On the GOP side, we hope the state party will experience a moment of clarity, accept responsibility and get back to letting candidates talk issues; we fear party leadership will live in denial and use the debacle as excuse to keep binge drinking at the saloon of big government.
As for Democrats, we hope the state party recognizes the role gunowners played. Four years ago our support elected one Governor. This year our absence elected another. In General Assembly races, our active support defended pro-gun incumbents regardless of party, ensuring that D’s were re-elected by wide margin and R’s were preserved in the face of very expensive challenges. (Giannetti aside, the GOP’s only near miss in taking an incumbent D out of the Senate was one in which we helped the challenger but didn’t have enough funds to run the whole program; the Dem’s only Senate pickup was one in which we were not defending the incumbent. In the House, only one pro-gun Democrat lost his general election race, but did so to another pro-gun Dem.) Looking ahead, we hope the party will agree that making a gun control statement on behalf of a few extremists in caucus would needlessly disenfranchise a lot of constituents. The most effective way to make Maryland’s single, strongest issue advocacy group into wholly owned chattel of the GOP is to make gun control a Dem party call on behalf of those extremists. It would neutralize our ability to keep the base focused on issues, and frag about a third of the Dem caucus. (A real danger: extremists in both parties know this and actively seek it. Dem extremists want their party purged of ‘impure’ centrists, and don’t care who does their dirty work. GOP extremists want more bomb-throwers to become active in the party and don't care what issue must be trashed to achieve confrontations.) And never mind the obvious: as a policy, extremist gun control is wrong for constituents!