George,
Good point, but what we need more than anything else is to motivate our own numbers. 80 million gun owners they say, and how many do you think contact their reps. If Washington got 80million calls per week from gun owners, do you think it might start to swing our way? I've found that sometimes you have to almost demand a vote be cast a certain way. If your rep is borderline then perhaps a few nice words will encourage, But I actually had a rep try to tell me my area of South Texas was anti-gun. Lets just say things didn't get real nice as the call went on, but I sicked about 200 townspeople on him in a couple days time and when the vote was cast, guess what, it was cast correctly. Sometimes in our perpetual niceness we forget that the men in Washington are there because we asked them to be. That day I really felt like he was trying to put out my fire with a strong reproach,"Your fellow citizens believe in gun controls." We can't buy into these lies. When i first started calling my reps, I got this treatment alot, and alot of the votes they cast where opposite of what I asked for.
If each of us would just go out and get our fellow gun owners to call once a week, how much better off we would be. We wouldn't even need the NRA or GOA. Then if we each went out and recruited just one more fence sitter. That's 160million votes, about 270 million folks in this country. We would have the majority. We allow to many of our number to sit home on the couch watching tv. Then if gains are made they benefit, when ground is lost they blame those of us who tried. It's time to get all your buddies who just really don't care to call. It's time to have your wife call at a different time than you, you are two votes. We need to make ourselves seem larger than what we are. Puff ourselves up, much like these small groups do, look at PETA and HCI, they are not huge groups, yet they influence legislation.
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Live Free or Die Trying,
Steve Moody
[This message has been edited by Ruger (edited September 19, 1999).]