(courtesy foxnews.com)

Last night’s Trump-less Republican Fox News debate was remarkable for its civility. WWF-style smack talk was only notable by its absence. Without The Donald distracting everyone with his hair and hair-brained schemes, the remaining candidates laid out their positions on a wide variety of topics: immigration, ISIS, the economy and more. The debate also focus on abortion, an issue that completely separates Dems and Reps. Of guns — another politically divisive issue — nada. Why was that? Too much unanimity (although Christie is plenty squishy)? Not important? What?

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79 COMMENTS

  1. I’d like to think guns weren’t mentioned in an effort to downplay “GUNZ” as an emotional selling point for uninformed voters. However, there’s no chance the left will stop talking, so us PoTG may be in danger of losing the narrative if even Republicans are keeping their mouths shut on this issue.

  2. I think folks have heard enough about the guns stuff, Trump or no Trump. Without him on the stage, there was time to actually cover everything else, topics that many would find more relevant and worth talking about.

    I also thought that Cruz was enough of an ass though, acting as if Trump were still on the stage. Sorry, but I didn’t see the same debate I guess as Robert.

    • “Without him on the stage, there was time to actually cover everything else”.

      There are only five subjects worth discussing. The wall – build it. Round up of illegals – sooner the better, republicans caving to democrats – vote them out. Iran building the bomb – stop them. Citizens right to lawful self defense – add to the 2A.

      The rest is crap

      • The wall – any wall built to keep people out can also be used to keep people in.
        Round up of illegals – Stop giving them benefits and go back to giving citizenship to offspring of citizens and most of the illegal immigrant problem disappears.
        Republicans caving to democrats – Realizing that there’s little difference in the two major parties on day to day matters will show that they’re not caving but giving into their nature.
        Iran building the bomb – if they really wanted one I’m sure they would have one by now, and if they do get one then let their neighbors in the Middle East deal with it.
        Citizens right to lawful self defense – all tools of foreign entanglements will eventually be turned internal, I fear intervention from the government more that I fear intervention from terrorists or criminals.

      • Nonsense. The only subject worth bothering with, is how much smaller can you make government. How many lackeys and apparatchiks can you fire. How much smaller can you make the budget. How much can you lower taxes. How many pages of laws can you tear out and burn. How many departments can you get rid of. Etc., etc.

        Pitting schmucks up against each other by one side claiming “we’ll do this”, and the other “we’ll do that” may work well in practice given the sheer idiocy of the indoctrinated population, but as for any government ever, the less they do, the better they are.

        There never have been, nor ever will be, a difference between so called “good” and “bad” government. They are definitionally all bad. So, the only difference is between big and small. Do you want your bad in bigger or smaller portions.

        Any government big and powerful enough to wall others out, can wall you in. If they can detain and deport “them”, they can, and will do so to you. Unless you’re a nicely behaved nigger happy to pick their cotton undies off the floor after they soil themselves.

        You “solve” the immigration “problem” by making sure even the most shortsighted of bleeding hearts have no access to even one single measly penny of tax nor debt money, even if that would be all that was required to save one million little innocent immigrant children from the most painful and horrific of deaths, right on national TV.

  3. Where to begin. With both parties supporting immigration from third world countries who think murder is “just business”. We have to disarm our citizens so the immigrants commiting crimes are not shot.

    The reasons why are endless.

      • No. In Mexico murder is just business. In Middle East murder Is about honor.

        As got the us military. We have to train people to kill because it not part of our culture.

      • Amongst the ruling classes, murder has always and everywhere been “just business.” The sad part is, only in very few instances have those ruled had the sense, courage and fortitude to return the favor, rather than falling for the indoctrination aimed at getting them to uncritically accept this asymmetry underpinning all totalitarian states.

    • You left out those that think the murder of infidels is commanded by Allah as shown by the actions of Muhhammad from the religion of pieces.(you know, the head in one piece and the body in another).

      • How many people have been killed by those murderous Moslems in the USA in the past year?

        Why is this a big problem again?

        • Clearly not enough for the likes of geniuses like you.

          Here’s the last two years:

          014.03.06 USA Port Bolivar, TX 2 0 A Muslim man shoots his lesbian daughter and her lover to death and leaves a copy of the Quran open to a page condemning homosexuality.

          2014.04.27 USA Skyway, WA 1 0 A 30-year-old man is murdered by a Muslim fanatic.

          2014.06.01 USA Seattle, WA 2 0 Two homosexuals are murdered by an Islamic extremist.

          2014.06.25 USA West Orange, NJ 1 0 A 19-year-old college student is shot to death ‘in revenge’ for Muslim deaths overseas.

          2014.09.25 USA Moore, OK 1 1 A Sharia advocate beheads a woman after calling for Islamic terror and posting an Islamist beheading photo.

          2015.07.16 USA Chattanooga, TN 5 2 A ‘devout Muslim’ stages a suicide attack on a recruiting center at a strip mall and a naval center which leaves five dead.

