AWR Hawkins provides Second Amendment Voter’s Guide: Trump vs. Clinton

AWR Hawkins provides a breakdown of Trump and Clinton's positions on Universal Background Checks, “Assault Weapons” Ban, Gun-Free Zones, and the 2nd Amendment (see here).

New York Times notes how Hillary Clinton tailors her gun control message to her audience

In a recent op-ed I noted how Hillary Clinton was tailoring her gun control message to her audience.  Now even the New York Times notes that:

Mrs. Clinton’s appearances in black churches, where she cited the grim statistics of gun violence and surrounded herself with families of victims, helped her win crucial African-American voters. She relentlessly criticized Mr. Sanders for his votes against gun control in the Senate.

On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton avoided speaking about gun control in rural white regions of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, whose blue-collar voters will be desperately fought for by any Democratic nominee against Mr. Trump. A disparaging comment by Mr. Obama in 2008, who said that these voters cling to guns and religion, did much damage.

Newest National Review piece: "On Guns, Clinton Runs Both Left and Right, Depending on Her Audience"

CPRC's John Lott has a new piece at National Review on Hillary Clinton's views on gun control.

What does Hillary Clinton really believe on guns? This year, she is running to the left of Bernie Sanders. In 2008, she ran well to the right of Obama, arguing against any kind of federal “blanket rules.” 

On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton gave an address at Philadelphia’s St. Paul’s Baptist Church. With a nod to Pennsylvania’s high rate of gun ownership, she declared: “There is a Second Amendment, there are constitutional rights. We aren’t interested in taking away guns of lawful, responsible gun owners.” 

But in New York City in the fall, she told donors: “The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment, and I am going to make that case every chance that I get.” In Maryland last Thursday, Chelsea Clinton reiterated that point, promising that her mom would appoint to the Supreme Court justices who would overturn past decisions that struck down local and state gun-control measures. Given that the only laws that the Supreme Court has objected to are complete gun bans or laws that made it a crime to chamber a bullet, one wonders what “constitutional rights” Clinton was talking about preserving in Philadelphia. 

Clinton has shown this split personality on guns at other points in the campaign. In the month leading up to the New Hampshire primary, gun control was the focus of a quarter of her campaign ads there. By contrast, she ran not a single gun-control ad in rural areas of Iowa. In Iowa as a whole, only 6 percent of her ads discussed guns in any way. 

When asked last October about gun laws in the U.K. and Australia, Clinton responded by extolling their virtues. She spoke highly of the U.K.’s handgun ban and of Australia’s confiscation of a third of legally owned guns. She failed to note that the U.K.’s homicide rate soared by 50 percent in the eight years after the handgun ban took full effect in 1997. The rate later fell, but only after an 18 percent increase in the number of police. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

Is Hillary Clinton's Gun Control Push Backfiring in New Hampshire?

Over the last month, a quarter of all of her campaign ads in New Hampshire have focused on gun control. In rural areas of Iowa, by contrast, she did not run a single ad related to gun control. In all of Iowa, just six percent of her ads discussed guns.

But even among Democrats in New Hampshire things are working out quite as well as Hillary might have hoped.   From the Associated Press:

With each mass shooting in the United States in the past year, a debate raged about whether gun-control measures were overdue to make Americans safe.But not in New Hampshire.
The gun culture is alive and well here, and with a population overwhelmingly familiar with and comfortable with firearms, gun-control issues that have resonated across the nation barely register among voters getting ready for Tuesday's presidential primary.
"Most folks in New Hampshire, I don't want to call them pro-gun but they're comfortable with guns," said Wayne Lesperance, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. The state is legendary for its strong libertarian streak, famously boasting "Live Free or Die" on its license plates. . . .
Brita Tirrell, a New Hampshire native and 34-year-old nurse from Concord, doesn't own a gun and has no interest in them.
"Am I into violence? Nope. But am I opposed to people having them for their protection? No," she said. Asked where she ranks it in her thinking about the primary, she said, "It's at the bottom of the list." . . .

