| New West's Bill Schneider writes a solid regular column on the outdoors. It's recently jumped into the controversy sparked by Jim Zumbo's comments on guns. This week, it looks at gun control and the Democrats.
Schneider is worried about a bill that has been introduced by a NY Democrat that is rallying the NRA crowd to hate Dems again. The bill is an assault weapons ban. Schneider writes about it more out of fear that it will bring back an anti-outdoor party than that it is bad policy. I have no real idea on the policy, share Schneider's fear, and just really don't identify much with the gun control movement.
All that said, the folks making this bill into a big deal seem to have missed the fact that it probably has no chance of passage. I'd be surprised if it even comes up for a vote.
That said, there's a way to avoid these problems. That's for hunters and other sportsmen and women to start a PAC that, unlike the Leagues of Conservation Voters, makes 2nd Amendment rights a key test and that, unlike the NRA, makes protecting the environment a key test.
The problem for sportsmen and women is that the NRA doesn't really have their back because it only cares about half of the real needs of hunters. Slowly, the people who most ardently defend gun rights have come to do it not out of a love of hunting, but out of a paranoia over the need to fend off government. For these folks, protecting public land isn't really a priority.
A sportsmen organization, structured properly (even as a separate political party if this state had embraced fusion), could make a huge impact on elections and could effectively fight anything like this New York bill that would threaten that work. |
