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Originally Posted by Sebastian

They do? They are aware of your concerns about every piece of legislation that comes up? Most people don't have enough time, energy, or insider knowledge to really be effective as individuals on this issue.

That's a false dilemma. Your premise assumes that some advocacy group could represent my concerns on "every piece of legislation". If one could, I would surely be 100% supportive of them. The fact is they can't, they don't, and they won't...and I am far from unique in that situation.

I join and support groups that advocate my thoughts and positions in general and notify me of issues and pending legislation so that I can make the choice on how I wish to proceed, knowing full well that there will most certainly be times when they fall short in that endeavor, after all, they're not my personal pet advocates, they represent a larger group than I alone.

It's not that terribly difficult, provided that you can find a group that actually alerts you of everything they're aware of. There are only so many issues out there to be discussed, things rarely change. While the specific provisions of different pieces of legislation are not always the same from one attempt to the next, there's not too much of a gray area (for me anyway). Gun control is gun control, and an assault on civil liberties is an assault on civil liberties. One letter, e-mail or phone call on one piece of gun control need not be radically different than the next. People surrender themselves to this horrid delusion that they can craft voluminous collections of words and arguments and change a politician's mind, but it doesn't work that way. One letter generally doesn't make a difference, no matter how persuasive it may be. The net effect of one of my normal verbose ramblings is much lower an impact than 10 letters stating nothing more than "HB 1234 is crap gun control, if you support it I will not vote for you and I will do my best to make sure others are informed not to vote for you either."

The problem with this method is that it the volume requirements can be pretty exponential. While 500 letters to your local county politicians just might be enough to give them heartburn and reconsider their stance on certain local legislation, when you get to state-wide and nation-wide issues, 500 letters is mostly a drop in the bucket.

Wondering how effective you could be if every gun owner cared about the issue and became a single issue voter is a moot point because it will never happen. I don't think the presence of pro-gun groups make it harder to motivate gun owners. Apathy is what makes it hard to motivate gun owners, and the existence of pro-gun groups has little to do with that.

But I'm not and never have been arguing for the eradication of pro-gun groups, neither specific or in general. I do think lobbyists and activism groups have shelf-lives, wherein the longer they are exposed to or part of the system, the more it permeates their objectives and reduces their efficiency. The more time you spend within the system, the more likely it is that you'll make more friends than enemies, and that means more people you have to treat with kid gloves at times in order to balance the relationship and maintain access (whether that access be for getting information, submitting legislations, directly endorsing or lobbying politicians, whatever).

Voter apathy is an issue on any platform, it is not solely reserved for gun control/gun rights issues. How do other issue-oriented groups combat apathy? By informing, educating, persuading and motivating others. To do that requires information sharing and a good system of communication or penetration. Throwing your hands up in the air and saying, "they're apathetic, what can you do? I guess we might as well just do it this way." is avoiding the issue, not combating it. Apathy is human nature, people these days are constantly bombarded with responsibilities and necessities, you have to compel them to take time away from that and do something else, especially when there's a common misconception that someone else can and is doing the work for them. You can observe this in almost any group-oriented situation. Something as simple as an employee survey, where the results could mean a company-wide shift in benefits or the environment (i.e. positive outcomes for the employees) will regularly see a low turn-out in almost any company in the world if the employees are not bombarded with communications of how important it is and how the survey in question serves their interests if they only take the time to submit a response. There are a number of factors that contribute to such scenarios, but I think you'll find that they're similar regardless of the situation or environment.

Without access to legislators, how the hell do you expect to influence the legislative process to work toward your interests as someone who cares about gun rights? The type of political situation you guys want isn't and never will be reality, so we're stuck working within the realities we have now, and given that, it makes little sense to sit on the sideline and bitch that the world isn't ideal. It makes even less sense to actively fling pooh at legislators who are actively trying to help us (Metcalfe).

You're assuming, incorrectly, that at that level, once can influence the system without the system exerting its own influence on you. Every citizen has access to their reps, it's not difficult to get your communication to them or their staff. The political situation is exactly this, the only thing that compels a politician to act outside of their own interests is concern over retaining their power and position. This whole dog and pony show that people want to pretend goes on where legislators have their strings so easily pulled by activists is nonsense. It's simply not true. A politician in the general sense, is a liar and a false appeaser by very nature, that's how the game is played to get to that level.

Sometimes activist and lobbyist groups do really great things, and sometimes they just get in the way. Take the NRA's support for the so-called "veteran's disarmament bill". They're still pushing for the bill's passage are they not? Despite the volumes of contact coming from concerned gun owners opposed to this legislation, it's still alive and active, is it not? Why? Because the NRA is basically telling them not to worry, they'll cover for them because they speak for gun owners and they're basically telling gun owners we don't know anything, just shut up and let them make the decisions.

And what you're advocating with this and the defense of Metcalf as if he's a sacred cow, is a system where we don't mean shit. If Metcalf is criticized at all, his lobbyist pets and their fanatics swoop in to attack and discredit anyone that so much as farts with a rhythm similar to the syllabic properties of Metcalf's name. And if Mr. Metcalf is so petty as to stop supporting any gun rights initiatives at all because some gun owners criticize him, then exactly how committed to the cause was he in the first place? The willy-nilly scarorism about how criticizing a politician will result in a loss of access and an imminent flurry of gun control is bullshit. You cant have it both ways.

When Metcalf's Legislative Secretary, Amy Dohner, e-mailed out Rep. George Kenney's cosponsor memo about a mandatory training requirement for an LTCF with the note, “Good morning: Rep. Metcalf asked that I share the attached cosponsor memo with you. Have a great day!”, should we not have been a little concerned? Should we not have asked questions? If Metcalf is so ardently pro-gun, then what does he have to worry about? Surely if he's opposed to such things, and he'd have to be in order to truly claim the status that so many of you loft upon him, a simple statement or note indicating this is not beyond the realm of a reasonable expectation. But instead of answers to that kind of query, we get people that are supposed to be on our side doing damage control on behalf of that politician's name, all in order to keep up the image that they've helped them build to sell to gun owners.

I'm not saying you have to. I am saying flinging pooh at organizations and legislators that are trying to help is counterproductive. It's one thing to offer constructive criticism, but the kind of things Greg is accusing Andy of here would appear to be outright sabotage of pro-gun efforts. It's one thing to disagree. Disagreement is inevitable. It's another to completely forget we're all on the same side.

Greg here has engaged in nothing more than ad hominem propaganda in an attempt to assassinate someone else's character to suit his own interests. Greg's post is nothing more than an Internet accusation filled with spite and speculation, nothing more. Again, I go back to what I said about this thread in the first place. All the OP is doing is masturbating to a sympathetic audience and then congratulating himself for the stain on the cushion.

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.

Andy responded via that e-mail list more than 8 and a half hours ago, I'll leave it up to Murf to post the reply as he's the one that brought the debate here, on a forum outside of where it originated and one that Andy is not a member of.