Seacoast History Blog #104
January 12, 2011  

I make it my policy to stay out of politics in these pages. Not because I don’t have opinions. I have a boatload. But because the only emails I get back are from the nutjobs on the other shore. Those who agree tend to stay silent. Those who float around in the middle with no brain at all tend to stay in the middle. But today I am ashamed to live in a state where the majority of legislators in the House of Representatives are so evil and so stupid that the first thing they do in the new year is to allow handguns back into the statehouse building itself. Apparently those who see dark clouds forming overhead aren’t as pessimistic as I once believed. These aren’t just Republicans trying to regain the balance of power. These are very scary people who need to carry deadly weapons into the debate.  (Continued below)

I understand that these people are scared too. They are frightened almost unto death, whether they admit it or not, by the fact that Americans elected a black Democrat to the White House. They are shivering in their boots at the prospect that he may actually be a good president, or at least, a better president than the man that preceded him. They are scared that he will be re-elected and that America is headed in the wrong direction, or worse, that the newest generation of Americans does not share their views.  

I feel their pain. Or, at least, I felt it for the eight fearsome years of the Bush administration.   

I’m all for change, even when it means that the pendulum swings right after it swings left. And I was not even nervous when we ended up with a Republican dominated executive counsel in New Hampshire, and a whole new crop of right-wingers in the federal government. This system is all about debate, when the debate is clean, and honest, and doesn’t involve guns.  

But now it is about guns again. And the fact that this legislative reversal is the opening salvo of the new Republican House in NH is not a small thing. It is a big thing. And the fact that it coincides with the shooting of a Democratic leader in Arizona is not just a coincidence. It is also a symbol. It means something. And if you can’t see what it means, then you should run for office as a Republican and fight for your right to own a gun and to carry it anywhere you please.  

The people who should be scared are not the Republicans in the NH legislature. The people who should be scared are nine-year old girls who run for student council and show up at a political rally filled with hope and excitement for the future. They are the collateral damage of the dangerous thinkers who now want to set the pendulum right.  

Republicans will tell you there is no connection between banning guns in the NH House and a senator shot in a supermarket. They are wrong, dead wrong. They will talk you comatose about every tiny gun detail, and they will wave the Bill of Rights like a flag. They will scare your family silly and quote the Bible and read from the encyclopedia until your ears fall off. But the truth is simply that fear breeds fear and guns kill. More guns, more death. America proves it every year. We're not defending ourselves. We're killing ourselves.    

So I looked on the Web site of the NH House of Representatives and tried to figure out who to write to about my shame and embarrassment at being a citizen of this state. The gun vote was on January 5, 2011, but I couldn’t find anything posted online beyond December of the year before.  

So I called. The clerk at the House in Concord was very helpful when I asked for a list of who voted for or against the repeal of the gun ban. But she explained patiently that there is no list. “There is no way to tell on a division vote,” she explained. A division vote requires only a “yea” or “nay” so there is no record of how individual legislators voted as their would be with a roll call vote.  

So why was there no roll call? Because no one, Democrat or Republican, asked for it. So the vote was decided by the fact that the number of people who shouted “yea” to repeal the gun ban from 2009 sounded louder than the number of people who shouted “nay” and wanted to keep the gun ban. I can only assume that the audio vote was so overwhelmingly loud and distinct that no one questioned the results.  

‘That’s the way it is,” the clerk said. “That’s all I know.”  

The only way I can find out which state reps voted to bring guns back into the statehouse, she explained, is to call each one individually and ask him or her how he or she voted.  

So I asked the clerk how many people were in attendance for that vote on January 5. At least we could figure out who didn’t show up. She checked the records and reported that there were 322 representatives present and 78 absent.  

“But that isn’t accurate,” she explained. “A lot of people forget to push their attendance buttons.”  She checked again and reported that only 11 representatives had excused absences from the vote that day. I guess that means that 389 were in attendance. That’s a lot of people to call.  

This was only a house rules vote, the clerk told me, not a bill. We located the title on the Web site. It is #63, listed under “Miscellaneous” and entitled “Deadly weapons; electronic devices; cameras.”  

So as a tax paying New Hampshire citizen, it turns out, I don’t have any way to determine who the bad guys are. That’s why I have to lump them all under the term “Republicans.” No other choice. And these cowardly Republicans, the ones who are so frightened that they need to carry their handguns into the hallowed halls of the House of Representatives, are too clever or cowardly to stand up and be counted. They don’t have to. The law protects them – not from guns – but from us.. 

I’ll take this as an overdue civics lesson. My bad. I need to pay more attention. There really are dark clouds forming over Concord. That’s just a symbol too, but symbols mean a lot. These new guys are dangerous. They are frightened and they can hide in plain sight. We can't even see them as they knock the walls down.   

© 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Robinson is the author of nationally award-winning books on NH history and he created SeacoastNH.com in 1997.