DAVE KOPEL OFFERS A Second Amendment Senate voting guide. That sort of thing may matter to voters like this guy from Minnesota:

I’m an ACLU liberal. I’m pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-equality (races and sexes) and I favor strict church-state separation. I will not be voting those issues this time, because I also believe that the campaign for “gun safety” is the greatest threat to American liberty since the “war on drugs,” to which it is politically very similar.

In 1968, President Nixon recognized that a crusade against drugs, coupled with appropriate scare tactics, could become a potent political cause, and that Democrats were poorly positioned to respond in kind. Today, many Democrats (mostly urban) use the gun issue in precisely the same way, including the mindless scare tactics, knowing that Republicans cannot turn their backs on gun owners.

Should this strategy prove effective, we can anticipate the same escalating cost, proliferation of ineffective law, and swelling executive agencies (not to mention the erosion of civil liberties), which have characterized the self-defeating drug war.

If you are a gun owner (sportsman or otherwise) or a critic of the war on drugs, this prospect alone should scare you. If you are also a historian, with a grasp of the intent and purpose of the Second Amendment and its part in keeping the locus of political power among the people, you have a far better reason to join me.

Join me where? Mine is a simple standard. I will not vote for any candidate who supports gun control. It matters not whether the motive is cynical political ambition or well-meaning shortsightedness; the damage to the republic is the same.

I’m happiest when voting for a Democrat who respects gun rights, but until the national party renounces this divisive, destructive stance, I’ll be casting a lot of Republican votes. Other issues can wait. Ground lost on this one will never be regained.

JON EGGLESTON

DULUTH

How many voters like him are there? We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.