Six months from now, we decide who will be the president of the United States (POTUS) until January 2016. We only get one vote and that's unfair, because it comes down to take 'em or leave 'em.
Will the next POTUS attempt to marginalize the Second Amendment through Federal Court appointments? Will he encourage the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms to promote the transfer of guns through our southern boarder to Mexico to see where they end up? Will he support or veto National Concealed Carry legislation? Will he promote international gun controls through the United Nations or support the ability of people everywhere to be armed and capable of protecting themselves from abusive governments and ethnic cleansing, or will we be coerced into being the world's policeman paid for by you and me? These are weighty questions and the answers have real consequences for our dwindling freedoms, liberties and budgets!
Will the next POTUS use the resources of the Department of Justice, the DEA, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement to arrest, prosecute, convict, and incarcerate medical marijuana patients and suppliers operating lawfully under their state legal systems? Will he continue to squander tens of billions of our hard earned tax dollars on the continuation of this racist, ignorant, counter-productive War on Drugs that has cost so much and returned so little? To be fair, it has brought us police corruption, a narco-terrorist state on our boarder (see above) and the highest incarceration rate in the world. Our efforts have resulted in lowering the cost of heroin and cocaine, while raising their purity; these have been the unintended but real consequences for our policies. Didn't our experiment with prohibition of alcohol teach us anything useful that we can apply to this 40-year-old ongoing disaster? It's bad enough to learn lessons the hard way; it's criminally insane to repeat them.
A year ago it appeared that the well-polished Obama campaign machine would have kept the gun rights versus gun-control issue from bubbling up to the emotional political surface as a campaign issue. The shooting last year of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was successfully downplayed by the White House. Whatever their motivation, they were correct that neither law nor regulation will prevent deranged individuals like Jared Lee Loughner or a John Hinkley from obtaining a gun. No, the Obama nightmare on the compellingly powerful gun issue began inauspiciously enough when one Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmermann in Sanford, Fla. Stand your ground, retreat rules, castle doctrine; they are just words that have returned us to a front page discussion regarding the role of armed citizens in our society. This must cause a triple-dose Excedrin migraine headaches for the White House. The last thing the current occupier of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. wants is a vigorous, galvanized gun owner voting block come November in the critical battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire and Florida. On the other hand, Romney is counting on it.
Also just a year ago, the state-based marijuana clinics, growers, dispensaries and patients were benefiting from a hands-off approach from the federal government. Someone over at Justice (funny how both of these newly created problems emanate from AG Holder's office) decided that we'd better use our U.S. attorneys to clamp down on those dangerous marijuana clinics. Al-Qaeda has been largely eliminated -- guess we need to have someone to keep fighting. Tenth Amendment be damned! At the Drug Policy Alliance convention in Los Angeles in November, most of the marijuana reformers were yearning for the halcyon days of George W. Bush! Somebody at the Romney campaign needs to be alerted to the treachery the marijuana community (mainly Democratic leaning voters) feels toward this president and his feeble excuses to live up to his commitment to them on this issue. Heck, if he could do that to his supporters during the first term, imagine the concerns that gun rights supporters can now more validly and alarmingly conjure up from a second term? The run on guns has begun anew -- the market is where people put their money where their fears are! The largely unorganized but potentially powerful voting block of marijuana reformers are getting hammered by the full force of federal law at the hands of the former senator from Illinois who admitted that he not only smoked -- he actually inhaled -- good heavens!
The president and his staff back in Chicago have plenty to stress about during their sleep. The question is will the Romney campaign understand the relationships between these two freedom- and liberty-related issues and pilot a course to maximize gun owners' fear and marijuana reformers' distrust?
What do you think?
