Il Ling New of Gunsite is doing a series of Tips and Tactics videos for the NRA Women campaign. Her latest is a good reminder for all of us, man or woman, on situational awareness. I especially like her reminder about how one should pay attention if you get that feeling things are not just right. Too often we ignore that at our peril.
In the piece below from Ginny Simone of NRA News, you can hear the grassroots activists like Victor Head of Pueblo Freedom and Rights explain what they did on Tuesday. They organized, they worked, and they overcame a tidal wave of outside money to recall two state senators who not only ignored the wishes of their constituents but didn’t even want to hear them.
If you want to hear more from the organizers of the recall, listen to Shooter Ready Radio this afternoon/evening. I know a number of the organizers will be guests on the program. You can listen live on the radio as well as the internet. Details are here.
Second Amendment attorney Dave Kopel has a very interesting analysis on the results of the Colorado recall elections at the Volokh Conspiracy. He, like I, thought Giron might survive and Morse ousted given the nature of their districts.
So why did Angela Giron lose in her heavily Democratic, blue collar, union stronghold of a district? According to Dave, it is because she crossed the double-red line of Colorado politics. It wasn’t just that she voted against gun rights but that she, as chairperson of the Senate State Affairs Committee, shut out the testimony of many of those who wanted to testify. Colorado has a tradition of letting everyone who wants to speak on a bill the chance to testify, if only for a few moments.
Dave concludes:
The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was the secondmost important reason why Morse and Giron were removed from office. The first reason was the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment principle of Due Process of Law. The opportunity to be heard is the fundamental to Due Process of Law, and not solely in adjudications. When Morse and Giron squelched the testimony of law-abiding citizens and of law-enforcing Sheriffs, they grossly abused their constitutional office of being law-makers. And so, for abuse of office, John Morse and Angela Giron have been recalled from office by the People of Colorado, to be replaced by legislators who will listen before the vote.
Read the whole analysis here. It is well worth reading and worth sending to your representatives as a warning of what happens when they won’t even take the time to listen.
The comment of the day comes from a post I did early this morning. Chris Wiggins, co-host of Shooter Ready Radio, and a resident of Pueblo, Colorado gives his explanation of the outcome of the recall elections in Colorado.
Despite what the polls and the party leaders said, I never doubted we would win. If you had been in that first town hall meeting with Giron in March, where we packed a small library with thousands of pro-gun supporters, it was palpable. Initially, the Republican party, the NRA and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners doubted that a recall was even possible. Fortunately, the NRA and GOP had a change of heart, but they obviously weren’t at that first town hall meeting–where we saw the beginning of true activist patriotism in this county. This is and always has been a grass roots movement. It was never about party or about realpolitik, it was only about the Second Amendment.
Chris’ show airs on Friday afternoons from 4pm until 6pm Mountain Time. You can listen to it on a number of stations in the Pueblo and Colorado Springs area or on the interwebs. I think this Friday’s show should have some interesting discussions on the recall elections. As an aside, Chris just so happened to schedule me as a guest on the show before we even knew the outcome.
When I went to bed last night here in the East, it was early in Colorado and the recall votes were still being counted. Sen. Angela Giron (D-Pueblo) was slightly ahead with just a few votes in and Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) was behind with a total of about 12,500 votes counted. I fully expected to wake up this morning to hear it ended up as a split – Giron surviving and Morse out.
The news was so much better – both Giron and Morse are out of office.
Not only was I surprised that both were gone but Giron lost by a larger margin in her heavily Democratic district than did Morse in a district where he had only marginally won in earlier elections.
With 100% of the vote in, the results were as reported in the Denver Post:
Ballot Issue State Senate 3 - Recall Giron 100% reporting Yes 56.0% (19,355) No 43.9% (15,201) Ballot Issue State Senate 11 - Recall Morse 100% reporting Yes 50.9% (9,094) No 49.0% (8,751)
The results are a clear win for the grassroots, for gun rights, and for basic freedoms. They are also a loss for Mayor Bloomberg, in particular, and for the elites in the press, politics, and the gun prohibition movement, in general. None of this would have to come to be if Morse and Giron had not so arrogantly dismissed the concerns of their own constituents which, in turn, pissed off the Victor Heads and Tim Knights of Colorado enough to do something about it.
