By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page recently took note of the Democrat candidates for president in 2020 squabbling over the gun issue, a supposed article of faith among members of their party’s leadership.
Page said that while there is new unanimity among the candidates on guns, “some restless souls in the party’s progressive wing have produced new litmus tests, not only about candidates’ public positions on guns, but their private ownership of firearms, too.”
He said that was taking the issue to extremes, especially among those that confess to own guns. Page accused them of doing what former President Barack Obama advised them not to do: engage in “a circular firing squad.”
Page didn’t criticize their varied gun control proposals as he did the fact that they were clubbing each other over the head about their various approaches to it, and that those among the candidates that did own guns were taking the most heat from their fellow Democrats.
He led off with Sen. Kamala Harris, noting that if she becomes president and Congress doesn’t act within her first 100 days, she promised to impose universal background checks by executive order. For “executive order,” regardless of who is president, read “dictatorial decree.”
Actually, Harris, California’s state attorney general in an earlier life has already staked out a lot of other steps she would pursue to impose new federal gun controls on Americans. However, the Tribune columnist takes issue with those candidates that criticize Harris because she is a gun owner herself. (She admits to buying a handgun for self-protection when she was a prosecutor and feared for her own safety.)
Page goes on to say: “Yet, as much as the other candidates tend to agree (with Harris’ positions), some progressive voices complain that she has not gone far enough, including in her personal life.
“An op-ed published in the USA Today kicked over a beehive of commenters in social media by arguing that Harris’ ownership of a gun is a ‘disqualifying’ issue for a Democratic presidential nominee.”
Later in his commentary Page mentions a bunch of other anti-gun Democrat presidential candidates who own guns, including “Shotgun Joe” Biden, but mostly all seem to be rather weaselly in their justifications.
Page wrote: “The piece was written by Peter Funt, who is best known for hosting a revival of his late father Allen Funt’s popular ‘Candid Camera’ TV show.
“He lambastes gun ownership itself as a “position held by the NRA, not progressive Democrats.”
“Disqualifying? If that were true, Harris wouldn’t be the only Democrat who would have to leave the field. Six of 18 Democratic presidential contenders who declared before former Vice President Joe Biden entered the race own firearms, a Washington Post survey reported earlier this month.”
But Democrats, whether they own guns or not, still have a lot to learn about the gun issue, which has historically been a problem for them, especially in presidential politics, as was the case in 2016.
The gun issue contributed significantly to the outcome of the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The main reason the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) political action committee spent so much in supporting Trump and opposing Clinton was the positions and history of the two candidates. Trump happened to run as a Republican, but it was his unequivocal support of the right to keep and bear arms, especially for personal and community defense, that tipped the scales. Clinton, who happened to be a Democrat, was as candidly anti-gun as possible, plus she had been First Lady when her husband pushed through the Brady Bill and the Omnibus Crime Bill with its ban on so-called assault weapons and so-called high capacity magazines.
The NRA didn’t spend so much to elect Trump just because he was a Republican but because he was the most pro-gun rights candidate to run for so many years. And Hillary Clinton was the most anti-gun rights candidate.
State by state, district by district, the anti-gun Democrats can win victories in states were gun rights have been largely eradicated, like New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California. But in states where the majority of voters still cherish their right to keep and bear arms—whether normally Blue, Red or Purple—states like Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Iowa and so on, that right is an important issue.
I mention Iowa in particular because at least one prominent anti-gun Democrat learned his lesson in 1980. He is a former long-time representative from Massachusetts: Barney Frank. He is not in office now by his own choice of retirement, but Frank wrote about gun control being the reason the liberal agenda was not moving forward several years ago.
In an interview with me for Gun Week in the 1980s, after he had written on the same topic in major magazines and newspaper, Frank spelled out his awakening.
It came in the 1980 presidential campaign primaries when he was stumping on behalf of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was popular nationwide. Kennedy, unlike his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a pro-gun Democrat who became president,
was the godfather of anti-gunners in those days. Maybe for personal reasons!
But Frank told me that Kennedy’s loss in the Iowa caucuses was due to the gun issue, and Kennedy withdrew from the race.
Frank was still an anti-gunner himself while he served in the House of Representatives for many years; after all he was elected and reelected in a liberal anti-gun state.
Barney Frank was not the only liberal Democrat who saw the handwriting on the wall back in those days.
Another liberal Democrat who saw the light about the gun issue costing his party national electoral victories was famed law professor and Second Amendment commentator Sanford Levinson. He wrote at least one piece paralleling Frank’s views back at about the same time Frank was speaking out.
My point is that in spite of cogent advice from prominent Democrat thinkers and the results of the 2016 election, the Democrats, as a party, have not learned their lesson. Maybe they never learn.
