Tennessee Firearms Assoc. Inc.

The Nay vote was the pro-gun vote, was it not? Tells me Naifeh knew who was voting and where, so he went pro-gun to look good.

Watson voted aye, he is/was a cop. No major surprise he only trusts us so much. McCord I expected more from. Did not Williams go onto Popes show and express support for this bill, minus the added amendments?

I do find it funny, Mumpower votes Aye, yet Harwell voted Nay.

I will say, I am surprised and angry McCormick voted Aye. He may very well have just been confused. Still, I am surprised. Normally he responds to my letters, I note he has yet to respond to me this year. This is surprising as well.

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but I doubt many were confused. My best guess is that John is correct with point #2 -- the house is up to something.

While I would love to have a clean bill, I'm almost to the point of wanting the Senate to go along with the house version. I just can't trust the house to pass this thing. At least if the Senate goes along with the house, we will have our foot in the door.

This is just so dissappointing.

I can not understand how they didn't know what vote meant what. One of the representative stood up right before the vote and explained what a yes vote and no vote meant. Not sure what his name was but it's on the video right before the vote is taken.

"all the Republicans did was listen to the 'gun lobby'"

It appears that that listen is all they are going to do.

If we could expand our ranks and build an effective lobby, a difference might be made. Till we get a big enough group raising their voices in unison, the self serving politicians of both party's have nothing to fear, we are a little grumble here, a rumble there, but the current volume is evidently not effective enough to sway action it appears.

If every deer, duck, dove, squirrel, rabbit, and coyote hunter, along with the Ar crowd, skeet and pistol shooters banded together and joined the TFA, wrote effective letters, and voted the issues we could garner some attention. If you love the smell of burnt gunpowder, you better take a hand in the battle, or it will be but a memory.

As it is, there is no cohesiveness to our struggle, and divided we will be isolated and defeated, and rightly so, if we are too recalcitrant to expend the energy to reach out to our fellow gun owners and band together to show sufficient numbers to demand a change in the standard Naifeh way of things, (I for one, am tired of his foot on my neck) we will have only ourselves to blame.

Great point Richard. Approximately 6 TFA members worked all day at the RK show in Nashville today making a presence and talking to voters. While we may have brought in a few new members, we talked to many, many more who would talk but ultimately did not have the extra $35 to spend. It takes a lot of work to grow membership and activists, which is even harder to cultivate.

In my opinion (as someone who voted)... you cannot count an Aye or Nay on the non-concurring motion as pro-gun or anti-gun.

I believe the House and Senate sponsors sincerely wanted to strengthen the bill by taking out the two provisions and working on the restaurant "definition" that is presently in the bill, in an effort to broaden it and reduce confusion. In that sense, an Aye vote would have been a vote to send it to conference committee and go along with the sponsors to make some last minute touches on the bill that would have been pro-gun.

However, because there is no absolute guarantee on who will be appointed to the conference committee, or what will come out of the conference committee, there were some pro-gun legislators like me who just couldn't risk it coming back to us weaker than the Senate version, so we voted No, with the hope we could simply "Move to Concur" in the Senate version and be done with it... leave any tweaking that needed to be done until next Session and not risk losing it this year. So in this sense, a No vote could be seen as pro-gun.

If you look at the 30 or so anti-gun legislators, they are split between the Ayes and Nays, and they probably each thought they had a better chance of killing it if it did, or did not, go to conference committee. Fortunately they are the minority on this issue.

So again I would reiterate that the 45-44 vote is not a good judge of whether the members are pro or anti gun... the original vote on the bill is a good measure, as will be the final vote on the conference committee report. Keep in mind that once a conference committee report comes to the floor, it cannot be amended or changed in anyway. A "minority report" can come from the conference committee for consideration; however I see that as very unlikely in this case.

Thanks for everyone’s work on this issue,

Joshua

Emailed my Republican rep. and got the answer that our local cops support the age restriction.

My main objection was to the curfew, but do any of you all have specific arguments against the age restriction?

It's kind of late, but if anybody posts anything good I might try to get it to my rep. before the vote tomorrow.

I have taken the tack of asking my Representative (Coleman, so not likely) to support whatever is reported from the conference committee. I'm sorry if some here think that is weak...but this is politics, not perfection.

And, what do you do with a restaurant (if any) between Nashville and Knoxville that sits on the time zone division?

Why did we lose the second time by such a margin on the refusal to recede on the previous motion? I saw a lot of people we count on in the wrong column, with people like Naifeh in the right column!

I know there has been a lot of talk in the legislature about this going to conference committee - that seems to have been almost predestined since it came through the House committees. If that is so, then it explains at least some of the House votes. I am perhaps being generous.

Immense backstabbing against us basically?