This is at a gathering of handpicked Obama supporters in Pennsylvania:
A woman in the crowd [in Duryea, PA] told Obama she had “heard a rumor” that he might be planning some sort of gun ban upon being elected president. Obama trotted out his standard policy stance, that he had a deep respect for the “traditions of gun ownership” but favored measures in big cities to keep guns out of the hands of “gang bangers and drug dealers’’ in big cities “who already have them and are shooting people.”
“If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it,’’ Obama said. But the Illinois senator could still see skeptics in the crowd, particularly on the faces of several men at the back of the room.
So he tried again. “Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress,’’ he said. “This can’t be the reason not to vote for me. Can everyone hear me in the back? I see a couple of sportsmen back there. I’m not going to take away your guns.’’
So he is suddenly someone who doesn’t want to take away guns but he does qualify that with the fact that if he did flip-flop, as he has been known to do, he has concluded he doesn’t have the votes so that shouldn’t be the reason not to vote for him.
Sound about right? Oh, maybe he didn’t flip-flop….maybe it was everyone else’s fault:
The case for Barack Obama’s consistency about the DC gun law rests on the following argument. (a) A spokesman gave an incorrect statement on whether Obama supported the DC law. (b) several questionnaires got it wrong — including one with Obama’s handwriting on it. (c) When Obama responded to CNN’s Leon Harris, who had just asked him, ” You said in Idaho recently, I’m quoting here, ‘I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns.’ But you support the D.C. handgun ban and you’ve said that it’s constitutional?…How can you reconcile those two different positions?” and Obama said: “Right, right.” — he was simply acknowledging the question, and for some reason, did not correct Harris in his answer, and (d) has always favored the right of locales to regulate handguns and (e) had never publicly opposed the DC law.
He can try to dance his way out of the box he created all he wants, no one believes it. He’s a liberal who hasn’t seen a gun control law he didn’t like and if he had concluded he did have the votes, he would do it in a heartbeat.
See author page