How about telling the truth?
It seems that the Democrats are going to use the misunderstood assault weapons ban against their rivals because the ban has popular support:
When former President Bill Clinton sought to frame differences between Democrats and Republicans in his prime-time convention speech Monday, he made a point of citing the soon-to-expire federal ban on semiautomatic assault weapons.
“Our policy was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street – and it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence,” Clinton said to Democratic cheers. “Their policy is the reverse.”
The ex-president’s charges demonstrated how some Democrats hope to use the assault weapons issue against President Bush and members of Congress in the campaign.
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry supports extending the ban, which is due to expire Sept. 13 unless Congress renews it. Such an extension appears to have public support. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in November found that 78 percent of respondents favored keeping the ban.
But while many Democrats would like to cast the issue in good-versus-evil terms, it’s more complicated than it appears to be, like many matters of public policy.
For one thing, Bush also has expressed support for extending the assault weapons ban since at least the 2000 campaign, putting him on the same side as his Democratic foes, at least rhetorically. Still, critics say Bush is doing nothing to promote an extension of the ban, enabling him to reap the political benefits of his position without upsetting his gun-rights allies.
Some popular support can be attributed to misunderstanding the ban. The questions in polls tend to center around using phrases like do you support a ban on AK47s? and the like. Maybe if the Republicans who oppose the ban spent effort informing people what the ban really did, they could gain some ground or at least expose supporters of the ban for what they really are.
July 31st, 2004 at 4:55 pm
What I find interesting is the number of gun owners (mostly the hunting only crowd, but not exclusively) who support the ban because they don’t understand what it really does. I’ll be honest, I think it’s a miracle that we’ve held off a renewed ban. Now we just have to get rid of the state bans that are in place.