LAS VEGAS (AP) — Like many liberals, Lara Smith considers herself a feminist, favors abortion rights and believes the nation’s immigration policies under the Trump administration have just been “vile.”
But when it comes to guns, Smith sounds more like a conservative: She opposes reviving the nation's assault weapons ban, enacting red-flag laws or creating a registry of firearms. The 48-year-old California lawyer owns a cache of firearms, from pistols to rifles such as the AR-15.
Smith and liberal gun owners like her face a quandary as voting in the Democratic primary intensifies with Super Tuesday next week. They are nervous about some of the gun control measures the Democratic candidates are pushing and are unsure who to trust on this issue.
“You’re alienating a huge part of your constituency,” Smith says of the Democratic field’s gun proposals. “You have a huge constituency that is looking for something different and when you are talking about restricting a right which is so different than everything else you talk about, you are being anti-liberal.”
Gun owners have long been seen as a solidly Republican voting bloc, but there are millions of Democrats who own firearms, too.
Many of them are feeling increasingly disillusioned by their party as it lurches toward the left on the Second Amendment, but they're also wary of President Donald Trump for a variety of reasons: his conservative leanings but a track record in office that has led to several gun restrictions, such as the banning of bump stocks.
An estimated 23 percent of Democrats nationally lived in households with guns in 2018, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. And roughly 20 percent of gun owners — about 12 million people — identify as liberal, according to results from survey between 2014 and 2018. More than a third describe themselves as moderates while just under 45 percent call themselves conservatives.
The liberals who are opposed to gun control are at odds with a broader trend among Democrats when it comes to tougher firearms restrictions. According to polling by Gallup last year, 88 percent of Democrats said laws governing firearm sales should be made more strict, up from 77 percent in 2015 and 63 percent in 2010.
The political dilemma for Democratic gun owners grew when former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg entered the campaign. Bloomberg heads one of the most politically active gun control groups and has spent vast sums of money pushing his agenda in races around the country.
All the Democrats running for president are seeking one form or another of gun restrictions. But current frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders finds himself under attack for being too pro gun. Bloomberg launched an attack on Sanders' gun record this week, noting he had been endorsed by the NRA earlier in his career and balked at expanding background checks.
The candidates brought up guns on several occasions during Tuesday's debate in South Carolina, held in the city that lived through the mass murder of nine black church goers by a white supremacist in 2015.
David Yamane, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture, said polarization over the issue began in the 1970s in the wake of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which was enacted amid national outcry over the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Subsequent efforts by the NRA to seize on gun rights as a partisan issue only heightened the divide.
Before that, gun politics wasn't divided so sharply on political lines. One Democratic president, John F. Kennedy, was actually a member of the National Rifle Association.
Liberal gun owners, Yamane said, are generally newer to gun ownership and are less likely to be the stereotypical face of gun owners: older, white men. It's a dynamic that doesn’t “get as much play because the public/political ‘face’ of gun owners for many remains Wayne LaPierre,” the firebrand leader of the NRA.
Yamane himself is part of the Democratic gun-loving public, describing himself as a “liberal snowflake gun owner."
Kat Ellsworth, from Chicago, was firmly against firearms and favored gun-control until just a few years ago, when she went with a friend to a gun range and discovered a love for guns and shooting.
As she looks at the upcoming election, she’s torn as a self-described liberal and registered Democrat. With the Illinois primary approaching in mid-March, she is leaning toward Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, two candidates whose gun-control positions she doesn't believe are all that rigid.
“They were both slower than others to develop and make public their proposals for gun control policies, and I believe the reason is that both of them are really not as anti-gun as they are forced to show publicly,” she said.
If she could give Democratic presidential candidates any advice, she said, it would be this: “I feel like they would really gain a lot more votes if they would just drop the gun-control crap.”
The Democratic stance on guns is directed at multiple constituencies — suburban voters horrified by school shootings and urban voters fed up with gun violence in their neighborhoods.
When it comes to black voters, Kevin Dixie sees guns in a different light. An African American, Dixie grew up in St. Louis and experienced firsthand the toll of gun violence.
He believes that gun rights are about empowering communities of color and ensuring freedom is available to every American, regardless of race, ethnicity or gender. He runs a firearms training business called No Other Choice.
One of his aims is to turn around the perception of firearms, especially within minority and urban communities, as being something that is only for criminals or police.
“This is much deeper than guns,” Dixie said. “It’s not just about owning a gun, it’s about maintaining your freedom, and we shouldn’t be politicizing it."
Less than a week before the California primary, Smith is she's still unsure who she'll vote for. At the top of her list are Sanders and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, two candidates she believes gun owners could at least have a conversation with. But she worries about the impact a Bloomberg candidacy might have on the Democratic field, pushing them even more vigorously toward gun-control.
