I was at the pistol range the other day and I noticed a poster at the counter from the NSSF (I refuse to link).
The poster was titled "Change we don't need" or something like that and showed Barack Obama with a bulleted list of several alleged positions he took against firearms.
Not all gun owners are paranoid, right-wing, militia types, but they seem to vote reliably Republican. Why is that, and can we change it?
Now I know the basics of the 2nd Amendment dispute (guns for a militia vs. guns for every citizen) and I know that urban folks dislike guns because of high crime rates and rural folks love guns because of hunting. But as Obama said in his DNC acceptance speech, "Don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals."
There are a lot of gun owners in America. They are typically white males and often outdoorsmen that hunt, fish, and boat (I see many of them up here in Michigan). And in every election cycle the Dems walk them straight over to the GOP.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Look at Brian Schweitzer, governor of Montana: he's a Democrat who is pro-outdoorsmen and endorsed by the NRA (of which I'm no fan). Granted, that's required in Montana politics, but so be it.
Other categories of gun owners are people that work in security occupations or the police. Police are often in unions and would oppose bad guys getting guns, but don't they typically vote GOP too? If so, can we reach them on those issues without going too far toward banning guns, the stereotypical Democratic position?
Pro-gun groups inundate gun owners with paranoid warnings about the big bad liberal government coming to castrate them take their guns away. Can we combat that message with something along the lines of what Obama said?
Are there any gun-owning Kossacks out there? Why are you still a progressive and why can't the Dems reach the rest of the pro-Second Amendment crowd?