Gallup: By a 56 to 41 Percent Majority, Americans Believe that More People Carrying Concealed Handguns make US Safer

For almost all categories of Americans, there is significant support for the notion that allowing people to carry permitted concealed handguns makes Americans safer.  Only Democrats and those with a post-graduate education do not believe this, but that doesn't mean that these individuals believe that carrying represents a risk.  If the question were asked whether allowing people to carry concealed handguns either made us safer or had no effect, it is possible that the results would be even more overwhelming (after all while the vast majority of research finds that concealed handgun laws improve safety, no peer-reviewed research by criminologists or economists find that it increases murder, rape or robbery rates).  Non-gun owners and Independents are equally divided.

Hillary Clinton on gun control on May 6, 2014: “We’re way out of balance. I think that we’ve got to reign in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime. And I don’t believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.” Clinton went on to further proclaim the dangers of people “carrying guns in public places. . . . Look at the types of things that have caused people who are carrying guns in public places to respond.  Loud music from a bunch of kids, someone knocking on your door seeking help, . . ."

UPDATE: There is also a related CNN poll, but the big difference is that this question doesn't ask if people have a permit or even whether they are law-abiding citizens.

Jake Tapper: When Bill Clinton complained about guns in Baltimore, ask him why the law-abiding poor can't carry

Bill Clinton on CNN's State of the Union:

. . . The Baltimore thing came on the heels of what happened in Ferguson, what happened in New York City and all these other places. And their is a big national movement about whether the lives of young African-American men count. 

You can’t have people walking around with guns. I used to tell people when we did Bosnia, Kosovo anything like that, you get enough people with weapons around and there will be unintended consequences. People make mistakes People do wrong. Things happen. To hold a community together you got to have a high level of community trust. . . .

Note that in Baltimore, it costs over $300 to license and register a handgun to own in the home.  It is virtually impossible to get a concealed handgun permit (just 0.3% of adults in Maryland have a permit), and about half of those are retired police officers.  The permits that are issued are definitely not going to people who live in this poor area of Baltimore.  The formal legal costs of getting a permit are not just the license and registration fees to own a handgun, but also the $75 ($70 application and $5 fingerprinting fee) and training costs.  Even then they are just a small part of the cost of getting a concealed handgun permit.  The poor aren't going to hiring lawyers to go through the legal process to get approval to have a permit, and even if they did, it is unlikely that a judge would grant them a permit.

"Hillary Clinton Says Opponents Of Gun Control Laws ‘Terrorize’ Americans"

Teacher in the studio audience: Do you think that reinstating the ban on assault weapons and banning high capacity magazines would do any good?
Clinton: Yes, I do.  I do.

More in the write up on the interview is available here:

“We cannot let a minority of people, and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people, hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people,” Clinton said during a live CNN town hall. The comments were Clinton’s deepest foray into an exceedingly controversial political subject since leaving the State Department last year. 

“I was disappointed that the Congress did not pass universal background checks after the horrors of the shootings at Sandy Hook,” she said in response to a question from a school teacher in the audience. “I don’t think any parent, or any person should have to fear about their child going to school or going to college because someone for whatever reason, psychological, emotional, political, ideological, whatever, could possibly enter that school property with an automatic weapon and murder innocent children, students, teachers.” 

“I will speak out [on this subject] no matter what role I find myself in,” Clinton pledged, referring to her consideration of a presidential bid in 2016.

Of course, I believe that Hillary is clearly knowingly lying when she talks about automatic weapons.

The video also repeats the false claim about 74 more school shootings

Here is an earlier comment from May by Hillary:

“We’ve got to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime,” she said. “And I don’t believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.”

Among Clinton's other views, in 2008 she advocated:

-- "I will also work to reinstate the assault weapons ban. We had it during the 1990s. It really was an aid to our police officers, who are now once again, because it has lapsed--the Republicans will not reinstate it--are being outgunned on our streets by these military-style weapons."

-- She also supports licensing and registration of guns.  

While Clinton was in the Senate she voted against prohibiting frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers, and also against prohibiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers for “gun violence” cases.