The Maximum Leader seems to misunderstand my position. I think gun ownership is appropriate and useful in many situations. Good examples would be a rifle as a tool for hunting or protecting livestock, or shotgun for home defense. My position is simply that there is NO constitutional right to own a firearm.

At one point, the Maximum Leader railed against judicial activism and said that public policy should be left to elected legislatures. If an elected legislature passed a gun control law, would the ML flip-flop on judicial activism?

Dean seems to support common-sense gun laws. I can see no legitimate reason for owning an assault weapon. In trained hands, a semi-automatic is as useful (if not more so) for home defense. In untrained hands, the potential for bullets to go awry and kill children across the street is that much greater. Ergo, common sense says that people ought not to have assault rifles.

I am very, very careful when I shoot, even though I have no close neighbors. Even with my pathological hatred of orchard-munching deer, I won‚ÄövÑv¥t shoot one unless I am shooting into a hillside. I don‚ÄövÑv¥t want to take a shot that risks sending a bullet a mile down range into someone‚ÄövÑv¥s house. I would wager that, of people who can place shots accurately, 99.99% would say that they are more accurate with their scoped semi-automatic rifles than an assault rifle. And many would say they are even more accurate with a bolt-action weapon (my choice). I note that the snipers in the article the Maximum Leader linked to were good old farm lads who preferred to use bolt-action weapons.

So, in short, Dean position does not push me farther from his camp ‚ÄövÑv¨ the foreign policy issue is what kills him. But it does reveal his centrist roots. He governed Vermont as a centrist. Why do Deaniacs seem to think he will be an uber-liberal?

It strikes me that the term ‚ÄövÑv liberal‚ÄövÑvp is starting to lack any real meaning. I always love how the Republicans continually painted Clinton as a left-wing liberal when he was in fact very centrist (probably because, being a poll-driven seeker of adulation, he naturally followed the general public trend). Dean is imagined to be very liberal by many of his supporters, and you can bet that Rover will paint him as a left-wing nut-job, but his record is also centrist. Hell, Bush, a supposed conservative, is pretty damn liberal with the public funds, especially when it comes to handouts for seniors and (corporate) farms.