More AHSA obfuscation

As I mentioned last Thursday (and as has been discussed in great depth, for months, by many other people), Obama considers the gun rights vote important enough to be worth pursuing. He also apparently thinks gun rights advocates lack the wit (and the memory) to realize that Obama and Biden probably constitute the most rabidly pro-citizen disarmament major party presidential ticket in U.S. history.

Running interference for him is the "American Hunters and Shooters Association" (AHSA), a phony "pro-gun" group that advocates draconian gun laws, and which the Brady Campaign sees as an ally:

Unfortunately for Schoenke, the Brady Campaign basically agrees with the NRA [that AHSA is an anti-rights group]. "I see our issues as complementary to theirs," Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign, says about Schoenke's association. "They're a positive group."

Helmke even contends that the two organizations are not far apart in approach. Helmke says he, too, shot guns as a boy and is as Middle American as he can be -- a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind. "The Brady Campaign is not just East Coast liberal Democrats," he says.

The latest round of Obama's AHSA-abetted claim to be a "defender of the Second Amendment" is a radio ad being aired in New Hampshire, featuring AHSA president Ray Schoenke.

"It's important to me that our next president protects our Second Amendment rights to own guns and defend ourselves," Schoenke says in the ad. "Barack Obama and John McCain will both make sure we can keep our guns. But what about keeping our jobs? Barack's got a real plan that invests in creating jobs here at home and cuts taxes a thousand bucks for working families."

Schoenke then criticized McCain's economic policies.

"It's the same old Bush playbook," he says. "When the coach loses eight years in a row, you don't bring him back for a ninth season! We just can't afford more of the same."

Click here to listen (QuickTime format).

Obama and McCain "will both make sure we can keep our guns"? That's funny, I thought Obama voted to ban shotguns (without even the courtesy of a "grandfather clause"), and that McCain has voted to ban so-called "assault weapons." It looks to me as if neither can be trusted to keep their hooks out of our gun safes, although at least with McCain, disarming America hasn't been a signature issue throughout his political career, and in choosing Governor Palin as his running mate, he is running with someone clearly vastly better with regard to gun rights than Senator Biden is.

As to Schoenke's claims about who would be better for the economy, I'll acknowledge that my understanding of economic issues is somewhere between thin and anorexic, but I do know that it's not the president's place to "create jobs," and that the less the feds interfere with the economy, the less they'll screw it up.

I won't urge anyone to vote for McCain (I myself won't be doing so), but a vote for Obama is a vote for forcible citizen disarmament.