          2015.12.02 USA San Bernardino, CA 14 17 A ‘very religious’ Muslim shoots up a Christmas party with his wife, leaving fourteen dead.

          http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/american-attacks.aspx

          Maybe you’ll be happier when Obama and Ryan’s THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND JIHADIS ARE SETTLED HERE THIS YEAR.

          • Now look up the statistics on how many people were killed by lightning strikes in the same time period.

            Or by tree branches.

            Or by falling off stairs.

            Or by drowning in pools.

            And tell me again why this is threat #1 in your inflamed imagination.

  4. One gun question asked to Gilmore during the undercard.

    What’s more interesting is…..

    … if you ask a question to a presedential candidate whose poll numbers is 0.0% did you in fact ask a question?

    • 0.0% is rough. Even the Inanimate Carbon Rod is pulling a solid .5% in the latest RCP average.

  5. I didn’t watch it because I knew what would happen. The moderators are in the tank for the Democrats, Fox News or not.

    It’d be like PBS having Rush Limbaugh moderate the Democrat debate. Which doesn’t happen.

    • lol. A panel of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin moderating the next Democratic debate would be worth watching though.

  6. What 6 Cuckservatives and a Canadian pandering to the ignorant establishment boomer conservatives had to say last night is irrelevant. Not one of them has a snowballs chance of being elected in the general.

    Meanwhile Trump actually does something presidential for the betterment of America and its veterans and wins the debate in abstentia.

    The man played Fox and the GOPe for the fools they are.

    • FOX News invited a radical Muslim activist, a Bernie Sanders supporter, a Black Lives Matter supporter and a Mexican illegal immigrant to the debate to confront Donald Trump.

      Trump was smart to skip the debate.

      • Will Trump also use the same strategy dealing with “inconvenient” meetings once he’s president?

        • You are repeating the same establishment narrative as the cucks and dems. It’s quite sad.

          Let me insult you personally and then see if you’d like to come over for chat, all the while contacting people who hate your ideas to come and ambush you with hate questions.

          Yeah, he “ran away” because he was “scared”. Ok, Fox.

          • Trump has insulted waaaaay more people than have ever insulted him. And he did insult Kelly first, brazenly, and kept piling on. Their mockery of him is return was totally justified.

            As far as you’re concerned, well, by your use of the term “cuck” you have already let me known that you belong to the crowd that cannot be reasoned with, shouldn’t be listened to, and most certainly cannot be respected in any way.

        • I’d hope any President wouldn’t attend meetings with our enemies that were SET UP BY FRIENDS OF OUR ENEMIES.

          Oh wait, that’s what OBAMA does.

          • So you want a president who just nukes it from orbit to be sure?

            I sure hope that Trump really isn’t as gung ho as his followers would like him to be. Otherwise it’s time to dig out that bunker in the backyard for real.

    • I cannot vote for Trump. He admitted in the first debate that he was a corporatist. He IS the establishment, but not on the political side, the greedy corporation side of it. Now he crosses into that arena and he suddenly proclaims that he is an outsider and fix what is wrong? He was part of what is wrong.

      • I think you need to get more informed on that. He is pro business obviously, pro AMERICAN corporations obviously, but he is distinctly Anti Establishment when it comes to globalization and free trade.

        NAFTA, TPA (which Cruz voted for) and TPP are all favorites of the GOPe. Trump sees them for the American economy crushing load of crap they are. American workers see it too and that is why he is earning the Populist/Nationalist meme from the media.

      • Huh? Are you really that blind? The left and right are up in flames against Trump right now because he’s the only one that opposes the increasing of H1B visas to import foreign workers, which corps want badly. The hate him because he’s not in their pocket. It’s difficult to believe you could have such a lack of understanding of clear basic facts.

  7. Let’s see how that question on guns would have come about…
    “‘establishment candidate X’, what do you think about the statement Ted Cruz made about ‘sumthin gunz’?…and no Senator Cruz, you are not permitted a rebuttal because I, the moderator, used your name, not the candidate.”
    Not that anybody sitting on that stage has any idea what words about guns actually mean.

  8. “The debate also focus on abortion, an issue that completely separates Dems and Reps. Of guns — another politically divisive issue — nada. Why was that?”

    Preaching to the choir…

  9. I’m starting to get the impression that RF is not a fan of The Donald 🙂

    There were no gun questions because the subject has been covered extensively already, because Fox News tried to position this as a “serious” debate and they perceive the 2A to be a fringe issue, because Fox News has an incentive to keep Christie relevant as one of the more quotable candidates, and because Fox News is pretty weak on the 2A.

    • Come to think of it, with polls showing gun control to be waaaay down the list of the great majority’s concerns, why WOULD there be a question about guns? The Dem moderators only ask it of the Dem candidates to pander to their anti-gun base.

