A Plea to the DNC: Lose the Gun Control Plank

Every so often I have a snit fit and take aim at the ridiculous gun control plank in the Democratic platform, and attempt to blast it to smithereens.

It is a stupid position and it costs us dearly as a party in the red states. Out here, where "gun control" means that you can hit your target, Democrats do exist. Witness Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Brian Schweitzer of Montana. Paul Hackett came a lot closer in the Ohio Second special election last year than any Democrat ever has in over half a century, and he told the national Dems exactly what they could do with their idiotic gun control plank.

I live in a red state, I own firearms and I hunt. How a nice Jewish girl who grew up in blue states came to be a deerslayer is a long story, and not at all important, just suffice it to say that as liberal as I am, my second ammendment rights are just as important as any of the others and indeed guarantee that those other rights will not be infringed too far or the government will answer to a well armed populace. I'm downright Libertarian where guns are concerned.

Where I hold my nose and vote for Democrats whose position on gun control I find abhorent, a lot of my "neighbors" on Cain Ridge (do you have neighbors when your driveway is a mile long?) hold their noses and vote the other way, because guns are a way of life for them. After my dad retired from the Navy I went to the same rural high school he graduated from. Every farm kid drove a pick-up to school, and every one of them had a .22 a shotgun, and if it was deer season a .270 or 30.06 in the gun rack. Uncased, loaded and ready. Nobody ever got pissed and went to their truck and shot up the school. But a lot of times they killed dinner on the way home.

One simple move - taking that gun control plank out of the platform - would gain us back in the middle and the mountain states what civil rights cost us as a party in the old south.

We accuse the Republicans of playing politics with the constitution. But don't the Democrats commit the same offense when they rail against our second ammendment rights? Just because a few people don't like the second ammendment is not grounds to toss it any more than another persons racism is a valid reason to toss the equal protection clause of the fourteenth ammendment.

Deal with it. Adults do that. They accept reality. And reality is the gun control plank is not just stupid, it's destructive to the party and needs to be taken out back and shot at sunrise.