A woman kneels at the memorial for victims of the movie theater shooting in Aurora July 25, 2012. NRA and its Colorado allies want to facilitate more of these.
Colorado Democrats
abandoned legal appeals and are gearing up to defend two state legislators targeted by gun groups as payback for tough gun safety legislation passed earlier this year:
The first two recall elections against Colorado lawmakers in the state’s history are going to happen on Sept. 10.
Just an hour after a judge ruled that recall elections against two Democratic lawmakers can move forward, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed an executive order Thursday scheduling the elections.
Roughly an hour that, both lawmakers being targeted announced that they would not be appealing Thursday’s ruling by Denver District Judge Robert Hyatt that the petitions seeking to remove Senate President John Morse of Colorado Springs and Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo are valid.
The NRA has seen much of its influence eroded this past year. They've lost the public on substantive grounds. They've had to
call in conservative reinforcements because they don't have the money to defend themselves anymore, particularly with Michael Bloomberg's and Gabby Giffords raising and spending big bucks. And their electoral efforts in 2012 were
shockingly ineffective, not to mention the root cause of their candidate losses in the IL-02 special election earlier this year.
They've lost their mojo, and this effort, which we first started covering back in May, is their attempt to get it back. It's our job to help deal the NRA yet another defeat.
In a way, we are lucky we have these guys as our enemies, since they're ... kinda fucked in the head.
Basic Freedom Defense Fund, a new 501(c)(4) non-profit group the NRA teamed up with to collect signatures for the recalls, has run into trouble, too. In April, Basic Freedom Defense Fund replaced its spokesman, Nick Andrasik, after the Colorado Springs Independent caught him referring to two female Democratic state Reps. as a "vacuous cunt" and a "stunning cunt," and a male Democratic Rep. as a "fucking retard" on a message board for AR-15 owners. And on its Facebook page, BFDF trumpets a quote from Morse in which he warns that "People who own guns are essentially a sickness on our soul." That quote is fabricated. Morse never said anything like that—although he did cite Martin Luther King to argue that violence is a "sickness."
That's who we're up against. I've long maintained that 2014 will be fought, in large part, over guns, as a desperate and cornered gun lobby fights for continued dominance. Their battle against the forces of rational gun regulation is an existentialist one—they either beat back public opinion and the Bloomberg/Giffords campaigns, or they cease to be politically relevant.
So chip in $3 to each of the two Democrats targeted by this NRA-fueled recall. Let's support those Democrats who courageously stand up to the gun lobby. If these recalls fail, so will the NRA. Big time.