Georgia’s lieutenant governors aren’t generally well-remembered. As a native son of the state, I can recall a few names, but generally not because the role is that important or groundbreaking. I’d even forgotten that a man named Geoff Duncan held the office until just a couple of years ago. Like a lot of lawmakers, he was mostly a non-issue.
But he clearly didn’t like President Trump, taking a side opposing him on a number of grounds, even as he said he disagreed with Joe Biden on policy. In fact, he ended up endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024, ostensibly because those policy issues with Biden weren’t really as important as “orange man bad” or something.
Now, in a move that surprised no one, the man who backed Harris has now come out as a Democrat. One prime reason he gave? Republicans don’t favor gun control.
Georgia’s former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan grew up in a Republican household, in the deep-South, heavily-red Forsyth County.
“That was the lens I looked through,” Duncan tells WABE’s “Morning Edition,” just hours after announcing that it’s official: he is now a Democrat.
“As I got elected starting in 2013 as a state representative, and then as lieutenant governor, it just became so hard at times to try to figure out the right way to do the right thing, as a Republican,” Duncan tells WABE’s ‘Morning Edition.’
“Politics is not easy for any party. But for me, it was just a series of events. Starting with how Republicans treated guns. Every time we had a gun conversation, it was kind of: neglect what the masses want. And that’s some sort of gun control.”
That sure sounds like the typical argument from anti-gun Democrats. “The people want it, so we should ignore the Constitution entirely and give it to them.”
First off, if Georgia voters really wanted gun control, they would put Democrats in charge of the state. Instead, Republicans have kept ahold of their legislative majorities. In 2022, the same year that Gov. Brian Kemp signed Constitutional Carry into law, he won re-election with 53.4% of the vote. That’s an improvement over the 50.2% he received back in 2018. Democrats did pick up a couple of seats in the legislature, but it was basically a blue trickle, not a blue wave.
Besides, rights aren’t simply what a majority decides they are.
If polling came out tomorrow calling for returning black Americans to slavery, would that be right? Of course it wouldn’t. Slavery is wrong and, thankfully, now the Constitution prohibits that. If the masses decided that didn’t matter, though, Duncan’s argument seems to be that slavery should make a comeback.
It. Should. Not.
The masses aren’t the final arbiter of everything. Our rights were specifically preserved because there are always going to be some people who want to curtail the rights of others.
Republicans haven’t always remembered that, but they generally have when it came to guns. They understood that gun control was an attack on the Second Amendment.
If Duncan is among those who don’t, then maybe the Democratic Party actually is a better place for him, since they don’t seem to be all that interested in people’s rights lately, including the right to keep and bear arms. Sure, there are exceptions, but those are exceptions, not the rule. The rule seems to be ignoring the parts of the Constitution they don’t like.
It seems that Duncan’s disagreements with Biden on policy aren’t as significant as he led people to believe.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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