Saturday, April 30, 2011
Associated Press
PITTSBURGH
Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum told National Rifle Association members at their annual convention Friday that President Barack Obama doesn’t “understand America,” and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told them the administration is “consistently anti-gun and anti-Second Amendment.”
Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, criticized remarks the president made recently when he said America not only was a better country because of social programs such as Medicare and Medicaid but added, “I’ll go further — we would not be a great country without these commitments.”
“Mr. President,” Santorum said, “you don’t understand America if you believe that,” because it implies the United States wasn’t great for most of the first 200 years of its history.
Gingrich told the crowd that the 2012 presidential election is the most important in the country’s history, because it will determine “whether we’re going to remain a nation that believes our rights come from our creator.”
Santorum, Gingrich and, later, freshman U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., spoke to NRA members mostly about general principles, including the concept of American exceptionalism. They defined it as not a claim to greatness because of pedigree, but because America is based on the idea that rights are God-given and inalienable — which they argued is meant to be reflected in limited government and maximum personal liberty.
“You loan power to the government. The government doesn’t loan power to you,” Gingrich said.
But the speakers also had specific criticisms of the current administration — from its views on the Second Amendment to foreign policy.