Warning: ‘Army’ of Gun Owners is about to Vote

Amid reports that there may be a serious terror threat on Monday, there is another warning that appeared Thursday in an Op-Ed piece that Democrats and the gun prohibition lobby should take just as seriously.

Veteran outdoorsman and broadcaster Tom Gresham, host of the nationally-syndicated “Gun Talk” each Sunday, put it bluntly in the Washington Times:

“As the country races to the finish line marked by the November 8 election day, media pundits, pollsters and operatives for both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to have overlooked a secret weapon about to be unleashed. That weapon, which will appear at the polls, is the army of enthusiastic gun owners found everywhere, but particularly in the swing states.”

These are the “deplorables” whom Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton disdained some weeks ago on the campaign trail. While she may profess to “support the Second Amendment…but,” gun rights activists consider Clinton’s remark to have been one of those all-too-candid Freudian slips that tend to reveal what someone really thinks.

What does Clinton really think? She was caught on audio at a private New York fund raiser last year telling donors that she thinks “the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment.” There is no way to spin or sugar-coat that statement, and she cannot walk it back. 

Gresham was blunt about something else, and he was – as the saying goes – dead-bang accurate when he mentioned “the flannel-clad coterie of hunters who traditionally lean to the right, but who tend to be almost blasé about the outcome of elections, believing that their hunting guns won’t attract the attention of the Clinton gun-ban machine she has promised to unleash.” It might be self-delusional to think that tolerating a ban on someone else’s favorite type of firearm will somehow insulate their own guns.

Passage of the Brady Law during Bill Clinton’s first term, and the required background checks even on designer skeet and trap guns, surprised some of these people. Passage of Initiative 594 in Washington State two years ago – requiring background checks on even casual loans of firearms to long-time acquaintances, and a second check when getting that gun back – upset more of them. Now similar issues on the ballots in Nevada and Maine, along with a measure in California requiring background checks on ammunition purchases, which gun owners consider outrageous, is a red flare warning to the “flannel-clad coterie” that their prized guns aren’t so insulated after all. Gun prohibitionists will eventually get around to them, or their children or grandchildren.

All of this is on the line Tuesday, and according to Gresham “this army of gun owners is something new, something younger, something unrecognizable to Democrats, and it’s very much motivated to preserve the right to have guns for personal safety.”

If there are terror attacks in New York, Virginia and Texas on Monday, it will bring to the fore once again exactly what the Second Amendment is really all about, and it’s not duck hunting or shooting skeet.

There are, by some estimates, as many as 90 to 100 million gun owners in this country. Gresham estimates 12 million citizens are licensed to carry, but there are higher estimates – up to 14.5 million – that may be more accurate, considering the recent rush for carry permits and licenses.

And Clinton wants to ratchet down on them all.

If all of those people fulfill their responsibility as citizens and vote next Tuesday, as a single-minded bloc to protect the Second Amendment from a Clinton-appointed Supreme Court, it will be an object lesson.

Clinton and her anti-gun cronies who have been running on a gun control platform will have only themselves to blame. They called down the thunder, perhaps forgetting that thunder is usually accompanied by lightning.