Gun rights could play a significant role in battleground states

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Published on Wednesday, 30 November -0001 00:00

Written by Jeff Garvas

September 9, 2004
Springfield News Sun

WASHINGTON — Large populations of hunters and gun owners in Ohio and other battleground states could provide critical support in the close presidential election, the National Rifle Association's chief executive said Wednesday.

Candidates' stances on protecting gun rights could help attract enough voters to sway the election, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"This issue is worth several percentage points," he said. "It's a powerful issue at the polls on Election Day."

About one-fourth of the NRA's 4 million members live in West Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Missouri and Pennsylvania — all battleground states with 101 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

It's this membership that the NRA plans to target through rallies, drives to register voters and a $400,000 weeklong television ad buy in several battleground states, LaPierre said.

The half-hour ads will begin running this week on Dayton stations WBDT and WKEF, according to a list the NRA provided to The AP. They will also run in TV stations in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida, South Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia.

The ads, which mock Democrat John Kerry's attempts to portray himself as a hunter by highlighting his voting record, feature scenes from Ohio towns and interviews with Ohio Democrats who support Bush, such as Maple Heights, Ohio, councilwoman Barbara Lee Miami.

"I just don't have faith that Kerry can do the job," she said.

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Kerry spokesman Bill Burton fired back: "John Kerry's been a straight shooter on guns. He's been a hunter and a gun owner since he's been 12 years old. No amount of inflated rhetoric is going to be enough to distract voters from the fact that George Bush has been making the wrong choices."

Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Dan Trevas added that Ohio gun owners are more concerned about the economy, national security and health care than they are about gun rights.

"It's not what's on their minds," Trevas said. "It's an attempt to divert the debate off the fundamental issues that affect every Ohio family and gun owners won't fall for it."

But political scientists say that while it's true that polls often rank the gun issue — whether it's gun rights or gun control — below jobs and the war in Iraq in terms of its importance to voters, it's very meaningful to a certain population of people.

"It could add a percent or two in the Bush column," said John Green, director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics. "This is an intense minority and if it's mobilized and the election is close, it could make a difference."

The NRA has not yet endorsed a candidate for president but makes it clear in the infomercial that it wants Kerry defeated. The NRA hopes to raise enough from its members to spend about $20 million on its election activities, LaPierre said.

Ohio, which just passed a law allowing people to carry hidden guns, has more than 1 million gun owners, including about 900,000 people who have state hunting licenses and 190,000 members of the NRA, said Keith Bailey, president of the Ohio Rifle & Pistol Association.

For Bailey, gun rights is an important issue and one his group plans to be vocal on at town meetings. He says it's important to tell people that pictures of Kerry with guns are a farce.

"He's very good at photo opportunities as far as having someone put a gun in his hands and apparently going hunting, but everything in his voting record is totally against private ownership of firearms," Bailey said. "He has voted even stronger than Gore."

Former Vice President Al Gore supported mandatory photo ID licenses for future handgun buyers and opposed loosening restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, positions that didn't sit well with Ohioans. Bush won the state in 2000 by 3.6 percentage points.

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