Republicans to target rural battlegrounds with ads about Obama, guns; NRA plans to spend millions

The Republican National Committee and the National Rifle Association will be going after Barack Obama's record on guns, both said last week in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that the Constitution grants an individual right to own firearms, making a ban on handguns in the District of Columbia unconstitutional.

The RNC is planning "a media and advertising push in more rural battleground states," David Paul Kuhn reported for Politico.com. The message will be that “Barack Obama is the most anti gun candidate in American presidential history,” RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said. Matt McDonald, a senior adviser to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, said “This issue is a big fat wedge in target states,” such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia. “Obviously it is an issue where he is at odds with working-class voters.”

Jonathan Martin of Politico writes, "While the gun culture is typically associated with the South, it’s actually the industrial Midwest where hunting is most popular. Pennsylvania has the most NRA members per capita of any state, and, after Texas, the next four states that sell the most hunting-related goods are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri, according to the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. And while Bill Clinton, Gore and Kerry could all handle a gun and had been hunting many times over the years, Obama has never hunted in his life and is the furthest thing from an outdoorsman."

Martin reports that the NRA "plans to spend about $40 million on this year’s campaign, with $15 million of that devoted to portraying Barack Obama as a threat to the Second Amendment rights upheld last week by the Supreme Court." NRA chief lobbyist Chris W. Cox told Kuhn the effort will point to Obama's comments that small-town voters "cling to guns" because they are "bitter" over economic decline. "There are a lot of bitter gun owners who are looking to vote against Obama," Cox said.

Obama's campaign told the Chicago Tribune last year, "Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional," and he didn't dispute that proposition in a February interview with Leon Harris of Washington's WJLA-TV. Last week, an Obama spokesman said the statement "was not worded as well as it could have been" and that Obama believes the Constitution generally "doesn't prevent local and state governments from enacting their own gun laws."

"McCain was one of 55 lawmakers who signed a 'friend of the court' brief opposing the D.C. gun ban," Kuhn noted. "Obama, who did not sign the document, has refused throughout the presidential campaign to clarify his stand on the D.C. ban despite persistent questions from reporters. Obama has said in the past, however, that he supports an individual right to bear arms." He told Harris that gun-rights groups often say "any regulation whatsoever is the camel’s nose under the tent. And that, I think, is not where the American people are at. We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measures that I think respect the Second Amendment and people’s traditions." (Read more)