VOTE FOR HUNTING AND WILDLIFE, NOT THE NRA

Hunters, Look Beyond the End of Your Gun Barrel

By Bill Schneider, 7-09-08

Has anybody heard that we have a big election coming up? And that in the wake of the historic Scalia opinion in the D.C. v. Heller case, gun rights might be a big issue in the campaign, especially in key western “swing states” such as Colorado, Montana and New Mexico? 

Republicans obviously believe they can win these and other western states on the gun issue alone. But I think most hunters can see beyond the end of their gun barrels.

Before the ink in Scalia’s signature had dried, the NRA, which for politicians stands for National Republican Army and for hunters means Not Really an Ally, hit the airways with promises to spend $40 million to defeat Barack Obama. I’ve been criticizing for saying the National Rifle Association has “endorsed” John McCain when the nation’s largest and most powerful gun lobby only plans to spend millions to defeat his opponent. Well, pardon me if I can’t see the difference.

The primary stated reason for going after Obama? So he couldn’t appoint anti-gun justices to the Supreme Court.

Let’s dispense with the gun issue right now. Obama isn’t pro-gun, nor is he anti-gun. He’s like most of us who live here in the New West. He supports the Second Amendment but wants what he calls “common sense” guns laws, which is roughly what we have now as the law of the land. But such “common sense” talk scares gun rights activists about as much as talk of a “balanced” wilderness bill scares me.

The NRA gave Obama an “F” rating, compared to McCain’s “C+,” so nobody is going to pretend Obama will get support from those who think any gun law violates their basic freedoms. Hunters and sporting groups, on the other hand, have a lot of powerful reasons to support Obama.

Two weeks ago, I posted an article about the American Hunters and Shooters Association, the bane of the NRA because it’s not just pro-gun but unlike the NRA, also pro-hunter, when the two-year-old group broke away from the radical gun rights pack and endorsed Obama. The reason? Obama’s strong support for issues vital to the future of hunting and because he poses no threat to the individual’s right to bear arms.

So, if you’re a single-issue voter, only caring about your guns and convinced government agents will arrive soon to register or confiscate them, vote for your lesser of two evils. But if you care about issues like protecting wildlife habitat so we can have something to hunt, improving hunting access, promoting alternatives to fossil fuels, keeping roadless lands roadless, reforming the 136-year-old mining law, preventing the republicans from selling off public lands, and many other conservation issues threatening the future of hunting, you might want to, as Barack Obama has already told us thousands of times, vote for change.

Obama supports the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, the backbone of wildlife management in United States, because it proclaims that wildlife is in the public trust, not owned by private landowners. That right there should be enough for hunters support Obama, but there is a lot more.

The League of Conservation Voters, not exactly a hunting group but still the nation’s best ranking of encironmental voting records, gave Obama an unimpressive 67 percent rating. Meanwhile, McCain received a perfect score, zero.

The last eight years, under the leadership of the Emperor (aka George W. Bush) and his apprentice Darth Vader (aka Richard B. Cheney), have been an all-time low for conservationists trying to protect wild land and wildlife habitat. Along the way the numbers of hunters have continued to decline, as has the amount of huntable land.

John McCain has a moderate flair about him and definitely won’t be an arch-enemy of environmental laws, which is what we now have, but since locking up his party’s nomination, he has changed several positions to be in line with those dictated under the regime of the Emperor and Darth Vader, such as now supporting offshore drilling and flip flopping on gun show sales to cozy up to the NRA. More dues must be paid, I suspect, so we could be looking at four more years defending our environmental laws and policies that have kept our hunting tradition alive. Instead, of course, we should be moving forward, passing stronger conservation laws and regulations, which we have a much better chance of doing under President Obama.

To me, it seems like democrats will have their agenda so full with cleaning up inherited messes they won’t have time to even think about gun laws. Dems have to stave off a collapse of our health care system; get out of the Guantanamo Bay debacle; re-write our energy policy to emphasize conservation, independence and fossil fuel alternatives; improve our woeful image internationally; recover our economy from eight years of massive overspending and mismanagement; and somehow keep the Three Trillion War from becoming the Five Trillion Dollar War, which is the biggest environmental issue of them all.

With all these calamities on the docket, you think the President Obama and, hopefully, his democratic Congress will give any priority to gun laws? Not a chance.

Even without so much republican chaos to clean up, democrats probably wouldn’t pay any attention to gun laws. The gun issue has hurt democrats, and years ago party leaders took it off their agenda. Witness the Bluegreen Congress’s refusal to even vote on issues like renewing the assault weapon ban and loosening policy against allowing guns in national parks. A maverick dem might have to appease urban constituents by proposing a gun law, but more gun control won’t get any traction in Congress or the White House.

Have you ever heard a politician say he or she didn’t support the Second Amendment? I doubt it because the NRA has essentially won the gun issue, especially here in the New West where state constitutions often contain pro-gun language stronger than the Second Amendment. But the gun lobby needs to keep the fear out there to keep the membership dues and contributions flowing in and keep people writing millions of emails and letters to any politician who might say or do anything liberally interpreted as anti-gun. Hopefully, not much of that time and money comes from hunters, who should be giving it to conservation groups instead.

And back to the Supreme Court. Same question. Do you think democrats staring all these galactic challenges in the face will spend even a minute looking for anti-gun justices? Or that gun laws will even be an issue in the interviews?

Look at the current court. Republican presidents appointed seven out of the nine Supremes. Only Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer have democratic roots, both appointed by Bill Clinton, and both dissented on the D.C. v. Heller decision. But two republican appointees, two out of the four dissenters, John Paul Stevens (appointed by Gerald Ford) and David H. Souter (appointed by Father Bush) also supported the D.C. handgun ban. With half the dissenters from each party on such a landmark case, should guns even be a partisan political issue? 

The NRA, incidentally, endorsed Gerald Ford, who put Stevens on the court, but stayed on the sidelines with George W.H. Bush, a NRA life member, mainly because he’d “wavered” on the issue of assault weapons. All this adds more weight to the theory that the gun issue isn’t a priority when picking the Supremes, won’t be for either McCain or Obama, and shouldn’t be for voters in this election.

While in Butte, America, for the Fourth of July, Barack Obama told the press, “There is not a sportsman or hunter who is in legal possession of firearms who has anything to fear from me.”

I happen to believe him. I hope most other hunters do, too, because we can make the difference on November 4.

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