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Three to One

By on January 24, 2013 in

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Carol Shea Porter has been public with her support of the President’s Proposals.

Dean Barker is keeping up his twitter pressure on the rest of our electeds to get behind the Obama/Biden measures.

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  • hannah

    It might be worth making the point that the whole “ownership society” is nothing but a sop to distract us from the fact that we’re being stripped of our human rights. And the proponents of gun rights are the kind of people who stick pacifiers in their kids mouths to shut them up.

    “You’ve got a gun. What more could you possibly want?”

    Suckers!

  • JonnyBBad

    Mike Hoefer, tweeting is fine as far as it goes, but in real time we also need bodies to show up at hearings. I was there on Tuesday for 4.5 hours with Zandra from GSP…the only other Hampsters I noted were Brothers Twomey and Cohen .If I missed others I apologize. Burt gave compelling testimony but we were outnumbered 10:1 I am sure the committee, in NH matters at least, will be more impressed if we show up than if we tweet but don’t tetsify or sign in support of our Legislators. Rep. Shurtleff is taking a brave and reasonable stance against the multitude of GONH folk who come out. Let’s show him some love. I would appreciate your take, if you think I am off base please let me know.

    • http://bluehampshire.com/author/mike-hoefer/ Mike Hoefer

      Legislators at all levels should be getting a clear message from these poll results regardless of who can show up at mid-day hearings.

      Would certainly welcome posts from you or others on important hearings progressives should try to attend.

      It would also be of service to the commons to explain how the hearings work what a newbie should expect (signing in, acceptable length of comments, etc.)

      A “How to Participate” series of diaries would be cool and could cover a number of topics.

  • MartyInNashua

    My Legislative email is running everyone to 0 against repeal. I was at the hearing from beginning to 5 PM. The time to testify or sign in support ended on Tuesday.

    • JonnyBBad

      You make a central point of fact MartyInNashua. The single most effective way to lobby for an issue in NH imho is for individuals to contact their own Reps. With the 3rd largest Representative body in the world, and roughly 3300 constituents per district, outside of the flotarials, if a Rep gets 10 calls and/or emails on an issue, (and they appear not to have all the same wording etc.), it is a movement! Wouldn’t you agree ?

  • JonnyBBad

    Speakers were asked to limit their remarks to three minutes by Chair Pantelakos, and people who had to leave for work were able to get messages to the chair that allowed their time to be moved up. It is best to have remarks that can be submitted, on paper, so that you can offer longer testimony than the three minutes would allow. Mike I don’t know why they can come and we can’t? If it’s worth it to you, if you think your Second Amendment rights ‘are being burned to the ground’ that seems to be enough.GONH sends one email, and a spectrum of hundreds from respectful conservatives to black helicopter crowd show up, EVERY time, and we are outnumbered EVERY time. And again this issue is not new…the polls were with us after Columbine etc.There have been approximately 387 school shootings in America since 1992 per, http://www.stoptheshootings.org/ The problem is the threats of witholding contributions and making their record knwon in their district are two of the tools, a.k.a and bribes and extortion from NRA on the Hill, and in every State legislature…as evidenced by the many week knees.The challenge here is to move from emotion at home when answering a phone call, to taking action on the side of prudence and decency.It strikes me that If there has ever been an issue that screams for the need for to change how “Congresscritters ” get funded this would top my list,

  • JonnyBBad

    apologies for spelling errors…emperor needs atypist

  • http://www.timothyhorrigan.com Timothy Horrigan

    I have gotten few if any emails on HB 135, although I am sure there will be a flurry of threatening and misspelled messages when the bill goes to the Full House.

  • Alex Gallichon

    So if a collectible rifle from the Second World War, like a Lee Enfield or Mauser, has a metal ring to affix a bayonet it is going to be a so-called assault weapon again?

    I am under the anecdotal impression that younger gun owners tend towards collecting and target shooting, and less toward hunting as inconvenient mandatory safety classes have reduced the hunting population to older people who did not face such barriers to entry.

    It is encouraging that 2nd amendment rights organizations can get people out to legislative committee hearings to defend that right, although it is too bad we don’t often see similar enthusiasm for the 1st or 4th amendment.

    We have serious social and mental health challenges in this country that could have received attention, but instead the politicians decided to move down the controversial gun control path.

  • JonnyBBad

    Hey Alex…nice to read your name here, hope all is well.It is a mistake to look at incidents like the Newtown school massacre as the work of a ‘crazed, lone gunman’, and point only to lack of funding and access to quality mental health care.While that is serious problem, I say this in the belief that we have rather a real societal health issue, an addiction to violence, With the commodification of violence, its just something else we sell and consume. The violence here I see as the flip side of drone wars,fought by gamers with joysticks in bunkers in Central Florida who go home to their families at night. The problem is the general overall sanitizing of war. No picture of dead kids in Newtown, no pictures of dead kids who are collateral damage in Pakistan, no pictures of dead soldiers or coffins coming home from Iraq or Afghnaistan. We must confront ourselves with what we have become, and what we do to ourselves and others like in a 12 step program. We’ve got to admit it before we can begin to fix it. It is a sickness. We are, we have been, and we will continue to be the largest weapons seller on the planet. No big surprise then that these things go boom and blow up in our faces, taking countless lives, ruining others.

    • Alex Gallichon

      It has been a bit strange to come back and adjust to the U.S. after some time abroad. BlueHampshire has also changed. Driving around New England these last few weeks there have been fewer handshakes and less banter with strangers than I had become accustomed to in South America. Especially with young people, who can socially isolate themselves with such ease nowadays because of technology. This Newtown school massacre was a real shock and awful tragedy, and startled my fiancee’s family when we found out it happened in Connecticut and involved people with New Hampshire roots just before she moved up here.

      I’ve been help up at gun point and travelled to places with higher and lower levels of crime, higher and lower amounts of gun ownership, and more and less restrictions on firearms, and the places where I feel safest are the places that respect human dignity and where people respect and have empathy for their neighbors. A campaign preaching peace and love would get a lot more respect from me than repackaging old legislation that makes it easy for regular people to accidentally break laws over cosmetic issues, and basically just push up gun sales until the final up or down vote, by which time everybody who wants one of the “scary looking” guns will have one or at the least have access to one. I have to once again get used to the same old fear, uncertainty, and doubt that dominates those intersections of politics and law here in the U.S., while pussyfooting around the bigger issues in our society.

  • BobRobertson

    I have to say that if it weren’t for working through the hours that these hearings are held, I certainly would have been there. But if I was independently wealthy, heck, I’d run for office.

    Voices have to be heard, and that’s the reasoning behind representative govt. Do visit your rep and your senator. Make sure they know just how real those poll numbers are!

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