Gun control is now a winning issue for US Democrats – in the key swing state of Florida it’s shaping up to be critical. Could it be the “Gunshine State” that helps end America’s love affair with firearms?
Matthew Knott
November 4, 2018
How gun control went from a vote loser to a vote winner these midterms
[In Washington state the anti-gun people have the mindshare they need but they may not have the passion to vote in sufficient numbers to win. I suspect it is also the case in many other states.
Gun people need to vote and get others of a similar mind to vote.—Joe]
That article is misleading. The article claims that there were more “gun deaths” in Florida than in all of Australia.
First, the populations of Australia and Florida are close. There are 20 million people in Florida, and 22 million in Australia. However, Australia has 3 million square miles of area, where Florida has less than 66,000. This means that Florida has 5 times the population density.
The death statistic of 2700 “gun deaths” for Florida includes 2,016 suicides. There were more than 2,800 suicides in Australia that same year. Homicides cannot be compared, because Australia only counts one person killing another as a homicide if the killer is arrested for the crime. No suspect, no homicide. If the killer is himself killed by police, no homicide. That makes it impossible to compare US and Australia homicide rates.
Timing is everything:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/armed-man-helps-subdue-suspect-in-deadly-stabbing-in-seattle
One thing to factor in for this and who knows how many elections elsewhere and in the future is that in a number of places gun control is likely to be less of a losing issue. Why bother voting for Rick Scott after he pushed and made a big deal of signing an invidious Red Flag law that’s already resulted in “investigations” of over 467 people from mid-March to July 24th, resulting in the seizure of over 200 guns and 30,000 rounds in Pinellas County alone. Plus raising the legal age to buy a long gun to 21, a direct attack on gun culture. If he loses to Bill Nelson this Tuesday, that’ll be one of the reasons.
I’m not sure any Republicans at the national level give a damn about the issue, to the extent they’re merely neutral, and they’ve given us the back of their hand since they gained nominal total power in the White House and the Congress, when in the mirror situation Obama and his Democratic Congress gave us concealed carry in National Parks and carriage of guns on Amtrak (thanks, W!). Eventually the luster of “we suck, but less than the Democrats” is going to wear off.
Meanwhile, it must really suck to live on the Left Coast. Particularly ironic since Washington state led the rest of the country by decades by enacting a shall issue concealed carry law in the early 1960s. Good luck with this initiative, but Bloomberg isn’t going to give up, I’d be making exit plans if I were you.
I sure hope that Idaho doesn’t build a wall to deter Washingtonian refugees!
But then, there’s enough influx of libs to the Boise area that I’m sure Idaho will be facing the same problems that all attractive-to-move-to red states are facing in the next few years. Concentrate enough liberal-voting IT geeks in one place and they will outvote the rest of the state, which is precisely what has happened here in the Evergreen state.
I like it here, but between taxes and socialism, I doubt I’ll be able to retire on the land that my wife and I have been steadily improving with gardens, trails, wildlife habitat, etc. I’ll probalby end up having to sell it to some Pakistani software product manager (like our new neighbor across the road) who has zero interest in country living.
Peruse Clayton Cramer’s blog for lots of info from a real conservative born and raised in California, purged from Bay area high tech who ended up in Idaho in the general Boise area. Or email him for his take on how it’s playing out.
One general warning, the cuckservatives in Idaho are even more terrified than normal at being called racists, I suppose in part due to the stereotypes of it being a haven for whites, Ruby Ridge is in the state, and are known to go medieval on whites who dare to defend themselves from PoCs…. Between that, the proximity to the Left coast, and hostility towards anyone who hasn’t been there for generations (Clayton has stories to tell of that), and minimal food growing, at least compared to the Midwest, it’s actually rather low on my lists of places to escape to. But certainly much better than Washington today or especially “tomorrow”.