Folks, the fight for the 2nd Amendment is an ongoing battle.
Some days you are taking back major portions of our rights and watching gun owners bounce anti-gunners out of office, and some days you’re wondering if your 5-shot S&W revolver will be taken away from you.
Having to constantly sound the alarm when anti-gunners try to hammer through bans on modern utility rifles and “high cap” magazines, or when they try to enact state wide gun registries or slide in a gun control bill under the guise of ‘mental health reform’ can be tiring.
And sometimes, those mean people at the Capitol snarl back, scared about losing their job in the next election – not to mention losing their majority, and their grip on power.
So rather than contend for our rights with a passion that sometimes incurs the anger of these radically anti-gun ideologues (which we consider a normal part of the job when dealing with radical gun grabbers), Iowa Gun Owners is announcing a truce with Senate Democratic leadership.
Specifically, we want Senator Mike Gronstal and Senator Steve Sodders to know that we’re no longer going to work to expose you to the voters in your district over your years-long attack on the 2nd Amendment.
Mike and Steve, it’s all good.
Your vote against Constitutional Carry on the floor of the Senate – not a problem.
Quashing Stand-Your-Ground law, when it was two votes short of passage – hey, we get it, Big Daddy Bloomberg isn’t happy with it.
The other dozen pro-gun bills that you’ve walled off in your committee, while shrugging and telling folks that ‘it’s only being pushed by those single issue gun owners,’ – all in a day’s work.
All of that is behind us now.
(Senator Gronstal and Sodders, we forgive you, and we wish you well in the Fall.)
You’ve moved a pair of minute gun bills through the Senate this year, a few months away from your upcoming election, and you know what, that makes it all right by us.
We forgive you for the years and years that you’ve spent crushing our gun rights.
More than that, just like the establishment gun lobby here in Iowa, we’re prepared to praise you in state wide email blasts – like this one.
We’re going to remain strangely silent this Fall, and sit comfortably in our easy chair while you fool Iowans into believing that you actually are pro-gun.
Steve, when you raffle away an AR-15, you know, the one that your fellow Senator Joe Bolkcolm wants to take away from law abiding Iowans – we won’t point out what a hypocrite you are.
No, seriously, we wish you great fortune in the Fall when your big gamble of 2016 comes to fruition.
And we want to add this warm wish to you as well . . .
APRIL FOOL’S DAY!!!!!
Ha ha ha. . . yes, the institutional gun groups are sending the message above to Senate Democratic leadership here in Iowa right now . . . BUT NOT IOWA GUN OWNERS!
Nothing has changed here at Iowa Gun Owners. We remain steady, and focused . . . on defending the Second Amendment in Iowa!
Iowa Gun Owners members and supporters will be crawling all over targeted districts this Fall, exposing anti-gunners and making sure that everyone knows what they’ve done against our gun rights over the past two years – just like we did in 2014.
(Teams of IGO supporters passing out flyers in legislative races the final days before the 2014 election.)
We’ll be running radio ads in key races, making sure that the facts penetrate into every single home in the districts – just like we did in 2014.
Didn’t catch those ads running on WHO radio and local stations back then? Check one out here.
(One the radio ads that IGO donors paid to run in the Beall/Kraayenbrink race, Beall lost that race by a huge margin.)
We’ll be deploying tens of thousands of pieces of targeted direct mail to gun owners in districts where we have a pro-gun candidate versus an anti-gun incumbent, putting page after page of facts into the hands of voters who want to know what their incumbent legislators has done in office – just like we did in 2014.
(A portion of the direct mail that IGO deployed in targeted races all over Iowa in 2014, exposing the anti-gun records that incumbents were desperate to keep secret.)
You see, Iowa Gun Owners members and supporters are not the ones who are going to be bought off by this morsel of freedom and we’re certainly not about to sit around and do nothing this fall.
Other groups do that.
Worse, they put these radical anti-gunners in photo ops and praise them in emails to their members – things that these anti-gunners will use to ‘prove how pro-gun we are’ during the elections.
But the facts speak for themselves, and we have a lot of them.
Come November, a lot of Iowans are going to be in possession of these facts too, we’ll make sure of that.
So we’re sorry, Senator Gronstal and Sodders, that we aren’t willing to lie down and sing your praises like the other groups you’ve so skillfully outmaneuvered are doing right now. That’s just not who we are.
You’ll do your best to fool gun owners in the Fall, with defacto help from these silenced organizations, and we’ll be there to expose you for who you really are.
You may win — after all, you can tout your previous “A” rating from the establishment gun lobby as well as their PAC checks as signs that you’re solidly pro-gun.
But you might lose, like your former colleagues Senators Rich Olive, William Heckroth, Staci Appel, Becky Schmitz, Keith Kreiman and Daryl Beall did over the past few years.
Either way, everyone will know what happened to Constitutional Carry and Stand-Your-Ground legislation during the 2015/2016 session.
Or, you could move SF137 and SF400 today, pass them through the full Senate with no weakening amendments, and over to the House for passage. It’s your choice.
Folks, if this is the kind of “No Compromise” organization that you’re proud to be a part of, please feel free to help us get ready for this fight by making a generous contribution to Iowa Gun Owners today so that we can put this program in motion later on this year.
For Freedom,
Aaron Dorr
Executive Director
P.S. Other groups are playing into Mike Gronstal and Steve Sodders’ hands right now, praising them for passing a regulation laden gun bill, and trying to give them political cover in the elections later this year.
It’s happening in their emails, photo ops, and press releases – and sadly, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.
But Iowa Gun Owners will continue to expose anti-gun legislators to the voters in their districts using mail, email, social media, radio ads, and TV ads as long as you can help us make that possible.