From the Amendment II Democrats blog on MySpace:
The election is finally over. Come January 20, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.
And what was the key issue that put a Democrat in the Oval Office and solidified Democratic control over the House and Senate? All it takes is a perfunctory glance at the newspaper headlines and the evening news on television to find the answer. Our nation is reeling from a failing economy and a dysfunctional health-care system, both of which have been ravaged over the years by Republican incompetence. Paychecks and pensions have taken a beating. The struggle to feed one's family has gotten even tougher.
However, if you were to ask Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign, what fueled Obama's victory on Election Day, you may get a somewhat different story.
A Brady Campaign press release issued during the vote county stated that the results were "signaling stronger support for sensible gun laws in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House as well as the White House," which as frequent readers of this blog know actually means another wholesale gutting of your Second Amendment rights, US v. Heller notwithstanding. In the same press release, Helmke stated that "The gun issue has clearly lost its status as a 'wedge' issue in most places and most races," with the release inferring that the Heller ruling may be largely responsible for this development.
Helmke went even further in a second press release issued less than 12 hours later, in which he stated that "When it comes to common sense gun policies, our candidates won, the NRA's candidates lost...We know of no candidate anywhere, at any level, for any office, who lost a race because of support for common sense gun measures."
Your humble Webmaster, however, may have found one such candidate - comedian and Saturday Night Live veteran Al Franken, who is currently trailing his Republican opponent in Minnesota, Norm Coleman, in the battle for Coleman's seat in the US Senate. The two candidates debated gun control on a public affairs television program several days before the election, and Franken, despite claiming to support the Second Amendment, has voiced his support for a new Federal ban on semi-automatics.
There is an important caveat I should mention at this point. As of this morning, Franken appears to be trailing Coleman by only 477 votes out of an estimated 2.9 million votes cast in the Senate race in Minnesota. A likely recount is looming, in which Franken could very well emerge victorious. This is by no means over.
The point is that, a long time ago, I predicted that gun control could very well become a major issue in the 2008 elections, especially with the Supreme Court still considering arguments in Heller. I was not aware that the economy, though troubled at the time, would stumble as catastrophically as it did starting in August and September. So my prediction turned out to be wrong, and I'm saying it right here on this blog. Will Paul Helmke be able to do the same thing if the facts prove his claims false?
I urge you to look past the rhetoric of the Brady Campaign and its efforts, to borrow its own words, to make it harder for dangerous people (read: you) to get dangerous weapons (read: any gun design less than a hundred years old). Brady activists are still very passionate and vocal, but their funding is deteriorating, their big-ticket donors are finding greener pastures, and they've pinned their hopes on the 110th Congress (controlled by Democrats) to tighten gun laws, only to be disappointed time and time again. Just because the same old paradigm of gun control is being repackaged as "gun violence prevention" doesn't mean that we haven't noticed the retooled sales pitch.
And every Democrat who is sworn into office next year would do well to heed the following assertion. Any new attempt to gut our Second Amendment rights will fail in the same way that Prohibition failed and in the same way that California's Proposition 8 will fail - and for the same reason. Prohibition took away the freedom of Americans to consume alcohol. Proposition 8 takes away the freedom of same-sex couples in California to get married. And Paul Helmke and his fellow travellers are itching to take away your freedom as law-abiding Americans to own firearms and to use them in such a way that does not endanger the general welfare or the collective blessings of our liberty. We have just been through eight years of an administration that gave no thought to taking away the freedom of Americans in the name of "homeland security" or "the war on terror." Our nation is weary of the same old lies. It is hungry for change.
Something's got to give.