Keep your powder dry! - by Tom Shafer

The US House and Senate are now controlled by the Democrats and Chuck Schumer, one of our bitter enemies on the hill, is crowing about how he is engineered the Democratic takeover of the US Senate. He's claiming that he's kind of the father of the modern US Senate. Now if that doesn't give you chills? Of course he did, he picked a lot of candidates to run for the US Senate thinking that the tide with the war and with extreme national hatred by the liberal media and by the liberal Hollywood types against Bush, would sway the election. I don't know what swayed the election, whether the American electorate is uneasy, is unsure or if its just one of those deals where an incumbent president is in the last two years of his second term or he can't run again, always loses seats in Congress. I think that might be it.

Life proceeding the Assault Weapons Ban, that steady media drumbeat, change is coming, people are mad, Democrats are going to win. Sometimes that does become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you don't keep your powder dry and go out and vote, you lose a few seats.

Schumer, in his zeal to get a majority so that that they could own these committee chairmanships in the Senate, chose some Democrats to run for the US Senate who are actually pro-gun. Now we just had a US senator who had a stroke and when you have 51 to 49, a division of a hundred Senate seats one guy who's in the majority side has a stroke and may or may not return to the US Senate, there goes your whole hard fought majority on the health of one person.

Some of the Democrats Schumer chose to run and did win are pro-gun democrats. One guy flat out said, "got the high and tight crewcut, I'm pro-gun, always have been and always will be." So the western states democrats doesn't always mean liberal anti-gun.

I'll just keep my powder dry and not worry needlessly about the Democratic takeover of Congress. Their majority in the Senate might not even be a majority now just for the turn of a card. In the House, you've seen the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, a woman from San Francisco, California. She has set the agenda and helped name the committee chairmanships in the US House of Representatives. Of course the media chanted it over and over like a mantra that Nancy Pelosi was going to be speaker. I'm not upset about it because I've had to keep my powder dry before just like all other gun-owners have.

Now we'll see what happens with these committee chairman like Conyers, Schumer, Pelosi, Biden, and Reed. We'll see what types of bills they try to debate, what type of committee hearings they try to hold and what type of Bush bashing they try to organize in the Congress.

We'll sit back and keep our powder dry and see what happens.

Old timers like Jim Butler and I have been through a lot together including these fights like assault weapons and Brady. Now the Illinois legislature gained some more Democrat seats in the Illinois Senate under Emil Jones and a continuing reelected Illinois Democratic anti-gun governor, Blagojevich. So now we get to see, do they have the guts to come forward with some blatantly anti-gun bills and risk, their majority, risk whatever goodwill they have which is mostly based in Chicago because of the population, and risk further alienating downstate Illinois?

I don't know what's going to happen, but I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep my powder dry and by doing so frustrate their will because they realize if we just stand firm they cannot win. They cannot ride herd over us. They might have some short term victories like the assault weapons ban that made my life miserable for ten years.

After a while it kind of hardens you, it kind of smoothes you and makes you a veteran of in essence what I call the gun wars. We have seen the bad times in just the years our group has been together. We've seen the bad days and I'm certain we will see brighter days ahead which is the way to think when its January 2nd of a brand new year. We're going to keep our powder dry.

Illinois is similar to Missouri and a lot of other states where you have this movement of the population away from the rural areas which used to be where everybody lived because it was mostly a farm based society. In fact my wife was born and raised on a farm and moved to a big city because there weren't any jobs. And that happens statewide and state by state. Missouri has a huge rural Ozark area dominated by two huge cities, St. Louis and Kansas City on both ends because the rural people don't have jobs and the little towns are closing. The factories have long since moved away and you have a population that moves from the rural area to the urban area. Illinois' huge agricultural downstate is dominated by a major city up north, the third biggest in the country and since representation is based on population, they have all these lawmakers who think they speak for the entire state. In a way they speak for an awful lot of the state because the people choose to live there.

Now there are some trends and shifts where people want to move back to the country but the big cities are dominated by these liberal democratic politicians with their anti-gun agendas. The media, they read the Trib and the Sun Times, two vocally anti-gun major newspapers owned by foreign corporations. They choose to read those papers and that revenue stream makes their editorial boards powerful and, how do they editorialize? Consistently against your rights, consistently against your liberties and that makes these politicians think, I'll get on the side of the Chicago Tribune editorial Board and I'll be good to go.

In Missouri, we lobbied, we fought, we had a statewide ban that failed by a sliver and the St. Louis Post Dispatch editorialized sixty times against concealed carry. But you know what, Missouri has concealed carry now and it came through a bitter fight, through a couple or three successive governors who vetoed it and they overrode the veto and they overrode a negative vote of the people and still passed it in the legislature.

The Post-Dispatch was so smug, so powerful, so well financed, so well read in the St. Louis metro area, they thought CCW would never get passed. So we kept our powder dry long enough and Missouri got concealed carry.

So then St. Louis said, we're not going to issue those concealed carry licenses here. All the Ozark people can have them and all the rest of the Missouri people can have them but you can't have them here in St. Louis. They tried to stop it like that deal. Then their core power which they thought was statewide shrunk immediately down to just metro St. Louis and the sheriff of that county. Then they said no, you've got to give them out to no matter how dang reluctant you want to be.

So if you just stay firm on a solid base where you know that you're right, you can see the walls crumbling around them and they can say that finally the sheriff probably had to come to work one day and said, you know what, we're going to have to start giving out these applications or I'm going to get put in jail over this deal.

If we stick to our system of never retreating, always advancing, keeping our powder dry, and we stand firm, it means that we prevail and they lose.

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