Democratic presidential candidate doesn't want to take guns :: 06/06/2023

While the Second Amendment should be a bipartisan issue, it’s not really. While there are exceptions, like on most issues, the truth is that you can kind of guess someone’s position on guns based on their party affiliation.

Democrats are going to want gun control and Republicans aren’t.

Again, that’s not universal, but it’s a fairly accurate generalization.

Because of that, it’s notable when a candidate for president breaks from his party’s orthodoxy on the subject.

Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

While he’s an outside candidate at best–one the Democrats don’t seem inclined to give a fair shake to, it should be noted–he has some interesting position. For example, he opposed COVID vaccination mandates at a time when most Democrats vocally supported them.

But more interestingly for our purposes here, he’s expressing support for the Second Amendment.

Kennedy’s not explicitly saying he dislikes gun control. He’s saying that gun control is off the table due to the Supreme Court’s decisions on the issue.

While that might be problematic to some, I think it’s a fair assessment.

Hearing a Democrat say they will not take guns, that gun control isn’t an option, is a refreshing take.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there’s pretty much no chance of Kennedy winning the nomination. Even if we were talking about an open race like in 2020, he wouldn’t be a frontrunner by any stretch of the imagination. With an incumbent? There’s no chance.

Plus, we’ve got Kennedy supporting some pretty extreme environmental causes like supporting the Green New Deal, among other things, as well as his anti-vaccine advocacy. Sure, his opposition to the COVID vaccine has won him many supporters, they forget that he’s also an opponent of vaccines in general, even those that have been proven safe for decades.

Still, with all that said, his position on gun control is interesting and one I’d love to see more Democrats share, even if it does run counter to some other comments I seem to recall him making about gun control.

Further, while I’m sure much of his rhetoric about psychiatric medications is predicated on his bias against Big Pharma, I’ll give him credit for at least being interested in looking at the potential causes of mass shootings rather than just blaming guns for them.

It’s downright refreshing.

Again, though, don’t get your hopes up. As it stands, the Democratic Party is doing all it can to stack the deck in favor of President Joe Biden winning the nomination all over again. They can’t afford to allow the voters to bounce him in the primary because it would be a repudiation of everything the Democrats have pushed for, including gun control.

So Kennedy isn’t likely to even make a debate stage at this point.

Despite that, it’s also possible that his position is one that we’ll start to see pop up among other Democratic candidates in the coming months or years. If so, that becomes a game-changer in the Second Amendment debate.

Guns aren’t the problem, and it would be nice if we could actually have a discussion as to what that is. While I have issues with Kennedy’s other positions on a great many topics, I like what he had to say on this one.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/06/06/rfk-jr-take-guns-n71164