Harry Reid's Pro-Gun Endorsement Up and Vanished from His Campaign Site
With Senator Dianne Feinstein's assault-weapons ban on the table before Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's team has chosen a curious time to delete a section of his semi-defunct campaign website touting just how much the NRA approved of his gun-policy beliefs. Reid, an avid shooter and long-time believer in Second Amendment rights who last won a campaign in his heated re-election battle in 2010, has a lot of broken links on his official campaign site, but the tab on "Sportsmen for Harry Reid" endorsements looked like this — until conservative commentators started pointing to it last week:
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Yes, that's an endorsement from Wayne LaPierre. But Reid has a B-rating from the NRA, and then there's this portion from the "sportsmen" outlining Reid's opposition to an assault-weapons ban:
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Remember that a lot of Reid's campaign site is borked and that he hasn't been actively campaigning for himself in years. But ... this particular section of HarryReid.com had been heavily cited by conservative and gun-rights bloggers in order to show that Reid was either pandering to gun groups for votes or is now planning to pitch against Feinstein's bill when push comes to shove in the coming months.
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From Guns.com on January 31:
And from Breitbart on January 30:
A search for "weapons ban" on Reid's official Senate website turns up two articles when Reid said he would oppose an assault-weapons ban. "Wayne and I also stood together to defeat the so-called Assault Weapons Ban. I voted against the ban when it was first proposed, I voted against it when folks tried to renew it, and I will continue to oppose it," Reid is quoted as saying in an event from 2010. And then there is this fact sheet from Reid more or less saying the same thing.
Reid has sort-of-gently said that he wouldn't be endorsing Feinstein's bill, telling reporters on January 30 that there would be plenty of votes to come and that he admired Feinstein. But a Reid aide did tell The Wall Street Journal that he might be in support of a new, different bill in the works that would limit the capacity of ammunition magazines. Though his campaign team's "Sportsmen for Harry Reid" section wouldn't necessarily reflect that. The Reid campaign hasn't commented on the changes, probably because the Reid campaign doesn't exactly exist right now.