“I think liberal gun owners have no good choice here,” she said.
Not one explanation of why they believe there shouldn’t be “red flag laws” or why there shouldn’t be an assault weapons ban or a gun registry. If they’re “responsible” gun owners, what’s the issue for them? Nobody is going to take away their “freedom” and yet “there’s no other choice?” Sounds like gun nutters from the other side. Nothing can be done. Hopes and prayers.
I m definitely not a fan of red flag laws. A very slippery slope imo.
Do you make threats to your wife or kids? Co-workers? Smack them around a little first? Threaten to shoot them if they don't pick up their toys or don't clean the bathroom or cook your steak just as you like? Threaten to shoot the store clerk who doesn't give you your change fast enough? Wave a gun around when someone cuts you off in traffic? No, of course not. You seem by all intent and from your posts, to be a "responsible" gun owner. What is the slippery slope you're worried about regarding red flag laws?
Nearly 1 million women in the U.S. today who have survived being shot or shot at by an intimate partner share Cretain’s journey, researchers say. Yet, more than two decades after Cretain’s shooting, women and children in the U.S. are hardly any safer from domestic abuse or from violence outside the home by intimate partners—and guns are largely to blame. Intimate partner homicides that involve firearms are increasing, research shows, while those involving other weapons, like knives, are falling. Between 2010 and 2017, intimate partner homicides that involved guns increased by 26%, a study found in March.
According to new data released Thursday by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, 80% of children killed in mass shootings—defined as those in which at least four people other than the shooter died—were shot in incidents tied to family or intimate partner violence between 2009 and 2018. In a recent murder-suicide that shook the community, a Massachusetts man shot and killed his wife and their three children—an 11-year-old girl and 9-year-old twins—before turning the gun on himself, authorities said. The family of five was found dead in its Abington, Mass. home.
Jewish identity is not an issue that is part of this campaign, so it's irrelevant. And stupid. Might as well use white, messy hair as a point. It's just as relevant.
My problem with red flag laws is that due process is taken away. I understand why the law is put in place and do see some advantages/saving people lives but like I said, it is a slippery slope.
Jewish identity is not an issue that is part of this campaign, so it's irrelevant. And stupid. Might as well use white, messy hair as a point. It's just as relevant.
Would also make my point.
"Mostly I think that people react sensitively because they know you’ve got a point"
On Feb. 18, Bloomberg News published an article with the headline "Bloomberg Campaign Says It's a Two-Man Race for the Nomination." Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeted the link with the caption, "It's almost as if he owns the media." Cruz was trying to point out that the flattering headline appeared in an outlet that former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg owns, rendering its judgment suspect. But in replacing a demonstrative pronoun ("this media") with a definite article ("the media"), Cruz skidded from a true statement (Mike Bloomberg does own Bloomberg News) into an old anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews controlling the — or really all — media.
It might have seemed like a harbinger of what's to come: This Democratic primary contest is, after all, a historic race for American Jews. The other man in the "Two-Man Race for the Nomination" is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an avowed socialist and another Jew, who looks like the front-runner after coasting through the first three contests, itself a historic feat for a Jewish candidate. The faceoff between the Jewish billionaire and the Jewish socialist is the most Jewish political moment in American history, and predictionshaveabounded that a wave of hatred is about to hit as the two gain steam, evoking mythological anti-Semitic creatures to rapacious anti-Semites: The Elder of Zion and the Judeo-Bolshevik in a race for control of America! The Daily Stormer headlines write themselves.
I'm not as worried. To me, Cruz's infelicitous tweet read like the kind of unfortunate mistake you make when you forget someone is Jewish, rather than when you target them for it. While Jews may see two 78-year-old Jewish men running against each other (arguing about who's had more stents and who has more houses, like at the kiddush in a Conservative shul), that's not how America writ large perceives this race. Sanders and Bloomberg are barely registering in mainstream politics as Jewish. It's a remarkable, final gift from the goldeneh medinah — the golden land, as Yiddish-speaking immigrants once called the United States — at a time when American Jews have never needed it more.
Take, for example, the recentvandalism of Bloomberg's campaign offices with epithets including "racist," "sexist," "oligarch" and "corporate pig." Yes, Bloomberg is Jewish, and yes, some of the insults were about his wealth, but none of the graffiti was anti-Semitic. The hatred seemingly fueling the vandalism was based on class warfare, not race or religion; the vandals clearly didn't target Bloomberg as a Jew but as a billionaire, and well, they apparently believe it's time to "Eat the Rich," as they spray-painted on the Flint, Mich., headquarters.
