kio: The Gun Control Movement made progress for the GOP... By getting the Democratic Party trounced in the last election. Lost the Senate.
You attribute this to gun control? Smallish populated red states are more prevalent than comparative blue states. But, when you compare voters by overall votes cast, there's far more support for gun control proponents, which shoots down your premise:
[2014 election of] 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate ... those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, "the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes."
...This doesn't mean that the Republican majority is illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the tables were turned: Democrats got more Senate seats than their vote share suggested they should. The problem isn't that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population. http://www.vox.com/2015/1/3/7482635/senate-small-states
kioa: Lost seats in the House. Put more state legislatures in GOP control than at any time since the Great Depression.
You do understand the gerrymandering problem, don't you? As a supposed dem you should be touting the unethical practice of rightwing gerrymandering to stack the deck to elect republicans, rather than praising repubs as being justly representative due to being pro gun.
kioa: I-594, despite its supporters having a 7-to-1 spending advantage (thanks to the donations of Billionaire 1%ers like Bloomberg & Bill Gates) passed by only 60%-40% in a coastal state [Washington state], showing the "90% support Background Checks" claim to be utterly unrepresentative of the reality. I-594 is a toothless 18 page monstrosity of a law that is so unenforceable it was openly broken on the statehouse steps.
Let me get this straight. You oppose background check law which passed in Washington state? and you are unaware that actual voters in a referendum may or may not be representative of overall public opinion when including non-voters for that year? And do you whine so when the usual funding dichotomy occurs where the gun lobby overspends the brady bunch 10 to 1? Scat back to RKBA.
seattle news on I594 bill: ... To hear those gun rights advocates tell it, their grass-roots effort at curbing governmental overreach was sabotaged by the big-spending bullies in the Initiative 594 campaign. Traditionally, gun control movements have struggled to take on the all-powerful gun lobby and its NRA-funded attacks, while movements like I-594 are usually the ones holding the grass-roots bake sales. http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/thedailyweekly/955243-131/role-reversal-in-gun-battle-has But not this year. In becoming the first state to enact mandatory universal background checks by popular vote, Washington [state] flipped the script.
kioa: Gun Control is an political dinosaur that has been put back to where it belongs: Irrelevancy.
You're one the verge of falling into the same extinction distinction.
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