Reply #71: There are three voting camps here, not two

[NickB79]

Everyone seems to make is seem like a one-or-the-other situation: vote for Bush or vote for Kerry. You forget the third option: say fuck it and don't vote at all. There are a lot of people out there who support most of what Kerry stands for, EXCEPT for his stance on gun control, myself included. And by alienating us with a gun-control stance, you can expect many people to be so conflicted by their conciences that they just refuse to vote whatsoever. I know that when I realized Dean was not going to make it past the primaries, I came very, very close to throwing up my hands in disgust and dropping out of the voting population entirely. It took a long time, but I've been able to convince myself that it is better in the long run to vote for Kerry than to not vote at all. I rationalized this by considering that, in all of Clinton's 8 years, the only significant piece of gun control legislation to pass was the 1994 AWB, due to stiff resistance by the NRA and other pro-gun groups, and even this was only a temporary ban. With the complete failure to obtain enough support to renew the AWB, that implies to me that gun control has become an issue the American people have tired of, and a new push by Kerry for more gun control laws will fail. However, I personally know of several people who have not been able to rationalize away their concerns, and have decided not to vote at all. This could very well end up costing Kerry precious votes.