>Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating? I spent a few years covering 2A topics for CBS News.com (this is before I left to found Recent

>Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating? I spent a few years covering 2A topics for CBS News.com (this is before I left to found Recent.io). This is true in my experience. As <brudgers> says, you can be interested in shooting sports without being interested in hunting, but I've found that both groups of people tend to be broadly pro-2A. Note this may not have been true a generation or so ago. But since then, we've seen a ratchet effect where anti-gun politicians have tried to impose more and more restrictions. One effect has been to turn the NRA into the potent political force it is today. This coincided with the rise of the anti-gun left, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who in this clip seems to say she wanted to ban all guns (or all rifles?) but didn't have enough votes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs Barack Obama, or his aide, filled out a questionnaire in 1996 saying he supported a state law banning the "manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns": http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newest.html http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newes... http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html San Francisco tried to ban possession of all handguns: http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/ http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/ And so on. This has been done in the name of cracking down on gun crimes. But the same weapon that can drop a 250-lb deer can also drop a 180-lb man, and even casual gun owners have become politically active and aware in a way they were not a generation ago (when politicians on the left were not as anti-gun as they are today). Also some of the recent wave of anti-gun legislation sweeps in weapons used for hunting purposes, which helps to explain this support for 2A rights.