This historic recall was grassroots politics at its finest.
Not to mention hybrid Prius tanks!
The satirists at Second City have come up with the perfect introduction to President Obama’s speech tonight in which he’ll tell us why we need bomb Syria. I think they have just characterized the low-information voters who blindly follow Obama far better than any conservative or libertarian columnist could hope to do.
H/T Instapundit
I was checking out the Colorado Springs TV stations to see how they were playing the recall election of Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs. One of the stations I checked was KKTV Channel 11. They are the local CBS affiliate in Colorado Springs.
At the bottom of the page of a story about how redistricting was causing some voter confusion at the polls in the recall election, KKTV had a set of links entitled More From Our Partners. The lead story in this category was about the new voter ID law in North Carolina. It was from “DGA”. Following the link I found that DGA stands for the Democratic Governors Association and the article was accusing Gov. Pat McCrory of backing “voter suppresion.” The link is gone now as they have rotating links. However, you can still see it in the screen cap shown below.
You have to wonder if this same station would consider the Republican Governors Association as their “partner” and include links to its “news” stories. Frankly, I don’t want my local TV station to consider either party as their “partner”. I want them to report the news without a slant. At least with KKTV the curtains have been pulled aside a bit and their bias can be seen.
The Gazette of Colorado Springs seems to get Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) and his motivation. At least that is the impression I get from reading this editorial in yesterday’s edition. The editorial discusses Morse and his purported liberal leanings. They note that the Marijuana Policy Project, a leading organization pushing for the legalization of pot, has named Morse their “#1 worst state legislator in the United States” for trying to sneak a bill through the legislature that would have, in effect, repealed Colorado’s voter-approved initiative on marijuana. The Gazette says that Morse is not a liberal but an authoritarian politician.
Liberals in Colorado’s 11th Senate District should understand that Morse is not a genuine liberal. Rather, he governs as an equal-opportunity authoritarian.
That’s why he may become the first state politician in Colorado history to be recalled.
And the second quote from the editorial which really summarizes what this recall election is all about.
This recall isn’t a battle of right versus left, conservative versus liberal. It’s a citizen effort to end the reign of a politician who views the public – even his most liberal constituents – as fodder for the elite political class in Washington, Denver and New York.
The City of Chicago Committee on Public Safety approved a rewriting of city ordinances that would repeal the city’s gun registry.
A decades-old requirement for Chicago gun owners to register their firearms will soon be off the books after a panel of aldermen on Monday recommended repealing it.
If the full City Council agrees as expected on Wednesday, it will be the first time in Chicago since 1968 that legal guns don’t have to be registered. That’s when then-Mayor Richard J. Daley set up a city gun registry.
The change can be traced to the State of Illinois’ new concealed carry law which gave the state the sole authority to issue gun permits and licenses.
According to Chicago Tribune, Alderman Ed Burke (D-14th Ward) was quite angry over the changes. Burke is the only alderman to have bodyguards provided by the taxpayers of Chicago.
Todd Vandermyde, the NRA’s lobbyist in Illinois, called these changes a “start”. A video interview of Todd is by the press after the Public Safety Committee meeting is can be seen here. As the video is an auto-start video, I’ve just included the link instead of embedding it.
All I can say after watching this is Go Todd!
Charles C. W. Cooke of the National Review sat down with Tim Knight and Luke Wagner to talk about the recall elections in Colorado. They are two of the leaders of the Basic Freedom Defense Foundation which is spearheading the efforts to recall Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) and Senator Angela Giron (D-Pueblo).
I am the first person from the national press that Knight has spoken to directly. “This is not about us,” he explains. “The new gun laws were just the catalyst. A lot of people are very upset about being ignored, so finding vocal moral support hasn’t really been a hard sell. There’s a lesbian couple that’s been very happy in helping us.” I raised my eyebrows at this. “I start there,” he adds, “because people say to me, ‘Well, they couldn’t possibly be interested in helping you.’ Well, sure they can! They care about protecting themselves, too.”
A desire to protect ones’ self is not limited to white, conservative, male heterosexuals. Likewise, being ignored by those that supposedly represent you in the various legislatures pisses people off including more than just gun rights advocates.
by