Republican Women With Guns: Greene and Boebert

There is a trend in the Trump years to promote "patriotic" people to politics. A simple way to do that is to go for gun rights. But it would not work so well for men. A mother with a gun, that's the symbol they want to use. Lauren Boebert comes from Rifle, Colorado. The name is old, and refers to an actual rifle found there: The city of Rifle gets its name from a local story, that a trapper had once left his rifle along a creek in the region; from then on, the city has been known as Rifle. Founded by Abram Maxfield in 1882.

                                    

The county is not as Republican as the people of Rifle would make it look.

Wikipedia: Garfield County has primarily voted for Republican Party candidates in presidential elections throughout its history, with the county only failing to back the Republican candidates six times from 1912 to 2016. Although the county includes the relatively liberal city of Glenwood Springs, this is outweighed by the extremely conservative city of Rifle, as well as the nearby towns of Silt, Parachute, and Battlement Mesa. Until 2020, the most recent Democratic win was by Bill Clinton in 1992, but Republicans were held to a plurality of the county's votes in half of the six following presidential elections prior to 2020. Notably, Barack Obama lost the county to John McCain by two votes in 2008.

Nevertheless, with Trump enthusiasm, Boebert won an election, planning to go to Washington to change the world with Trump. But Trump lost. Now she is left with gun tricks to demonstrate, such as taking a gun to work, or attempting to. But her voting will be simple. She just has to vote against anything Biden or Democrats propose.

Then from Georgia, we get a building contractor and conspiracy enthusiast entering politics.

Marjorie Greene has added quite a bit of QAnon beliefs and conspiracy theory to the pro gun mix.

I am not quite sure how seriously to take all this. On the one hand both women have entered politics with sound bites and dog whistle terms to get crowds excited. These crowds do not wish to understand politics on a deeper level, they just want to get rid of Democrats in politics and attack "foreigners" and other Trumpian targets. On the other hand, they will add to guns and violence. They promoted the attacks on the Capitol and aided the insurrectionists. They can be charged with aiding and abetting domestic terrorists.

The actual gun issues will play out in the Supreme Court, so we will have to watch that for the next two years.

The Supreme Court decided on District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. There were some other decisions in modern times. It would seem that the original amendment was rather limited in scope, and dealt with the relationship of the federal government and the states. It mentions a militia, giving the states the right to have such organizations. It does not plainly state that the federal government has any further say on arms. Going along that, it would seem the peace keeping and owning of guns, or prohibition of certain guns if such an issue came up, was left to the states.

The constitution is a brief document that left a lot of power to the states. Even federal taxation needed an amendment.