Australian media covers election angle Ohio media ignores: "Ohio voters warn Obama on gun control"

By Chad D. Baus

While the Ohio media fawns over a recent visit from Ray Schoenke, President of the fake gun group known as American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has done the job of providing a much better look at how the gun issue is hurting the campaign of Barack Obama in the Buckeye state.

Even as the U.S. media was assisting the Obama campaign by propping up a "John Kerry and his goose"-style photo-op with Schoenke at a nearby gun club, Australian Broadcasting Corp.'s North American correspondent, Kim Landers, decided to find a less sanitized place to talk to Ohio gun owners.

From the story:

The economy is the number one issue with voters in Ohio, but some businesses are still doing a roaring trade, despite the financial upheaval buffeting much of the nation.

At a gun store and indoor shooting range in the central Ohio town of Lancaster, business is brisk.

Wes Disney has been working at the gun store and shooting range for five years and says it can accommodate a large number of shooters.

"Weekends, it pretty well smokes, we have 21 lanes to shoot on," he said.

After covering some of the products and services the store offers, the writer then transitions back to the election, saying that by visiting the store, "it does not take long to realise the customers nor the staff are fans of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama."

Mr. Disney says middle Americans are typically freedom-loving people who take their constitutional rights seriously, and Senator Obama is a threat to those rights.

"Mr Obama is a threat to the Second Amendment and he's a threat to many things in terms of how we run our lives," he said.

People like Mr. Disney have not forgotten that Senator Obama once said that when times are hard people cling to guns and religion.

So it is probably no surprise that nobody either on the shooting range or in the gun store is an Obama supporter.

In a separate blog post by the same author, entitled "Guns and God", Landers writes:

...There's no doubt that John McCain's campaign in this part of Ohio is undergoing a revival of sorts. His selection of the pro life, moose hunting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has given Republican supporters here a new shot of enthusiasm.

At party headquarters in Lancaster, they're busy putting together 2,500 new McCain-Palin signs. There's even a waiting list for them. The local party chairman Steve Davis tells me they had a whole heap of McCain only signs a few months ago, but frankly no-one wanted them. Sarah Palin changed that.

So while the anti-gun, pro-Obama American media are busy repeating claims that NRA "F"-rated Veep candidate Joe Biden - who in a 2008 debate suggested that a gun owner should have his head examined and who likes to brag about having authored the 1994 Clinton Gun Ban - is going to keep Obama on the straight and narrow if he tries to ban guns, it takes a correspondent from Australia to smoke out the truth about gun owners in Ohio: we don't like Barack Obama.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman.