I don't know about the rest of the gunnies, but lately, my inbox has been bombarded with emails by various gun-related businesses for me to call my reps and senators to get them to vote for S.3525, aka "The Sportsman's Act of 2012".
As you can see by this listing, the Sportsman's Act is an omnibus bill, that is, a collection of bills lumped together primarily because the support isn't there to pass them individually.
Read the titles on that list. If you have a lot of time, read the bills.
What jumps off the page at you when you peruse the list?
Answer: the majority of the bills are ecologist's wet dreams.
There is exactly ONE Bill on that list that is not "green", S.3065, the Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act, which would establish funds to support government-owned firearms ranges. Some states have those public ranges and some don't. This Bill would provide grant money to publicly-owned ranges. I could support that Bill, maybe, unless it establishes some more restrictions on firearms ownership and carriage.
With that one exception, S.3525 holds the Second Amendment at arm's length. The 2A is THE 900# gorilla in the room whenever guns are mentioned, but there is NOTHING in this Bill which supports the Second directly, and ONE bill which supports it indirectly. (Somewhere in that Bill is a statement affirming that no lead ban may be enacted for hunting ammo. Okay, that prohibition on lead bans is already Federal law, and I'm not sure it needs re-iterating.)
Why, Oh Why, don't the gun dealers, the NSSF, etc realize that without the Second Amendment, hunting goes away rather quickly? Why, Oh Why, is there no strong support for the 2A in this Bill?
Yes, the Second is NOT about hunting, it is about protecting the Constitution from tyranny. That said, the same Founders who gave us the Second Amendment also refuted the European idea that hunting was a privilege for the landed aristocracy only, so the Founders didn't parcel out all those millions of acres of public lands to the control of folks who could shut them down to hunting and fishing, they required public access to, and use of those lands, in stark contrast to the Europeans, who forbid it, and generally, had no public forests or streams. You pay to hunt in Europe, if you are lucky enough to find a lease to hunt on and can manage the restrictions on owning a hunting firearm.
Now we have established a new Landed Aristocracy in this Nation, that being the Government, which increasingly reserves more and more rights of the use and access of public lands to itself. In fact, unless you just came in on the slow shuttle from Planet Zargon, you probably know that the Greens have succeeded in closing off most uses of public lands except hunting/fishing by foot access only. In Oregon, just in the past five years, we've gone from over ten thousand miles of forest roads open to powered conveyances (road vehicles and ATVs) to less than a thousand, and some entire National Forests here have but a few dozen miles of legally-driveable roads in them now (Mt. Hood National Forest, a half-hour from here). Should you take your rifle and fire a few rounds to assure yourself that it is still zeroed, if one of your bullets hits a tree in the forest, you've just committed a Federal crime, and are subject to a $5,000 fine, per tree hit. Same rule when you are hunting. If you bag a deer, the first thing you'd better do is drag it quite a ways from where you shot it, because if your bullet left the deer and hit a tree, that's one expensive deer if the ranger stops by, has a quick look around, and finds that "wounded" tree.
We need to put it right to the Greenies: these are OUR woods. Keep your farging idiot regulations out of them.
S.3525 needs to go away. Do NOT call your congresscritter to support it. Your support of S.3525 only empowers the Greens, and empowering the Greens is a direct attack on ALL your Constitutional freedoms, including the Second Amendments.
While you're at it, resolve now to evaluate everything involving guns and the outdoors on the basis of the Second Amendment, without which you don't GO hunting. If your pro-hunting stance doesn't include a pro-2A link, you are being led astray, and the orgs which do this are usually tools of the gun-banning filk.
Comments