2016 Postmortem

A lot of states that went for Obama in '08, I'll point out.

My state (NC) appears to have elected a pro-gun-owner Dem governor, while rejecting the anti-gun-owner presidential candidate. If you were to explore the reasons, you might find that threatening 2+ *million* NC residents with major felonies (a la the NY SAFE Act) might convince a few hundred thousand Dems and indies to stay home or leave the Presidential ballot blank. Just as in TN and WV in '00 (Gore lost his own home state), or a bunch of swing states in '04. And what was the margin of loss in heavily-gun-owning MI? FL? OH?

You may not *like* guns, but it is certainly helpful to understand that there are roughly 100 million gun owners, that they tend to vote at higher rates than the general population, and that they are more likely to vote the issue than are people who don't like guns. It's the ham and egg principle; if you're a chicken, you're concerned, but if you're a pig, you're involved.

And given those facts, is it too much to ask that the Dem leadership actually try to understand the nuances of the issue, instead of letting their policies and legislative proposals be set by those who don't understand, and can't avoid stepping on the mines?

Let me put it this way. If you proposed to outlaw hunting, and make it a Class D felony equivalent to rape for someone to go in the woods and shoot a deer, do you think you *might* get some pushback at the polls from the ~16 million Americans who hunt? If so, then why is it hard to grasp that threatening 60+ million with such felonies might create similar backlash?