24 NRA CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY STATES DOWN, 26 TO GO! #winning
NRA @NRA
Tweeted on March 21, 2022
[I remember when it was called Vermont carry. And many people held those pushing for shall issue carry in contempt. The thought was that granting the opposition the toehold that the state had the authority to license what should be an unrestricted right was a dead end. It was, they claimed, Vermont carry or nothing. No compromise. Once the state was licensing our rights it was a slippery slope to no right to carry.
I was torn. I didn’t see a direct path to unlicensed concealed carry from many anti-gun leaning states. But there might be a path to licensed concealed carry. Wasn’t the possibility of progress better than the faint hope of utopia?
Even now people claim, “Liberty isn’t on the ballot. I don’t see the point of voting.” But the progress of constitutional carry shows that you don’t need to reach perfection with your next step. You just need to make progress or even just hold the ground you currently have until the next time you take a step.—Joe]
Liberty is ALWAYS on the ballot, and has been for at least the past 30 years. We just don’t always see it that way.
Liberty has been on the ballot since Lincoln vs. Douglas, and we’ve voted wrong in that election, and almost every election since.
Kurt
Lincoln should have been Senator from Illinois instead of Stephen Douglas?
Just looking for clarity.
I would say the “Compromise” of 1850 was all wrong, since no Senator or Congressman voted for every part of the alleged compromise, and the Fugitive Slave Act, combined with the later Dred Scott v Sanford case meant that no northern state could keep slavery out of its territory, no matter what laws the population enacted.
Yes. It goes like this:
– Lincoln becomes Senator
– Douglas loses seat
– Lincoln has to deal with the Senate from the inside, and likely wouldn’t become President (not absolutely given, but probable or at least possible)
– Someone else becomes President, who perhaps wouldn’t have bent the Constitution over the nearest tree stump, pulled down its pants and sodomised it by introducing the draft, an income tax and denying habeus corpus.
Heck, without Lincoln as President, we might not have had the War of Northern Aggression.
Kurt
There are times for “this is the hill on which I die”, and there are times for incremental progress. The hard part is knowing which is which.
I agree that, while going to “shall issue” was grating for many, it’s a lot better than the “no issue”, which I believe was in 16 states in the early 1980s. Today it is effectively 1 or 2 (and legally 0).
In retrospect, we were hearing a lot of crazy talk about “blood in the streets” and “Wild West rules”, and I think a lot of people were concerned about that. They needed time to see the hysteria for what it was… and that has produced slow, steady progress, one state at a time.
That is exactly how it SHOULD work. If we could flip the entire country on a dime, all at once, then they could flip it right back.
Those last right “may issue” states will be tough. But keep the faith, and keep on going.
All good. But you should never say; this is the hill I will die on.
Always; this is the hill they die on.
“No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country, you win by making the other son of a bitch die for his.” Gen. George S. Patton.
It’s a mindset we all need to start carrying along with our guns.
Thing is, May Issue was the same as No Issue in many places (and still is). That is what helped drive the Shall Issue movement.
RE: incremental progress:
Incremental progress is how we have so many gun laws on the books. That didn’t happen overnight, but steadily, piece by piece over the past century-plus.
The anti-freedom people got us here one step at a time. I see nothing wrong with winning our rights back the same way. And as the antis’ fear-mongering turns out to be just that, we win the support (or dispel the opposition) of more and more moderates.
(That said, if there were ever a chance of passing a bill that repeals all gun laws at all levels and disbanding the BATFE, I’d probably support it. But such a bill is DOA for any foreseeable future, so we must be realistic.)
When deciding how to vote, the question in my mind isn’t, “Will this win ALL my rights back?” Instead, it’s “Will my children and/or future grandchildren inherit measurably more freedom than I did?” If yes, I support the bill; if no, I don’t. It’s that simple.
Incremental is good. Particularly incrementally reversing the anti-liberty, anti-freedom laws and court cases of the Leftists. I am more in favor of incremental progress, much like the NAACP and other organizations did with Plessey v Ferguson in the fifty seven years between it and Brown v Board of Education.
And the LGBTQ community, before the “IYF” (In Your Face!) subset took over. It was decades of baby steps toward acceptance and normalization, ultimately leading up to Obergefell and legal recognition.
There are many parallels and lessons we could (and should!) emulate from the pre-IYF LGBTQ movement.
What lasts longer? The mountains or the sea?
You just keep taking steps to your goal.
If they ban scary rifles, individual states can start forming easy to join state militias, and issue M4s in return for a deposit equal to the cost of buying one.
Watch how the NRA uses this to ask for more money, takes all the credit completely ignoring or downplaying all the other groups on the state level while asking for more money.
The NRA has not received any money from me in a long time. But… I generally don’t criticize them in public.
If the members aren’t doing it publicly, the directors can pretty much ignore the occasional private bitch as simply a personal problem. When lots of people, inside and outside of the org are pointing fingers, and leaving their wallet in their pocket, THAT may finally get some attention. I would never have joined as a life member if I had bothered to do any sort of look at the overall performance in regard to political issues. They have been pro government since day one, and like the RHINOS have quite often ended up on the wrong side of an issue.
Or as I often remark, “Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.”
(Sometimes it ends in “good enough”, depending on the context.)
There is nothing wrong with incremental progress, but plenty wrong with “all or nothing”.
The former sounds reasonable to moderates and fence-sitters. The latter always sounds fanatical to all but true believers.
It’s worth remembering that evolution operates on “the survival of the fit enough”. (The usually-quoted version “…of the fittest” is actually not correct; the existence of the appendix is one of many examples demonstrating that fact.)
As you point out, what we have here is evolution, operating by exactly the same rule.
That’s something I always noticed. Species variants often survive even though they’re not “the fittest”. Sometimes even the least-fit makes it far enough to procreate.
“Fit enough” makes much more sense and more closely matches observations.
Meanwhile, WA state is creeping in the other direction.
Does not say good things about either the electorate, or the election process.