but verify.” He related how he had been involved in gun rights politics in New Jersey against anti-gun Gov. Jim Florio, and found that contrary to popular belief, police in the Garden State are not anti-gun.
“What they meant by gun control and what I meant by gun control were two different things,” Feldman recalled. “They were equating gun control with crime control.”
Feldman said that the battle over gun rights is not about Democrats versus Republicans, “the fight is about winning the hearts and minds of the American people.” He noted that Gen. Douglas McArthur won in the Pacific during WWII not by fighting every battle, but by picking his battlegrounds, moving forward and often not fighting a battle but winning the ultimate victory.
“What’s the big picture” he asked rhetorically. “It’s winning the war, not necessarily winning a big battle.”
Responding to Tartaro’s question about what Democrats mean when they claim to “support the Second Amendment,” Workman wrapped up the panel, and the conference, by explaining, “I do not support the Second Amendment. I live it.”
Observing that he is a deer and elk hunter, he recounted an incident in St. Louis during the April NRA convention in which AHSA President Ray Schoenke denied an NRA film crew admission to an AHSA press conference at a hotel near the convention center. Workman witnessed the confrontation from a few feet away, and immediately after the conference—which Schoenke claimed the NRA had tried to get the hotel to cancel—he checked with hotel management and was told that no such attempt had been made by the NRA.
He said that this claim was “a canard, a prevarication, a lie,” and that it is cause for anyone to question everything else this organization may claim.
The 23rd annual GRPC is scheduled for Phoenix, AZ, Sept. 26-28, 2008. Gun Week will provide details as they are finalized.