Women & Guns

From The Editor...

By Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor

Although this issue of Women & Guns is dated November-December, it is going to press before we know who the winner of the 2008 Project Runway is.

Of course, we also don't know who will be elected President, or what the balance of power will be in the House or Senate.

"Expect the best, prepare for the worst," might just be the most useful motto gunowners could adopt-in this or any other year.

We certainly had the "best" with the Heller decision in June, which itself followed a five year period or so of incremental gains by gunowners, both on and off the political field. Whoever wins the presidency, the next occupant of the White House will either be largely indifferent to gunowners, or downright hostile.

More telling will be the makeup of Congress, and most prognosticators are expecting Democratic Party gains in both the House and Senate. While not all Democrats are anti-gun, the party as a whole, despite fancy talk about the sanctity of the Second Amendment every couple of years, has done us no favors over the years.

It may be that whoever is the next president, he will be so busy with a variety of other problems, big and small, now known and yet to come, that gun legislation will not occupy much of his time.

Legislation would be the operative word however. Because whoever is president will be making a host of appointments, even before he takes the oath of office. And after Inauguration Day, sometime in his first term, one of those appointments will likely be to the Supreme Court. That would be the Court that this year decided by the narrowest of margins, 5-4, that the Second Amendment upholds an individual right to "keep and bear arms."

Before we get to another gun case at the Supreme Court (and there is one on the docket already for next year), we would have to go to the gyrations of the so-called Advise & Consent process by which the US Senate will decide whether a presidential appointment to the Court is up to their standards. Even if the president and the Senate are of the same party, for the last 20 years there hasn't been a Supreme Court appointment that hasn't generated fireworks on the Hill.

And while the spectacle of two parts of the government wrangling over the third can be disturbing to some, at least we get to see it.

The next president will appoint dozens of people who either need no Congressional approval or who will get a cursory look and a rubber stamp (a process that is common even when the Executive and the Congress are of different parties).

Many of these appointments will have an impact on your gun rights, including federal judicial appointments in lower courts.

But so, too, will bureaucrats in agencies under the president's control as disparate as the Department of Homeland Security to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). It was OSHA, who earlier this year, tried to sneak through rules on handling of ammunition that would have put the majority of gun dealers in the country out of business and affected how you stored your own ammunition.

The fine folks at the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association (NMLRA) were the first to get wind of this scheme and sound the alarm to others in the gun community.

Which reminds me that once again at the Gun Rights Policy Conference this year, the so-called NATO Doctrine was affirmed as a resolution by the attendees.

Initially introduced over 20 years ago at the first GRPC, the resolution came from Linda Farmer, of Georgia, an activist and machine gun enthusiast. Linda's resolution stated that an attack on one class of gunowner (machine gunners, hunters, defensive gunowners, muzzle loaders, etc.) should be treated as an attack on all gunowners.

It is a policy which has served gunowners well in the two decades since it first appeared and one that deserves more attention by all gunowners.

Regardless of who the next president is, and how Congressional and statehouse races shake out, we are all-always-in this together.

Peggy Tartaro