Quote of the day—Adam Kline

There is no organization on our side in Olympia that can do for us what the NRA does for our pro-gun colleagues; that can gin up the support, generate the letters to the editors of every hometown paper, get the folks in our districts to circulate petitions and call and write and visit our district offices, get the back-stories of gun violence on the TV news, bring surviving victims to visit with editorial boards, bring the home folks to Olympia to pack the room at legislative hearings, raise funds to hire the consultants and wordsmiths to help target the sensitive races and frame the message and run the outside game. There is no one to organize this state’s willing and wealthy donors to fund independent expenditures and cut maximum checks to those suburban and rural Democrats for whom any gun bill is a tough vote—and yes, any Republican gutsy enough to buck his or her caucus—so that we legislators can get the job done. CeaseFire has little if any capacity for this unglamorous work. It prefers to release position papers and go on TV.

Adam Kline
Washington State Senator
October 2, 2012
Sen. Kline: Democrats haven’t wimped out on guns—The more complex truth behind Olympia’s failure to restrict access to firearms.
[H/T to Joe Waldron on the WA-CCW Yahoo Groups email list.

Read the whole thing and the comments. Understanding why we win and why they lose is important. We need to keep winning.—Joe]

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6 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Adam Kline

  1. He manages to skate around the reason for this state of affairs. That reason is that there is no constituency for gun control. There are a few “Victims” who are generally not what we would call “savory” creatures. There are some actual victims who we can match with pro gun survivors. And there are Statists, who everyone hates. Hell, even other Statists hate Statists. They disagree about who should be in charge.

    He manages to avoid putting into words the base cause of the lack of fundraising, organizing, letters, petitions, phone calls, and bodies in the committee rooms. It’s because there aren’t any people. There’s no “there” there. When you have to make everything up, it’s too much work. Gun rights groups succeed because they have a large and active constituency. The NRA (or in most cases, the State level pro-gun group) doesn’t have to organize letters, calls, and bodies. Realistically all they have to do is put out the info. Pro-rights people do the work themselves.

    Isn’t it interesting that Statists always assume that there is some sort of shadowy group behind the scenes making everything happen? Maybe because that’s the only way any of their crap gets done.

  2. The NRA? I’m reminded of a Tam-ism: “Poor Lefties. They’ve been playing on astroturf for so long, they can’t recognize true grassroots even when fed a mouthful of divot.” Or words to that effect. The NRA doesn’t have to “generate letters” or motivate their base. We LEAD the NRA around.

  3. @Sean D Sorrentino, You are correct “he skates around the reason”. I suspect this is because he thinks the people who believe as he does exist but just don’t become active. They are “more sophisticated” and are not so dimwitted as to be single issue voters. He doesn’t realize that it is a fundamental difference of philosophy. A culture dependence where food, shelter, education, health care, and protection from criminals is all something that is to be supplied by the state versus a culture of self-reliance and free trade. The dependent culture almost for certain believes the government should “do the right thing” (in their minds) without any contribution by the masses. The self-reliance culture realizes that if something is going to get done they are probably going to have to contribute in some way.

    The dependency culture makes progress on most of their issues without the grassroots organization because it is a much more diffuse threat than attacks on gun ownership. Firearms are a relatively visible focal point that directly affects the individuals of the self-reliance culture as opposed to something like the incremental expansion of health care or food stamps. Hence they can easily get spanked if they attempt to move forward on the gun issue compared to other things on their agenda.

    Hence gun owners are active by philosophical nature while the dependency culture are inactive by philosophical nature.

  4. “gun owners are active by philosophical nature while the dependency culture are inactive by philosophical nature.”

    I think it’s worse than that. Gun owners are active, while anti-gunners don’t really exist. There are enough to pretend to be a movement when given all the free press they can handle, but in reality they don’t exist except as a statistical abstraction reflected in numbers in a biased poll.

    “Static poll-data showing popular support is brought forward to assure this. Never mind that polling data changes quickly under a barrage of ads ”

    What he’s saying here is that “sure, we can fake some people into ‘supporting’ some of our ideas by using biased polls, but as soon as someone points out the ramifications of our plans our support vanishes faster than a hard on faced with a naked Nancy Pelosi.”

  5. Kline… hmm, Yep, rings a bell, he along with Ross Hunter, Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Seattle PD and ceasefire want an AWB in WA State (Aaron Sullivan Public Safety and Police Protection Bill)… Dem. lawyer that worked for the laborers union… He’s head of the Judiciary committee, the last few bills concerning suppressors, short shotguns and short rifles must give him a case of the vapors…

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