The NRA two-step

'I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away." Those words, intoned by Barack Obama at a Virginia campaign event in September, were a kind of incantation aimed at exorcising the ghost of Al Gore from the Democratic presidential race. Gore's favorable stance on gun control was widely seen as a key factor in his loss to George W. Bush in 2000, and it's not likely another Democrat will soon make the same mistake. Yet if Obama thought he was making any friends with the virulently pro-gun National Rifle Assn., he's out of luck.

October 13, 2008