Obama on Board That Funded Handgun Bans
By SusanUnPC on April 20, 2008 at 12:41 AM in Barack Obama, Joyce Foundation, Second Amendment, William Ayers
For eight years, Barack Obama sat on the board of Chicago’s Joyce Foundation — earning $70,000 in compensation — an influential board that “funneled almost $3 million in grants to political groups opposing gun rights,” according to Politico.com reporter Kenneth Vogel.
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns.
As Jerlyn at TalkLeft points out, “At Wednesday’s debate, Barack Obama wouldn’t say what his position is on the DC law banning handguns.” She notes that Obama “dodged, saying he wasn’t familiar with the facts of the case.” She asks:
Why didn’t Obama answer the question at the debate instead of weaving and bobbing? Was it because he didn’t want to alienate PA voters, many of whom favor strong gun ownership rights? And, did he fail to tell the truth?
Jeralyn affirms that in November, “his campaign told the Chicago Tribune he supported the ban. (Chicago Tribune November 20, 2007.)” So which is it, Sen. Obama? You can’t have it both ways.
Obama’s efforts to woo gun owners in states like Pennsylvania may be further damaged when gun owners and gun rights groups learn of Obama’s long association with the Joyce Foundation, which “doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.”
This is the second board position about which voters have become aware, the first the Woods Fund, a board he sat on with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers.
LaBolt [a campaign spokesperson] said Obama, an Illinois senator, “does not remember each of the over 1,500 individual grant requests and his assessment of their merits, but he considered all requests in light of the foundation’s goal of developing a robust public dialogue around reducing gun violence.”
Voters need to learn more about Obama’s association with liberal boards that voters outside large cities may question. Reports Politico:
Obama’s service on the board of the Joyce Foundation and a few other Chicago-based nonprofits including the Woods Fund of Chicago remains one of the least scrutinized parts of his career. But it’s one that could hamper his efforts to woo populations of rural pro-gun voters in Pennsylvania, which votes April 22, and in a general election match-up with the presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.
In his appeal to gun owners, Obama has not emphasized his own legislative record, which includes supporting a ban on semiautomatic weapons and concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has blamed his staff for indicating on a questionnaire filled out during his 1996 state Senate bid under his name that he supports banning “the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns.”
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and served as president of the Harvard Law Review, has instead focused on his respect for what he contends are constitutionally guaranteed gun owners’ rights, the “passion” of hunters and the “tradition” of handgun ownership.
Many pundits have criticized Obama’s vague, confusing answers to questions about gun ownership and rights during last Wednesday’s debate.
One blogger summed up Obama’s performance this way:
By the time Gibson got around to the issues, Obama looked lost and upset. It got worse when Gibson asked about capital-gains tax rates, which Obama has pledged to raise. When Gibson repeatedly pointed out that decreasing the rates actually increased the revenues, Obama simply couldn’t come up with an answer, stammering while trying to change the subject. On guns, both Hillary and Obama stumbled through tortured explanations of how they support a Constitutional right for individuals to own guns while backing gun bans like the one in DC.
The winner of this debate? John McCain. Both Democrats came out of this diminished, but Obama got destroyed in this exchange. If superdelegates had begun to reconsider their support of Obama after Crackerquiddick, they’re speed-dialing Hillary after watching Gibson dismember Obama on national TV tonight.
Here is ABC News’s transcript of the debate, and here is the video of the portion of the debate on gun rights and the Second Amendment:
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
