The Second Amendment isn't about hunting. We all know that, and anyone who actually reads the Second Amendment can see that neither the word "hunting" nor any of its synonyms appears anywhere in the text.
But the Second Amendment protects the weapons used for hunting, as well as others. Back when it was ratified, the guns for hunting and the guns for defense were pretty much the same, so it was obvious.
Today, there's more of a distinction between them, though there's still a fair bit of overlap.
And because of that, attacks on the Second Amendment are, in fact, attacks on our hunting traditions, too, even if the Fudds don't get that.
Enter Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. She's definitely anti-Second Amendment. She's tripped over herself to make that clear. However, she's also trying to pander to hunters and getting mocked for it.
Maura Healey, posing with a powerful weapon in her hands, joins a long list of pols whose political pandering to hunters and gun owners could end up backfiring.
The liberal Democratic governor, whose strict gun control measures have long infuriated gun owners, this week filed a bill to allow Sunday hunting and expand crossbow hunting, long overdue moves that aimed to shore up one of her biggest weaknesses in an election year.
“Let’s finally lift the ban on Sunday hunting in Massachusetts,” Healey posted on X with a video of her shooting a crossbow and holding another weapon in her hands.
Gun owners immediately flooded Healey’s X site with derogatory comments about her long record of opposing gun rights. Healey is clearly not a hunter and looks ridiculous trying to pretend to be one. Stick to basketball, Governor.
And just ask John Kerry, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush or Tim Walz if pandering like this works.
That bipartisan list of politicians all tried to pose as hunters, but wound up getting in big trouble — in Cheney’s case almost fatally.
Look, I agree with lifting the Sunday ban on hunting. While my father and I never hunted on the sabbath, the sabbath is a different day for people of different faiths, and some people don't see an issue with hunting on the sabbath, anyway. Regardless, it's not the state's role to enforce compliance with religious doctrine any more than it is to interfere with our right to keep and bear arms.
But Healey is down with interfering with our gun rights, so this isn't really about rights, is it?
No, this is about trying to pretend that she's not anti-hunter, just in favor of some of those "commonsense gun laws" we've all heard so much about. This is her trying desperately to woo the Fudds to support her.
She knows the hardline gun rights activists will never side with her, and she's right. Even if she completely flipped and started fighting for gun rights, we'd all likely wonder what her game is. We're never going to accept her as pro-gun, no matter what.
But the hunting contingent is full of people who don't see gun rights as absolute. Basically, so long as they can go hunting, they're happy. Making hunting easier by removing an idiotic ban on hunting on one particular day of the week? That's easy.
And posing with a crossbow lets her pretend to be pro-hunter without getting her the kind of heat she might get if she'd had a firearm in her hands. You're deluding yourself if you think this wasn't calculated.
Now, she's getting mocked for it on social media, as she should be.
This kind of idiotic pandering should be mocked. It doesn't matter if it was Kerry, Obama, or Walz. Nor if it was Bush or Cheney, though Cheney was actually a regular bird hunter and I seem to remember Bush was, too, which isn't pandering, though stupidity while hunting is still fair game for mockery.
Healey, though, as the Democrats mentioned above, worked for gun control. That makes their pandering hypocritical to some degree, especially as they work to curtail our access to arms, while using arms--a crossbow is still classified as "arms," after all--to bolster their image.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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