Make a difference as a voter
A few days after writing Telecom Immunity, I received the Senate election issue of America’s First Freedom. The NRA has become the model of an effective issues-oriented political organization. How does the NRA succeed where others, like the ACLU, fail? They weren’t always so successful. In the seventies it looked like an absolute gun ban was inevitable. Once the government sets its sights on prohibition it is practically impossible to stop. Alcohol prohibition took the Great Depression to repeal and still left it up to the states. Great Britain has moved from banning firearms to arresting newspaper deliverymen for keeping printer’s knives in their cars.
So how did the National Rifle Association reverse what looked like an unstoppable trend? Rather than more and more gun bans extending to more and more knife bans, existing gun bans have been allowed to sunset, most states now support concealed carry, and politicians go out of their way to downplay their anti-second amendment votes. What happened? The answer is in this issue of the NRA magazine:
The mainstream media focuses on the partisan breakdowns, but for gun owners, what counts is if there is a majority in the Senate that supports Second Amendment rights.
Second paragraph in, they make sure that politicians know they’ll recommend voting for second amendment supporters regardless of party.
The endorsements that follow are bipartisan. From Alaska’s beleaguered Ted Stevens (R) to Montana’s Max Baucus (D) to Virginia where they give a shout of support to both the Democratic and Republican candidates, politicians know that if they support self-defense, the NRA’s members will support them. They’ll support them with votes, with contributions, and with action.
If you want to make a difference as a voter, that’s how you do it. Vote the issue, not the party.
In response to Don’t wait—capitulate: The ACLU’s doomed campaign against telecom immunity is a classic example of why you have to be willing to vote for Nobody if you want to be taken seriously in politics.
- Self-Defense: The Equalizer
- “In 1996, knife carrying was made presumptively illegal. The government arrested and jailed Dean Payne, a man who worked in a newspaper distribution plant and carried a knife to cut the straps used to hold newspaper bundles, for carrying an ‘offensive weapon.’”
- Right to Carry 2008
- “Whenever a state legislature first considers a concealed carry bill, opponents typically warn of horrible consequences....But within a year of passage, the issue usually drops off the news media’s radar screen, while gun-control advocates in the legislature conclude that the law wasn’t so bad after all.”
More National Rifle Association
- Why do gun owners think the left wants to take our guns?
- Gun owners think the left wants to take away guns because the left keeps refusing commonsense gun laws in favor of laws that ban guns.
- Doug Hoffman, Conservatives, and the Dangers of Unreasoning Partisanship
- Effective politics means supporting candidates who share your principles, not who share your party. If your support reflexively goes to a single party all the time, that party won’t care about your principles.
More Nobody
- Voting for a candidate supports that candidate’s positions
- Politics has meaning; your support of a candidate is support for that candidate’s policies. If you vote for candidates who move “your” party in a direction you don’t approve, no one knows that but you. Everyone else sees your vote as approval for moving the entire party in that direction.
- Voting for Nobody in New York
- The Republican Party and Doug Hoffman is providing social conservatives with the perfect opportunity to vote for Nobody in New York’s 23rd district.
- Nobody wants immigration reform
- “Immigration is not a problem to be solved.” A confident and successful electorate could understand that issues are more important than who you hate. Unreasoning partisanship, however, is a problem that often seems as if it has no solution.