The vandalism is just the most extreme example of something true across the board when it comes to Bloomberg: Most of the criticism he faces, aside from censure over the racist stop-and-frisk policy he instituted as mayor, focuses on his staggering wealth and how he's used it to buy power and influence. That is a familiar Jewish stereotype, yet it's not anti-Semitic in this case because Bloomberg's Jewishness is completely irrelevant; he's accused of these things not because he's Jewish but because he's Bloomberg. Anti-Semitic canards are based on generalizations and myths. This critique is specific.
Sanders, too, seems to exist in the American imagination independent from his Jewishness. Take the myriadarticles exploring his popularity among Latinos, many of whom call him Tío Bernie, the articles tell us, despite the fact that he is a "white, 78-year-old senator from Vermont." The mystery these articles seek to solve is never how young Latinos could identify with an old Jew or even an old white Jew, but how they could identify with an old white guy and how they came to claim him as one of their own. The narrative erases Sanders's Jewish identity.
single issue voter
says more about you, than the choices you have been presented with
would rather feed into wedge issues division politics inability to step back look at the big picture
congrats
People even having a thing like Guns being an issue is and I guess never will not be mindblowing to me.
It like if someone would have "Cars" as an issue.
Chuck Todd: But Mr candidate, you are avoiding the question -- in 1984 you voted for having seatbelts on being a law. Did you not?
Candidate: All I can tell you Todd, is that I have a D minus grade from the seatbelt lobby. Okey?
WE CAN'T MAKE HAVING GUNS IN SOCIETY SAFER AND MORE SOUND BECAUSE REASONS
You know what's funny (but not really haha funny) is that the only place, the ONLY place I've seen the gun issue entering conversation related to the Democratic primary is this Pearl Jam, A Moving Train forum. This place seems to be obsessed with the whole gun thing. Weird, just weird.
People even having a thing like Guns being an issue is and I guess never will not be mindblowing to me.
It like if someone would have "Cars" as an issue.
Chuck Todd: But Mr candidate, you are avoiding the question -- in 1984 you voted for having seatbelts on being a law. Did you not?
Candidate: All I can tell you Todd, is that I have a D minus grade from the seatbelt lobby. Okey?
WE CAN'T MAKE HAVING GUNS IN SOCIETY SAFER AND MORE SOUND BECAUSE REASONS
You know what's funny (but not really haha funny) is that the only place, the ONLY place I've seen the gun issue entering conversation related to the Democratic primary is this Pearl Jam, A Moving Train forum. This place seems to be obsessed with the whole gun thing. Weird, just weird.
All those fans who bought this shirt in the early 90s...
... and were all "1 out of 10 is pretty good, but hopefully we can make it 2 out of 10 in the future"
"Mostly I think that people react sensitively because they know you’ve got a point"
single issue voter
says more about you, than the choices you have been presented with
would rather feed into wedge issues division politics inability to step back look at the big picture
congrats
I m not a single issue voter at all. I just agree with the article.
What is the argument for not having election day on a weekend (saturday/sunday) when the most people are free from work?
The argument is the same argument that Is the cause of most problems with American politics...
”That’s how they’ve always done it.”
Elections should be on weekends and/or make Election Day in November a holiday....or make Veterans Day and Election Day the same day to kill two patriotic birds with one stone.
I‘m lucky that my polling place is a church basement where you’re right in and right out. But for folks in bigger cities? They wait in lines that could be hours. It’s a joke.
Polls open six am and close at 8 or 9 and we have absentee ballots. No need to switch Election Day. Find five minutes and vote.
It's not 5 minutes on general election day. It took me over an hour because of the lines. It should be weekends or a national holiday.
It shouldn’t take that long to vote. If we weren’t a “I want it now” culture...multiple day voting would help. I would agree re:weekend. But look how weird people got about not getting iowa results instantaneously
Comments
Biden won by cheating with that "using the flute in Super Mario Bros 3"-endorsement and having every third word be "Obama".
NO CHEATERS IN THE WHITE HOUSE 2020.
There is a humbleness in Joe that I dig. Comes of really good here. The surge has begun, all the way to the presidency:
Nearly 1 million women in the U.S. today who have survived being shot or shot at by an intimate partner share Cretain’s journey, researchers say. Yet, more than two decades after Cretain’s shooting, women and children in the U.S. are hardly any safer from domestic abuse or from violence outside the home by intimate partners—and guns are largely to blame. Intimate partner homicides that involve firearms are increasing, research shows, while those involving other weapons, like knives, are falling. Between 2010 and 2017, intimate partner homicides that involved guns increased by 26%, a study found in March.
According to new data released Thursday by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, 80% of children killed in mass shootings—defined as those in which at least four people other than the shooter died—were shot in incidents tied to family or intimate partner violence between 2009 and 2018. In a recent murder-suicide that shook the community, a Massachusetts man shot and killed his wife and their three children—an 11-year-old girl and 9-year-old twins—before turning the gun on himself, authorities said. The family of five was found dead in its Abington, Mass. home.
https://time.com/5702435/domestic-violence-gun-violence/
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
This is the most Jewish election in U.S. history. Amazingly, no one cares.
Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg are running for president not as Jews, but as Americans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/this-is-the-most-jewish-election-in-us-history-amazingly-no-one-cares/2020/02/27/24672dfc-58e2-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.htmlOn Feb. 18, Bloomberg News published an article with the headline "Bloomberg Campaign Says It's a Two-Man Race for the Nomination." Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeted the link with the caption, "It's almost as if he owns the media." Cruz was trying to point out that the flattering headline appeared in an outlet that former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg owns, rendering its judgment suspect. But in replacing a demonstrative pronoun ("this media") with a definite article ("the media"), Cruz skidded from a true statement (Mike Bloomberg does own Bloomberg News) into an old anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews controlling the — or really all — media.
It might have seemed like a harbinger of what's to come: This Democratic primary contest is, after all, a historic race for American Jews. The other man in the "Two-Man Race for the Nomination" is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an avowed socialist and another Jew, who looks like the front-runner after coasting through the first three contests, itself a historic feat for a Jewish candidate. The faceoff between the Jewish billionaire and the Jewish socialist is the most Jewish political moment in American history, and predictions have abounded that a wave of hatred is about to hit as the two gain steam, evoking mythological anti-Semitic creatures to rapacious anti-Semites: The Elder of Zion and the Judeo-Bolshevik in a race for control of America! The Daily Stormer headlines write themselves.
I'm not as worried. To me, Cruz's infelicitous tweet read like the kind of unfortunate mistake you make when you forget someone is Jewish, rather than when you target them for it. While Jews may see two 78-year-old Jewish men running against each other (arguing about who's had more stents and who has more houses, like at the kiddush in a Conservative shul), that's not how America writ large perceives this race. Sanders and Bloomberg are barely registering in mainstream politics as Jewish. It's a remarkable, final gift from the goldeneh medinah — the golden land, as Yiddish-speaking immigrants once called the United States — at a time when American Jews have never needed it more.
Take, for example, the recent vandalism of Bloomberg's campaign offices with epithets including "racist," "sexist," "oligarch" and "corporate pig." Yes, Bloomberg is Jewish, and yes, some of the insults were about his wealth, but none of the graffiti was anti-Semitic. The hatred seemingly fueling the vandalism was based on class warfare, not race or religion; the vandals clearly didn't target Bloomberg as a Jew but as a billionaire, and well, they apparently believe it's time to "Eat the Rich," as they spray-painted on the Flint, Mich., headquarters.
The vandalism is just the most extreme example of something true across the board when it comes to Bloomberg: Most of the criticism he faces, aside from censure over the racist stop-and-frisk policy he instituted as mayor, focuses on his staggering wealth and how he's used it to buy power and influence. That is a familiar Jewish stereotype, yet it's not anti-Semitic in this case because Bloomberg's Jewishness is completely irrelevant; he's accused of these things not because he's Jewish but because he's Bloomberg. Anti-Semitic canards are based on generalizations and myths. This critique is specific.
Sanders, too, seems to exist in the American imagination independent from his Jewishness. Take the myriad articles exploring his popularity among Latinos, many of whom call him Tío Bernie, the articles tell us, despite the fact that he is a "white, 78-year-old senator from Vermont." The mystery these articles seek to solve is never how young Latinos could identify with an old Jew or even an old white Jew, but how they could identify with an old white guy and how they came to claim him as one of their own. The narrative erases Sanders's Jewish identity.
article continues on web site
says more about you, than the choices you have been presented with
would rather feed into wedge issues division politics
inability to step back look at the big picture
congrats
It like if someone would have "Cars" as an issue.
Chuck Todd: But Mr candidate, you are avoiding the question -- in 1984 you voted for having seatbelts on being a law. Did you not?
Candidate: All I can tell you Todd, is that I have a D minus grade from the seatbelt lobby. Okey?
WE
CAN'T
MAKE
HAVING
GUNS IN SOCIETY
SAFER AND MORE SOUND
BECAUSE
REASONS
You know what's funny (but not really haha funny) is that the only place, the ONLY place I've seen the gun issue entering conversation related to the Democratic primary is this Pearl Jam, A Moving Train forum. This place seems to be obsessed with the whole gun thing. Weird, just weird.
... and were all "1 out of 10 is pretty good, but hopefully we can make it 2 out of 10 in the future"
WHERE IS YANG?!
”That’s how they’ve always done it.”
Elections should be on weekends and/or make Election Day in November a holiday....or make Veterans Day and Election Day the same day to kill two patriotic birds with one stone.
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
A democratic government should create as few hurdles as possible to participating.