BREMPRO
BREMPRO's JournalThe NRA Lobbyist Behind Florida's Pro-Gun Policies
After Charles McBurney learned that he’d been passed over for the judgeship, he published an op-ed on Jacksonville.com, arguing that Hammer’s bill had nothing to do with gun rights, and decrying her tactics. “It’s the message being sent to our legislators and elected officials that ‘you can be with me on virtually everything, but if you cross me once, even if the issue doesn’t involve the Second Amendment, I will take you out,’ ” he wrote. “It’s frightening for our republic."
In 2016, when a shooting occurred at the Pulse night club, in Orlando, in which forty-nine people were killed and another fifty-eight wounded, the Florida legislature was out of session. Using a long-shot procedural maneuver, Democrats tried to convene a special session but were rebuffed by Republicans. At the time, Hammer told the Tallahassee Democrat, “I have not heard a single Republican say that they were interested in spending the taxpayer’s money for a special session that would achieve nothing but more publicity for Democrats.”
Months later, Representative Carlos Smith, a Democrat from East Orlando, introduced a bill that would have banned assault weapons. It never got a hearing. “The power of Marion Hammer dictated whether we could even have a conversation about what I was proposing,” he told me. “I lost constituents at Pulse. I lost a friend.”
This legislative session, he reintroduced the bill. On Tuesday, February 20th, as students from Douglas High School sat in the gallery, every House Republican voted against bringing the legislation to the floor. Smith said, “It was devastating to watch that happen, but the students aren’t kids anymore, and it’s important that we don’t shield them from harsh political realities.”
Stunning Insight into how the powerful gun lobby influences and threatens careers of legislators, judges and public servants to effectively push their radical pro gun agenda not supported by the majority of citizens and harmful to public safety. We need a NCSA ( National Common Sense Association) with this kind of power to Influence public policy!
The NRA Lobbyist Behind Florida's Pro-Gun Policies full text:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/the-nra-lobbyist-behind-floridas-pro-gun-policies
In this new "post truth" era where fact checking
reason and passionate debate seem increasingly ineffective and antiquated, what NEW strategy will work to defuse and overcome the power of Trumps ad-hoc propaganda, truthiness proclamations of success , misdirection, distraction and bully tweets that are echoed by rabid bully followers and repeated by, auto bots and secret foreign actors with their own motives? I'm serious. This is not your grandfather's America. The rules are evolving fast and we have to be prepared for an agile and strategic fight in uncharted territory. Do the Senate Dems use the confirmation hearings to try to expose for instance the climate change denier who was just nominated for the head of the EPA using facts? Is this the last chance to defend and restore rational fact based debate? Or does the loudest most tweeted voice win? I believe this is the debate and strategic brainstorming we need to have now, , not an internal self defeating and demoralizing debate over why we lost big time and have a battle for " the soul of the party".enough has been said and it won't change the outcome or the impending gutting of democratic policy. To much at stake in the values we share that are about to be trampled if we don't pull together with a united front. Like now...
Privatizing highways? Killing climate change funding to give tax breaks to wealthy?
Why did it take so long for the media to get beyond racism, sexism, sexual assault etc..to the actual Trump policy detail horror show?? Not even Trump supporters i know would agree with this...
"The first beneficiary of that kind of environmental know nothing-ism would be the Koch Brothers, oil companies and the wealthiest of the wealthy who will get the savings on their tax bills when Trump slashes every form of taxation on the rich to benefit himself and the top 1% of earners.
And anyone who drives would feel the pinch of the only new roads being expensive toll lanes which connect wealthy areas to one another - potentially bypassing the poorer areas.
None of this is what Trump supporters think that the candidate is pitching, but they’re blissfully unaware that any policy exists from their campaign.
A policy to deliver America’s infrastructure to Wall Street and give away our green energy investment funds to billionaires for tax breaks.
I guess that’ll make America great for billionaires and infrastructure companies, but the rest of us may be less than thrilled."
More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-just-told-the-truth-its-more-terrifying_us_581e495ce4b0102262411844
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