If politics were easy, everyone would be doing it.

If Second Amendment Human Rights politics were easy, Andrew Cuomo would be a poli sci professor at Lackawanna Community College.

After last week’s introduction of DFL Rep Deb Hilstrom’s gun bill – I call it the Good Gun Bill, as opposed to the DFL’s raft of gun grab legislation – there’ve been two annoyances; some Second Amendment activists have come to the opinion that it’s just another gun control bill, and some Republican legislators seem stand-offish to it.

Both are mistakes.

It’s Not Even A Compromise – Read the bill.  I did.  It does what all of us pro-Second Amendment people say gun bills should do; makes life harder for criminals, leave the law-abiding citizen alone.

Some might see Hilstrom’s an urban DFLer, or that the bill is supported by a major law enforcement association, and assume it’s a DFL shill.  It’s not.

It increases sentences for gun-related crimes and ties up a loophole in Minnesota’s NICS data reporting that was supposed to have been tied up by the DFL legislature years ago.

That’s pretty much it.

Read the law; there is no stealth gun grab provision written in invisible ink.  It’s all right there.

This is a bill that Second Amendment people should support on Second Amendment grounds. It is not an onerous compromise; it is the sort of thing Second Amendment groups have been proposing all along.

Optics – Rumor has it that some Republicans in the Senate are hinky about the bill because they don’t want to be seen to be operating with the DFL.

Let’s think this one through.  There are three reasons this is just plain wrong.

For starters; as I noted above, this is a good bill.  This is, indeed, the only good gun bill in the Legislature that has any chance of passing.

Second:  You neglect the “security mom” voter at your own peril.  They are a form of low-information or single-issue voter, all right – and there are a ton of them.  And Sandy Hook freaked them out bad.  Statistics – like the fact that both violent crime, including murder, including mass murder – are down 40% in 20 years don’t matter to them, and their votes count just as much as yours.  They are the ones who bellow “we have to dooooooooooooo something!” after every tragedy.

And here’s a teaching moment; showing the “security moms” that “doing something” can actually be productive, and seizing the messaging on this issue – which is, by the way, one of the very few issues that seems to be breaking the GOP’s way so far this session – is a good thing.

And the fact is, you can not let the DFL come out as the unalloyed good guy on this one; do you want the DFL to be able to go to Greater Minnesota crowing that “WE were the ones with the common sense solutions on guns?”  After the Metrocrats’ crimes against democracy last month?

Finally:  this is a chance to throw the DFL-enabling media’s “Bipartisanship” slur back in their face.  You know as well as I do the DFL only cares about bipartisanship when they’re in the minority – but working this issue, and winning it, gives you an instant hot-button to throw back into Lori Sturdevant and Keri Miller’s faces when they squirt their crocodile tears about “bipartisanship”.

Passing this bill shuts them up, it gives the low-information but not-too-addled voter their catch word, and it gives us a gun bill that actually does something useful.

If the MNGOP drops the ball on this one, it’ll be a very, very bad thing.