IS PRESIDENT BUSH GOING TO ENDORSE EXTENDING THE ASSAULT WEAPON BAN? That’s what this story says.

Sounds like a good way to be a one-termer, to me.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg thinks it’s safe for Bush, as the extension is unlikely to pass:

So it’s probably a safe position to take. He can make himself look moderate to the moderates, while still allowing the thing to die, thus pleasing his gun rights constituency.

Well, maybe. It seems a bit, well, Clintonian to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Tabin thinks I’m wrong, too. He doesn’t think this has a lot of political traction.

He may be right, of course — but I’ve gotten a lot of angry email about this, copied from gun-rights lists, that suggests that the gun-activist constituency is already pretty upset about it. They also think that Bush has been all talk, no action, on the Ashcroft Second Amendment strategy (and they’re clearly right about that). So if those people get mad will they stay home? Maybe. If they do will it cost Bush some states? Maybe. Can he afford to lose those states? Maybe. Is he smart to take that chance? At best, maybe. Anyway, here’s what I wrote when this was first rumored, back on Sept, 8, 2001.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike McDaniel writes:

think that Bush and Rove have miscalculated the brittleness of their support from gun owners. Gun owners have become very watchful for the knife in the back – so much so that many regard betrayal as inevitable. Trust has to be earned, and Bush has provided little more than lip service.

The Republican Party tends to forget that every election in the last fifteen years that they fought with NRA support was a victory – and every election without NRA support was a defeat. Sooner or later, the people they keep stabbing in the back will walk out and STAY out – or the Democrats will figure out that a slightly better offer (which would not have to be much) would turn gun owners on THEIR side, smashing the Republicans’ chances for decades to come.

We’ll have to see. But Bush needs to take care – he is horribly vulnerable on the right. The Democrats can’t do it, but a conservative Republican could easily. . .

He needs to stop pandering to his opponents and start mending some fences.

I think that there’s a significant group of people who feel this way, and that McDaniel is right — their support is brittle, and they’re hypersensitive about betrayal, because they’ve been betrayed so many times.