Bill Clinton Warns Democrats About Guns, Acknowledges Non-Hunting Reasons to Bear Arms, Sorta

The former president wades in

At a private Democratic fundraising meeting reported on by Politico, Bill Clinton warned donors not to "trivialize gun culture," offering that gun control was an issue that drove voters to the polls, and explaining in his Clintonesque way that polling that suggests "the public is for us on all these issues" is "meaningless if they're not voting issues." From Politico:

[Clinton] said that he understands the culture that permeates a state like Arkansas — where guns are a longstanding part of local culture.

"A lot of these people … all they've got is their hunting and their fishing," he told the Democratic financiers. "Or they're living in a place where they don't have much police presence. Or they've been listening to this stuff for so long that they believe it all."

What might "this stuff" be? It sounds a lot like dismissing gun ownership as bitterness. Even when the anti-gun left acknowledges "gun culture," the fundamental place of civilian arms as a tool of self-defense and defense from tyranny is deafeningly ignored and in an effort to cloud those fundamentals we get raw emotional appeals instead.