http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347690,00.html
Something happens to Democrats on the gun issue when they run for president. For John Kerry during 2004, it was awkwardly posing in brand new hunting gear at a seemingly endless series of hunting photo-ops.
But in what will probably be the most improbable change, the Politico reported on Saturday that Barack Obama was making a big play for gun votes in Pennsylvania. It is not particularly surprising that this change is occurring with the crucial Pennsylvania primary soon approaching.
With about one million of the country’s 12.5 million hunters, Pennsylvania is number one in the nation in the amount of time its citizens spend hunting. With about 600,000 people with permits to carry concealed handguns, Pennsylvania also has more permit holders than any other state.
Others, such as Jim Kessler, vice president for policy with Third Way, a progressive think tank, view Obama as starting to position himself for the general election.
Obama has consistently supported gun control legislation that came up while he was in the Illinois state legislature and the U.S. Senate.
For example, when Obama ran for the Illinois state senate the political group, Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI), asked him if he supported a “ban [on] the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns” and he responded “yes.”
Realizing how damaging this could prove in the general election, his presidential campaign “flatly denied” Obama ever held this view, blaming it instead on a staffer from his state senate race.
But then IVI provided Politico the questionnaire with Obama’s own handwritten notes revising another answer. Members of IVI’s board of directors, some of whom have worked on Obama’s past campaigns, told Politico that “I always believed those to be his views, what he really believes in, and he’s tailoring it now to make himself more palatable as a nationwide candidate.”
But the IVI questionnaire isn’t the only one out there.
In 1998, another questionnaire administered by IL State Legislative National Political Awareness Test didn’t ask about banning all handguns, but it did find that Obama wanted to “ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.”
Indeed, such a ban would outlaw virtually all handguns and the vast majority of rifles sold in the United States.
In addition, from 1998 to 2001, Obama was on the board of directors for the Joyce Foundation, which funded such anti-gun groups as the Violence Policy Center, the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, and Handgun Free America. Both the Violence Policy Center and Handgun Free America, as its name suggests, are in favor of a complete ban on handguns. During his tenure on the board, the Joyce Foundation was probably the major funder of pro-control research in the United States.
In fact, I knew Obama during the mid-1990s, and his answers to IVI’s question on guns fit well with the Obama that I knew. Indeed, the first time I introduced myself to him he said “Oh, you are the gun guy.”
I responded “Yes, I guess so.” He simply responded that “I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns.”
When I said it might be fun to talk about the question sometime and about his support of the city of Chicago’s lawsuit against the gun makers, he simply grimaced and turned away, ending the conversation.
I am guessing that one should not sign their name to a questionaire and then claim they never saw it.
