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What Does It Mean to “Vote Guns?”
Decades and decades ago, to be a gun owner meant you were a hunter. You lived in a rural area and you used your rifle or shotgun to put the wonders of God’s creation onto your dinner table. The guns you used in pursuit of this goal were classics like the Savage 99 or an Ithaca double-barreled shotgun. The prevalence and the simplicity of the guns used in hunting meant that when the Roosevelt administration thought it would be a good idea to severely restrict certain kinds of firearms as part of the National Firearms Act of 1934, gun owners didn’t complain that much because the guns that were being restricted weren’t in common use.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed in the wake of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, and in an attempt to counter the rising tide of violence in the inner cities. Gun ownership was changing: hunting was still popular, but more and more people were living in urban areas, and gun owners now understood that criminals preferred their victims unarmed. In the decade that followed the Gun Control Act, gun owners suffered through more restrictive changes in local and state gun laws, culminating in Bill Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban of 1994.
Gun owners, and especially a revitalized and reorganized NRA, had had enough. They mobilized get-out-the-vote efforts and turned up the volume of their lobbying efforts to the point where today, the Democratic nominee for President considers the NRA and Republicans to be her biggest enemies.
We don’t have a sovereign and a prime minister, but the one thing we do have in common with our British cousins is the concept of “first past the post,” that is the candidate with the largest vote count in any constituency wins.
I know the meme. “My vote doesn’t count, so why bother.” I know its contrapositive: “Every vote counts.” If only one other person in each precinct had voted for (fill in the blank), so-and-so would not have been elected President, Senator or Representative.
In a recent, 
When we were growing up, my mother always made a point of bringing my sister and me with her when she voted. She would tell us why it was important and explain who she was voting for, as well as providing the reasoning behind her choices. Discussing politics and religion with my mom on long car rides are among my favorite memories of childhood, so I smiled when I read the first half of a recent status update from my sister. It explained how she had taken my niece with her when she voted recently: