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Huckabee Goes Hunting (Macho Bona Fides)
Presidential contender Mike Huckabee bagged a pheasant Wednesday, offering Iowa voters the image of an experienced outdoorsman on the hunt, shotgun blasting and dogs braying.
AND:
Of four birds flushed by the party, three were felled. Huckabee claimed the third with his .12-gauge shotgun. He proudly displayed the birds and said jokingly, “See that’s what happens if you get in my way.”
He also jested about Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting accident in which a fellow hunter was shot. Asked why Cheney hadn’t been invited, Huckabee chuckled, “Because I want to survive all the way through this.”
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8 Responses to “Huckabee Goes Hunting (Macho Bona Fides)”
Other than demonstrating adept humor, he’s not doing anything that other GOP politicians wouldn’t do, or that desperate Dem politicians wouldn’t do, such as John Kerry. Rabidly anti-gun people are not rational, and the same is true about hunting, even if both hunting and shooting are nothing like what they used to be in, say, the 1950s and 1960s.
And we can already envision Hillary Clinton lugging an M-60, so there’s no need for her to pose in a tank.
I’m guessing that Huckster actually hunted on farmland or state land as opposed to Cheney’s or Kerry’s shooting fish in a barrel at a preserve(LOL).
DLS Using a 12 gage to hunt a meal versus plinking with a AK-47 in a rural area is what even Liberals in the Midwest and North call as normal gun use. Now these shows were people play with automatic weapons is another story.
Rudi — people don’t play with automatic weapons in this country unless they get a federal machine gun permit. You should know by now that so-called “assault rifles” (the real thing and the cosmetic copy-cat versions) are semi-automatic. (Only criminals convert them to fully automatic.)
Truly diseased behavior and dangerous behavior associated with guns (yes, it can be pathological, going beyond self-actualization, which is bad enough) is disturbing, but it has never been an honest way to depict typical gun owners and shooters, such as me, much as so many anti-gun nuts do, anyway. The distinction is obligatory.
postscript — Bill Press in a Hollyville article
Please end cruciality of (especially) Iowa and NH
Rudi — people don’t play with automatic weapons in this country unless they get a federal machine gun permit.
Let’s also mention that even that federal machine gun permit doesn’t make a privately-owned machine gun legal in states that have banned them entirely, as many do.
“You know your luck is all bad when that hunting trip you won is with Dick Cheney, and Ted Kennedy is driving…”
DLS – Then please explain this:
http://www.machinegunshoot.com/shootinfo.htm
Until just a few years ago, class III weapons(machine guns) were allowed to be purchased.
http://www.fortliberty.org/american-politics/nfa.shtml
http://www.westernfirearms.com/
The Kentucky show isn’t the only one were a father and son can fire class III weapons.
Its pathetic that we now choose our presidents by this criteria. We now must have a “Christian candidate” who wishes all voters Merry Christmas and exhibits the requisite bagged game, so that they can believe that no gun laws will ever be enacted. This is probably a direct hit at Romney, who only pretended to be a hunter. Huckabee can prove he’s the real thing. Another test for whose b Rhymes with Pick is bigger.
If an honest guy actually had the guts to admit he was repelled by hunting would it kill his candidacy?
Rudi, where it is (or where it was) legal, it is (or was) legal.
I think shooting at exploding targets with tracer ammo is fun. There’s certainly nothing inherently wrong with that. I also am more sane than any critics who reflexively want nobody to have possession of or a permit for suppressors (usually called “silencers”). These devices reduce recoil as well as report — and they do not make guns Hollywood-style silent or nearly silent, but just reduce a centerfire to a rimfire-level report; they do nothing to eliminate a supersonic bullet’s crack. They also make handguns harder, not easier, to conceal.
Simply by posting these facts, now watch, I’ll face more false far-right accusations. [sigh]
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K, please ditch the phallic myth of guns and shooting. (It really doesn’t fit female shooters, for one thing.) The psychological appeal of shooting is the same at its core as is so with archery or even rubber-band shooting: it’s the satisfaction of being able to hit a target out of your reach. Marksmanship is rewarding. The report (I doubt the recoil) of firearms also add something to the experience that some no doubt enjoy.
It depends on where and when he runs. In Berkeley or Cambridge, MA (“Berkeley East”), it probably would boost his (or her) candidacy already. In another 10-20+ years, this will be true for more places as shooting and especially hunting have fewer adherents, either absolutely or as a fraction of the electorate.