Since Monday morning, when Senator Ted Cruz announced his intentions to run for President, our office has received a flurry of calls, emails, and Facebook messages from Iowans wanting to know where Senator Cruz stands on your right to keep and bear arms.

Of course anytime a high profile candidate comes to Iowa, we get contacted by Iowans wanting to know about that candidate’s commitment to your gun rights.

As Iowa’s largest gun rights organization, and the only one with a comprehensive survey program designed to objectively examine all candidates on where they stand on your gun rights, we take this responsibility very seriously.

So while we are busy with the legislative session at the moment, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what’s to come once this session adjourns ‘sine die.’

As you know, every candidate running for office here in Iowa professes to be pro-gun.

Shucks, President Obama claims this and VP Joe Biden is well known for his ‘savy’ self-defense advice, recently telling folks who hear noises to “put that double-barreled shotgun up and fire two blasts outside the house.”

The bottom line is, talk is cheap and everyone is going to want to cater to gun owners in Iowa, since we’re the largest and most organized issue organization in Iowa.

Don’t believe a word of it, without objective facts to back it up.

And that’s exactly what Iowa Gun Owners will be working on for the rest of this year: providing you with the information you need to make informed decisions as this caucus process heats up!

We’re going to do this in a couple of ways.

First, we’ll be issuing candidate surveys to every candidate who formally declares in this race. This survey isn’t a softball, designed to give candidates a chance to take advantage of gun owners by answering easy questions.

We want real answers. We’ll be seeking written answers on a variety of topics including:

• Whether or not the candidate would sign into law Universal Background Checks, which would establish a defacto national gun registry, a blunt precursor to national confiscation;
• Whether or not the candidate would sign into law certain types of so-called mental health reform, which are simply masks for gun control, as we’ve seen multiple times in the Iowa Senate over the last few years;
• Whether or not the candidate would sign into law bans on so called “assault weapons,” bans on magazines beyond a certain arbitrary size, or bans on other types of cosmetic features that can not alter the mechanical function of firearms;
• Whether or not the candidate would continue to entangle the US in the UN, especially as they continue to push the UN Small Arms Treaty.     

And that’s just the start.

As candidates complete this survey, we’ll be immediately conveying that information to you.

And of course, we’ll be giving you the chance to be involved in this process at every step – urging you to communicate directly with those campaigns that refuse to go on the record in support of your right to keep and bear arms!

Second, we’ll be doing the hard work of digging into the backgrounds of these candidates.

In some cases, these candidates haven’t been in office in a very long time and they will be doing all they can to ensure that their anti-gun secrets remain safely in the past.

We won’t allow that to happen.

Of course, as a 501c4, we’ll not be endorsing in these campaigns – but we will be making sure that you know exactly where these candidates stand and have stood on your right to keep and bear arms.

As a result, gun owners in Iowa will be the most informed, most ready for action, and most politically feared issue group in our state.

We won’t be able to do it alone.

We’ll have plenty of volunteer opportunities in this process and will be absolutely dependent on your calls, emails, and Facebook messages to the candidates demanding that they complete the candidate survey we put before them.

We don’t promise that you’ll always like what we bring to your attention. It’s Iowa – and Iowans get very personally involved with ‘their’ candidates.

But we’ll do what we always do during an election season – give you the cold, hard facts on where the candidates stand on your right to keep and bear arms!

 For Freedom,

Aaron Dorr
Executive Director

P.S. Senator Ted Cruz announced yesterday that he’s running for President of the United States, and he’s seeking the GOP nomination.

He’s one of what may well be over a dozen GOP candidates that seek Iowans’ support for his campaign as Senator Rand Paul and Senator Marco Rubio are expected to announce their candidacies early next month.

Iowa Gun Owners will be unveiling our candidate survey program soon after this legislative session comes to an end – giving all the candidates a chance to get on the record when it comes to their views on your right to keep and bear arms.

We can promise you that we’ll not relent and not give in when candidates bluster and threaten us for exposing their anti-gun records or refusing to sign our candidate survey.

Get ready! It’s going to be a busy 8-10 months!