The issue liberals should stop pressing

Sam Smith

One reason liberals don’t do better in elections is because they insist on pressing an issue which easily annoys 55 million Americans – those who own guns. This is roughly the size of America’s liberal population and either constituency constitutes about a quarter of America’s adults.

The sad fact is that liberals in recent decades have done little to reach out to constituencies not naturally their own, particularly working class whites and, in fact, in this election they tended to dis’ them, even using terms like “deplorable.” And 41% of whites say they have a gun in their home (as opposed to 19% of blacks).

The liberal retreat from economic programs is their big problem, but the anti-gun approach hasn’t helped things.

After all homicides are at a half century low, and those responsible for them represent about two one-hundredth of a percent of all gun owners.

Further, gun ownership doesn’t tell you as much about the murder rate as liberals think. For example, Mississippi has approximately the same rate of gun ownership as New Hampshire yet has five times as many murders per capita. And there are five times as many murders per capita in Louisiana than in Maine despite roughly the same rate of gun ownership.

Those of us who live in low murder Maine found ourselves cursed with another term for right-wing Governor Paul LePage in 2014. He won a three way race by 29,000 votes thanks at least in part to a referendum on an “Act To Prohibit the Use of Dogs, Bait or Traps When Hunting Bears Except under Certain Circumstances.” While you can only guess how many hunters were pulled to the polls by this measure, it lost by 41,000.

Over half of gun owners, unlike liberals, live in rural areas. They overwhelmingly use weapons to kill animals not people. This was one constituency that liberals bombed on in this election.

If liberals would take their failed efforts against guns and apply it to economic improvements that help people of all genders and ethnicities they would do much better in future elections.