Outdoors commentary

By Pat Wray
For the Corvallis Gazette-Times

Dear President-elect Obama:

Congratulations on your recent election as President of the United States. Your selection helped restore my faith in the intelligence of the American people, a faith that was shaken eight years ago and nearly destroyed in 2004.

I don’t represent any organization, but I believe I am representative of a segment of the population that was very important in your election. Your polls may not have identified this group of people and I want to make sure you appreciate the significance of our support.

We are the hunters and shooters who voted for you despite your less-than-stellar background with gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment.

We voted for you with some trepidation, I might add, because we’ve been hearing for months from the National Rifle Association (NRA) that you will take our guns away, that you will restrict our 2nd Amendment freedoms, that you are the devil incarnate.

We voted for you because we believed you when you told us that law-abiding gun owners have nothing to fear from you.

We voted for you because we don’t believe in single issue voting and because our country has challenges more dangerous and more daunting than individual gun ownership. We believe you are the one best qualified to deal with those challenges.

I tried to explain this concept to soon-to-be-ex-Senator Gordon Smith at his Portland office a few months ago. I told him hunters and shooters were far more sophisticated now than in the past. We would no longer vote for a politician just because of an NRA endorsement. We will vote for people who respect the needs of wildlife and love the land.

I tried to enlist Senator Smith’s support for the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would have dramatically reduced greenhouse gases. He declined, smiling with his white teeth in his tanned face, and took a big step, though he didn’t realize it at the time, back to packaging frozen peas. I bet if his polling data were specific enough he would learn the measure of his close defeat was provided by hunters and gun owners who expected an environmental ethic.

Those same hunters and gun owners voted for you, Mr. President-elect, and I hope you understand the faith and hope that such a vote required. We have great faith in your commitment to the natural world, and it’s been a long time since we felt that sort of confidence about a politician.

But we need more than hope about our guns. We have forgiven you your statement about “bitter gun owners” but we have not forgotten. Our guns are not just tools to us; neither are they simply self-protection devices. Guns are the symbols of our freedom. We understand that subjugation of a people begins with control of their individual weapons and we are not naïve enough to believe it could never happen here. We have taken Machiavelli to heart; to paraphrase, “An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.” We don’t forget, and will never forget, that throughout the history of this nation, guns have always been the final, literal guarantee of our freedom.

Our willingness to break from the NRA voting line should not be interpreted as willingness to give up the 2nd Amendment freedoms we already enjoy. We will oppose any attempt to increase the breadth of gun registration because we don’t want future governments to be able to collect them from us. We will also oppose further restrictions on handgun ownership but we will work with you to craft laws to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute and imprison gun-wielding criminals. We hope you are smart enough to avoid anything containing the words “assault weapon,” a meaningless umbrella phrase popular with gun control advocates because so many reasonable sporting arms can be caught in its net.

If you have questions, we recommend you read Hal Herring’s remarkable essay in the Oct. 27, 2008, issue of High Country News, entitled “Why We All Need the Democrats to Abandon Gun Control.” http://www.hcn.org/is

sues/40.19/why-we-all-need-the-democrats-to-abandon-gun

We’re on your side, Mr. President-elect, and we proved it with an historic vote. So please remember our support, and be on our side as well.

Pat Wray can be reached at patwray@comcast.net.