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Originally Posted by Sebastian

The problem is, you need those relationships with legislators. Grassroots matters, but if you don't have people who are spending time representing the issue to legislators, they won't have any idea how to serve your interests.

My legislators know how to best serve my interests, I tell them so. For those that don’t speak up, I guess in theory that brings the need for people and groups to represent us, but I do speak up, so make no mistake, none of those groups speak for me. So when people make comment about sitting on the sideline, they should keep in mind some of the others things they profess as well.

If every single gun owner were to vote on the gun rights issue nearly exclusively, we probably wouldn't be as dependent on interest groups, because we'd have the raw numbers to destroy any politician who opposed us. But we don't. The people who are really doing do work on this issue, learn how their legislators vote, and bother to get informed, are a small minority; too small to have much of an impact on elections.

That's pretty much what Andy states, and it's pretty much what those of us at odds with certain RKBA groups have been saying all along (though all of us in that position don’t agree on the particulars 100% of the time). You can't have it both ways. If you complain that we have to engage in such access-oriented acts because gun owners don't know any better or aren't politically active, then anything that detracts from the ability or goal to engage, empower and inspire gun owners is totally counterproductive to rectifying that situation (assuming the desire is to remedy it at all, which is a point of contention). But instead of seeing wide-spread support for such an undertaking, those very same RKBA groups actively work against it (most often behind the scenes or one gun owner at a time).

So we need people to represent gun owners, inform gun owners, and give them an idea of how they can participate in the movement as grassroots.

Ah, but I have it from the horse's mouth (at least one or two of them) that this is not in their playbook. They stay informed and tell the rest of us how to vote because we wouldn't understand the process and/or can't comprehend legislation for ourselves. When we offer an alternative opinion, they or people that support them with a little too much fanaticism start posting threads like this one.

The alleged need for access to those legislators might be an effect of the lack of politically educated or active gun owners, but certain RKBA groups won't work towards changing that because that's not in their model of operations. Again, something many of us, including Andy Barniskis, has said time and time again. And when we say it, we get shit on for it.

I don't recommend anyone have unwavering trust in pro-gun leadership, but to some degree you have to trust people to represent you. I don't really see any viable alternative.

That doesn't mean we all have to trust the people you trust; no one died and made you or anyone else the decider. The problem comes when cheerleaders for one group or set of groups (of either side really) starts to take a difference in opinion personally. Look at the title of this thread and then realize that the list the OP is referring to is a privately moderated list that reaches maybe a few hundred people, many of them not even in Pennsylvania. Yet the OP came up with a fantastic headline that would make CNN or the Washington Post's anti-gun journalism squad proud. I'm actually laughing out loud at the title and the implications of this thread, it's hysterical. Someone might as well have posted a thread titled "gun owners eat babies" based on comments scribbled on a men's room wall at Burger King. If anyone made this an issue, it was the person that took a small message from an e-mail list with almost no mass penetration and put in onto a site that gets more than a million hits per month (especially considering they didn’t wait around to let the discussion run its course and instead stampeded off to post one side of it).


“Infighting threatens imminent avalanche of gun control in PA”
LMFAO. Let’s blame one guy who wrote something that reached a few gun owners (some not even in this state) on a small, private moderated list for an imminent avalanche of gun control… seriously? Sounds like somebody’s deal is being queered somehow and they’re thumbing through the ol’ address book looking for a convenient scapegoat to me.