Uppity Liberals

[MADem]

211. Quite right! C MINUS it is!!!! I do beg your pardon!!

This might help: http://www.salon.com/2015/07/09/bernie_sanders_has_a_troubled_record_on_gun_control%C2%A0but_the_nra_still_hates_him/

So what gives? Why is it so hard for so many online conservatives to give Sanders a modicum of credit for agreeing with them, especially when he has peeved liberals from Mark Joseph Stern of Slate to fellow 2016 presidential candidate Martin O’Malley in the process?

The main problem is that, for a large number of pro-gun advocates, support for their interpretation of the Second Amendment is an all-or-nothing deal. “For more than three decades, the NRA has consistently argued that pretty much any new regulation of firearms would move the country a step closer to more draconian regulations, like gun registration and confiscation,” writes Michael Scherer of Time magazine, adding that “in the longtime logic of the Second Amendment activist, all gun regulations are suspect because of what might happen next.”

As Alan Berlow explained here at Salon, the NRA is “an organization whose Web pages are replete with paranoid conspiracy theories” and “whose top leaders are quite literally predicting—based on not a scintilla of actual evidence—that all Americans will be disarmed by the end of President Obama’s second term and that the Second Amendment will be ‘excised from the Constitution.’”

Hence, even though Sanders opposed the Brady Act of 1993 (one of the earliest gun control bills), supported prohibiting lawsuits against gunmakers and manufacturers, voted in favor of allowing firearms in checked baggage on Amtrak trains, and defended gun owners from liberal critics by asserting that “99.9 percent of [gun owners] obey the law,” he is distrusted because he hasn’t always toed the NRA line. As former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman explained to the Trace, the organization views voting in favor of any kind of firearm ban or regulation as irredeemable “unless you vote the other way later on.”

Although the NRA was thus willing to fund a campaign against one of Sanders’ opponents (who supported an assault weapons ban) in a 1990 congressional race, it has subsequently fluctuated in grading him; he reached his peak in 2006 when they gave him a C-, but after his support for President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful proposed gun control law in 2013, Sanders now sits at a D-minus. .... Even though most polls find Americans closely divided on the broader issue of gun regulation (a CNN/ORC poll from June 2015 found Americans split 49/49 on whether we should have stricter gun control laws and believing by a 3-to-2 margin that stricter gun laws wouldn’t reduce the amount of violence or gun-related deaths), there are specific gun-related reforms that receive overwhelming support....

People post about HRC's POVs all the time--the threads usually get trashed pretty quickly in GD-P by her opponents who do the very thing you decry. Even though HRC supporters are in the majority IRL, here on DU they are a minority and the regulars (plus the people who only show up every four years, and a fair percentage of the newcomers who will surely disappear--as they have done since this site was founded--at the end of the election season) are doing a pretty good job bigfooting us out of most discussions. That's not an opinion, a quick look at GD-P will tell you all you need to know.

It's not a kind or welcoming place, it's a battlefield. That's why positive discussions are usually better held in the protected groups, and there are plenty going on in there.