We had a relatively good legislative session this past year. The only bad bill to see any action was microstamping in the Assembly and it took a lot of arm twisting for A-1157 to pass with a 77 vote majority. Only 5 years ago they would typically pass with much fanfare and 20+ votes a dozen or so gun control bills in the Assembly followed by motions to discharge in the Senate. This change of direction in Albany is the result of the slow, but steady progress we’ve made over the past decade with our PAC in electing good people and removing some bad ones.
Contrast this with California, where gunnies seem to have given up on elections and pinned their hopes on the courts. Governor Brown just signed three bills into law including 1.) long gun registration, 2.) prohibition on unloaded open carry and 3.) diverting certain fees from background checks to other purposes. Even if somewhere down the road one or more of these laws is ruled partially or entirely unconstitutional, that would not change how legislators treat the gun issue. The first thing they did after losing the Chicago gun ban case was to rewrite the law so that it was 99.9% as obnoxious as the one the courts struck down. There is no reason California legislators would not do the exact same thing.
The reason for this is because politicians don’t win or lose elections because of legal challenges to the laws their write and that is all they ultimately care about: winning and losing. If decades of research proving that gun control does not crime control did not stop legislators from passing gun control laws why should anyone assume that years of court cases will? Facts don’t matter to politicians nearly as much as they should.
Gun owners need to be involved in the election/selection process from primaries to general elections, from town board and city council to statehouses and Congress. That is the only way to defeat gun control and it’s advocates.
The same can be said for a multitude of issues, across the political spectrum: the best way to defend the Constitution is to elect politicians who don’t violate it in the first place. (Over) reliance on the courts is a dangerous game: even when judges get it right (which isn’t often enough), elected officials are adept at ignoring/circumventing rulings they don’t like.
There is no reason gun owners and gun groups can not take part in judicial elections too as local, county and state judgeships are elected positions.