> They will spend $40MM to swift boat Obama.
I seem to remember John Kerry running an ad that said that if I wanted to
know what kind of man he was, I should listen to the men who had served
with him. It was Kerry himself who created the issue.
As for Obama, his problems with gun owners are of his own creation.
http://www.icadp.org/page236.html
Each candidate supported closing loopholes that allow gun shows to sell
weapons to unauthorized buyers. Each also advocated the renewal of a
federal ban on the sale of assault weapons, which expires in September.
Obama, however, called for a host of new gun-control measures:
strengthening the assault-weapons ban to include high-capacity clips made
prior to 1994; holding parents criminally responsible for children who
injure someone with a gun found in the home; placing trigger locks on all
guns; and allowing gun buyers to purchase only one weapon per month.
Hynes advocated increasing penalties for crimes committed with a gun, and
Hull would increase funding to update technology that provides instant
background checks on gun buyers.
All of the candidates, except Hynes, said they opposed allowing citizens
to carry concealed weapons. Hynes and Chico said states, not the federal
government, should regulate the matter.
"I consider this an issue for the states to decide, not the federal
government," Chico said.
Obama disagreed. He backed federal legislation that would ban citizens
from carrying weapons, except for law enforcement. He cited Texas as an
example of a place where a law allowing people to carry weapons has
"malfunctioned" because hundreds of people granted licenses had prior
convictions.
"National legislation will prevent other states' flawed concealed-weapons
laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents," Obama said.
--
As a civil rights worker in a Southern state during the early 1960s, I
[...] learned what value to place on the pseudo-pacifism (I have too
much respect for genuine pacifists to call this real) of those who see
no difference between aggression and self-defense. Driving South, I had
been accompanied by another new civil rights worker bound for another
state. Proclaiming himself an ethical pacifist, he was appalled that I
carried guns for self-defense. When we met a few months later, I still
believed in self-defense. He now believed in terrorism and assassination.
The philosophy of self-defense prepares one to evaluate realistically a
potentially violent world and respond with a minimum degree of violence
necessary to cope with it. His philosophy having not so prepared him,
he had perforce to abandon it. People who are unable to discriminate
between defensive violence and aggression are unlikely, if they come
to believe violence necessary, to be very discriminating about its use.
A little-remember fact is that all the white members of the Symbionese
Liberation Army started out not as "macho gun nuts", but of pacifists
of the flower-child type. The failure of their rosy dreams that all
obstacles can be surmounted, all prejudices and differences of viewpoint
reconciled, through "good vibes" and effusions of love, lead them to
equally unrealistic dreams of salvation through blood and death.
- Don B. Kates, Jr. "Restricting Handguns, The Liberal
Skeptics Speak Out"
