I appreciate your statements. I understand that Fred Thompson is a more comfortable choice, on this one issue.
I’m someone who looks behind every issue. With this particular issue, the banning of the sale of certain types of weapons, I’ve seen the rhetoric is more black and white than the reality, given that there are currently banned weapons, and nobody really seems to be arguing that EVERY armament should be available to the average citizen.
In other words, virtually everybody would find SOME place to draw the line between weapons you could own, and weapons you could not own, even if you could afford them.
If people were arguing that Romney wants to draw that line too far to the left, that would be good debate to have, determining where that line is drawn.
But we rarely can get past the “My candidate is perfect, and Romney is a gun-grabber”, which in my mind completely ignores the reality of the situation regarding drawing that line between permitted and banned weapons.
I would challenge you to name one weapon which the Founders intended to permit Congress to ban. The march of military technology does not automatically modify the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It means today what it meant to the Founders.
Also, the federal AWB created a class of "grandfathered" rifles which had certain characteristics. Just like the ban on machine gun manufacture, it became illegal to manufacture a "new" assault weapon by attaching any two of the infamous "assault weapon" features.
Finally, despite the expiration of the federal ban, the anti-gunners have succeeded in enacting "bans" in both Kalifornia and Massachusetts. In Kalifornia, if you owned an affected weapon prior to a particular date you could continue to "own" it but you were required to register it with the state within 90 days. I put "own" in quotation marks because one's heirs cannot inherit the weapon in Kalifornia. By law, I believe that the executor of the estate of an "assault weapon" owner must give up the weapon.