Fingers crossed, Conor Lamb gets across the finish line tomorrow in the PA-18 special election.  As Vox notes, Lamb is a “pro-gun” Democrat and that can be a problem for Dems going forward.  It doesn’t have to be.  Yes, there are always the small minded who have to scour everything with ideological bleach and kill all more nuanced, complicated or opposing viewpoints.  The purity squad will not be silenced even when faced with the greater good and the exceptionally salient point that we need Democrats to win all over the country, and they’re not all going to hold the same 100% progressive policy viewpoints.  We do have to be a big tent.  So it does depend on exactly what “pro-gun” means.

For me, it does matter if you take NRA money.  Don’t do that.  After that there’s a good amount of wiggle room.  So Conor Lamb likes to fire AR-15s.  The great compromise that is out there is my line in the sand.

Would Conor Lamb support a law that confines assault weapons to shooting ranges? I would hope so.

I would ban them outright.  But hell, I DO NOT support the second amendment.  You won’t hear me offer the knee jerk pleasantry that affirms support for the 27 words written 230 years ago.  Nope.  I’d repeal it.  I think Madison and Hamilton would repeal it if they saw the firepower available today and legal to walk around a city with.  Short of overturning or modernizing an anachronistic part of our Constitution, we can go back to the pre-Heller position on the amendment, held for 220 of the 230 years that, of course there are limits we can make to the availability of deadly weapons.

Does Conor Lamb agree with that?  That’s my test.  If we can’t ban semi-automatic weapons, or at least high powered assault style semi-automatic weapons, then we can at least compromise and register them and confine them to qualified, secured, shooting ranges.

Does anybody agree with 80%* of what we stand for?  They’re with us, we need them.

*So long as the other 20% isn’t in contradiction to bedrock principles – no racism, sexism or other prejudice against a minority.  If you’re okay with education, enlightenment, science, humanism, fairness, justice for all, etc., we can work together.