I Am Not Trying to Confuse You

You are already confused, and I am trying to un-confuse you. Not about everything, just about guns and political parties. I can understand your confusion about guns because you don't have a background in that subject, but I don't understand how someone who is way more politically astute than I am can not know the difference between being a member and not being a member of a political party.

Let's do the guns first. One of the reasons my ilk is so hostile to your ilk when it comes to guns is that my ilk has the impression that your ilk doesn't know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, and yet they are trying to tell us what to do with our guns. You might have better luck if you became conversant with some of the terminology so you could speak to us in our native tongues. Then again, maybe not, some of my ilk is pretty much set in their ways.

There are two kinds of automatic firearms, fully automatic and semi automatic. A fully automatic gun will keep shooting as long as you hold the trigger back, while a semi automatic gun will only fire one shot until you release the trigger and pull it again, at which point it will fire one more shot. Fully automatic guns have been prohibited to civilians for a long time, so you're flogging a dead horse on that one. There are lots of semi automatics on the civilian market, but they may be divided into two categories, traditional sporting arms and tactical arms, which are military type guns that have the fully automatic part locked out. Because these guns can easily be converted to fully automatic, there have been efforts made over the years to ban them from the civilian market. They actually were banned for awhile, but that law was allowed to expire, and your ilk has been trying to reinstate it ever since.

The compromise that I offered was I would accept a ban on the tactical guns if you would agree to leave the sporting arms alone. Your counter offer was to ban all repeating firearms, both automatic and manually operated. This is like, you ask for a bowl of soup, I offer you a half bowl, and then you demand two bowls. So "No soup for you!"

Registering as a Democrat or Republican has nothing to do with party membership. We don't do that in Michigan, and I don't think you guys do it in your state either. I think the reason some states do it is to prevent "crossover votes". This is when a Democrat votes for a Republican candidate, or a Republican votes for a Democratic candidate, not because they like him, but because they think their guy would have a better chance running against him than his primary opponent. This is what happened when George Wallace won the Michigan Democratic primary back in '72. For a long time after that, Michigan Democrats didn't participate in the primaries and picked their candidates in party caucuses, like some other states do.

 Michigan Democrats resumed participating in the presidential primaries at some point, but I don't remember when. For a long time after that primary ballots listed both parties on a single sheet, and the instructions said you could only vote for one party or the other. If you switched back and forth, your ballot was invalid. Now there are two separate ballots, and they ask you which one you want. They don't make a big production out of it. You check one box or the other on your ballot application, and that's the one they give you. Last time the guy head of me in line forgot to check the box, and the clerk quietly pointed that out to him. The only way I could have known which ballot he chose would have been if I looked right over his shoulder when he checked the box which, of course, I didn't do. My mother told me the way they used to do it in Chicago was to shout your name out loud and ask you which ballot you wanted. My mother used to shout "Republican!" right back at them. She was a strong willed woman, not easily intimidated. I want to be just like her when I grow up.

I have been trying to find out how you would go about joining the Democratic Party if you so desired. So far I have found out from Wiki that they had 43.1 million members as of 2012, but it didn't say how you would go about becoming one of them. I went to their official web site, Democrats.org and couldn't find out there either. My guess is that you would join at the local level and your group would be affiliated with the state party, which would in turn be affiliated with the national party. In answer to your question, "What's the difference?": It's like the difference between sports fans and sports players. Sports fans support the team, while sports players are the team.