The Washington Post is busy helping the antis drive the perception that gun control won them Virginia, or at the least didn’t hurt them. In politics, perception is just as important as reality, so as long as they can make the powers that be believe what they say is true, it doesn’t honestly matter if it’s not. Did Al Gore really lose over his position on gun control? That’s the perception. It doesn’t matter if it was true or not. I think often time our side sees the lie and assumes everyone else will see it too. Here’s the spin the Post is offering:

The National Rifle Association ran commercials against Herring, but its messages were directed at voters who our own polling showed were never accessible to Herring. The NRA avoided the largest concentrations of swing voters in the Northern Virginia, Norfolk and Richmond markets. That is not a recipe for growth or success.

What they are arguing, essentially, is that the gun vote are already baked into the GOP numbers. In other words, the Democrat has nothing to fear on gun rights, because those votes were never really up for grabs anyway. As someone who has pulled the D lever before, in order to punish the GOP for their stances on certain issues, I can at least personally say that’s not true for me. I might be willing to vote for a pro-gun Democrat against Corbett, who seems to be just about as good at raising my taxes as Ed Rendell was. But the gun issue will likely keep me in Corbett’s corner in 2014.

The other side is now driving the perception that gun control is a winning issue for Democrats, whereas up until very recently, it was seen as a toxic issue. This is not a good place to be in, if they are successful. We will lose our rights if we remain here, because you can’t count on one party to control everything all of the time, and it will only be a matter of time before the GOP realizes they can, once again, get away with just not being as bad as the other guy. The Democrats have to be punished severely in 2014 for their stance in favor of gun control. This should lock them out of certain states and regions.