  10. I didn’t watch this debate but. I think at this point even the Repubs are taking us for granted as having one of their votes……………. So why bother?? They should. Myself being a 1 issue voter I don’t want to be ignored at ALL.
    I want it brought up time and time again to make my best decisions on who will not only promise but DO the most for me.

  11. While to many of us here gun rights are a seminal issue, for most voters they are way down on the list behind the economy, national security, immigration, foreign policy, national debt, entitlements, etc. No right or wrong to it, nor any nefarious intent or intentional slight, I suspect, but just a network trying to connect to the largest number of potential viewers in order to drive up viewership.

    • Sadly, the feds actually have real control over gun policy, unlike all those other issues they pretend they can do something about (jobs, economy, war, crime, inequality)

      • Erm, are you claiming that the federal government can do nothing about wars (and foreign policy in general), given that it is explicitly in their purview, and that President is Commander-in-Chief?

    • FOX News invited a radical Muslim activist, a Bernie Sanders supporter, a Black Lives Matter supporter and a Mexican illegal immigrant to the debate to confront Donald Trump.

      Trump was wise to skip the debate, it was an ambush.

    • LOL. I’m sure there are Trump supporters on this site, and that’s freedom for you and I hope they exercise the crap out of it. But come on, didn’t all of us encounter people like him on the playground when we were kids, bragging about how much money his parents made, how popular he was, and then he gets all pissy when no one picks him for their team so he takes the ball and goes home.

      • Trump is the regular kid who loves America, hard work, and sticks up for his friends. The kind of kid who goes to school and then goes to work after. He has money, and good grades and bangs the cheerleaders behind their boyfriends back, because Alpha.

        The rest of the republican field are nothing more than a high school clique of betas, who lack the balls to confront the guy who is banging their girls.

        • Yeah, we all grew up with a 100 million dollar empire to fall into once grown, same as everyone else. Cruz, among a few of the candidates, actually did come from fairly humble origins & had to earn his way, if that (or anything) matters to Trump supporters.

          Literally the only thing people have to bitch about Cruz is that he’s gonna kill the ethanol subsidy, and those hard-working welfare farmers & distiller corps are livid over it. Or voting for a TPA that was already beyond the control of our government to stop. Simpler tax code, cheaper gas, consistent conservative principles his whole life.

          Or:

          A bilionaire trust fund kid from NYC with a hard-on for making the Rolling Stone rich list, screwing over people with land deals (which is how you actually make money in real estate, btw; market timing. The buildings themselves do little to bring value to the market individually), and pushing liberal democrat causes of his buddies (if not himself, supposedly). Vote for Trump in one hand and crap in the other; see which ends up like NYC first.

        • barnbwt, your answers will fall on deaf ears. You’e making an assumption that you’re talking to people who share your small-government ideology because they happen to have appropriated the word “conservative” to describe themselves. But they don’t care about small government. They don’t see anything wrong with welfare in principle, so long as it is in their (i.e. white middle class) interests – their problem with the existing arrangement is solely that it benefits minorities at their expense. Similarly, they don’t want free trade – they want strong protectionism, i.e. government welfare to secure their well-paying jobs. It’s classic identity politics, appropriated by and for the needs of white blue-collar workers.

          Whether they’re actually “conservative” or not is not for me to say, as I am not a conservative – it’s between you guys to fight it out. But they’re definitely a very different, almost oppose from you on matters of ideology. The only few things on which you agree are some of the practical outcomes of those different ideologies, but that they match is largely coincidental, and can change tomorrow.

          Gun rights are not exempt – basically, the Trump crowd are the exact same people who passed laws prohibiting carry in Texas after the Reconstruction, because they (white citizens) were concerned with blacks being able to shoot back. Trump is “pro-gun” because his supporters are “pro-gun”, and they’re pro-gun because in today’s USA, whites constitute the majority of gun owners by a very large margin, and so this position is in their favor at this moment. If blacks were to drop their support for liberal gun control policies tomorrow and start seriously tooling up, like Black Panthers of old, you’d see a major flip flop on this.

  14. Didn’t Cruz, in the last debate, say something like everyone on the stage would of course say they support the 2A, unless they were clinically insane? It would be a waste of a question if the moderators kept asking.

  15. I wondered the same thing, concluded that talking about gun control at a REPUBLICAN DEBATE is like asking if the ocean is wet. Completely unnecessary.

    • 2A questions at a republican debate can help to flush out the RINOS. I personally don’t think it matters all that much at this stage because the top 3 candidates are all more or less pro 2A, but if Christie or Bush were still a threat then I think their “I support the second amendment but” answers would be illuminating.

      • That might have had something to do with it. Or Google. Somebody had to dig those social justice warrior YouTube “celebrities” out of the woodwork. Especially that tubby Muslim.

  16. A question on gun control was asked of Ohio Governor candidate Kasich, who promised to veto any gun control legislation that hit his desk when he is POTUS.

    Where were you guys? Was it time for a snack? Perhaps a potty break?

  17. Because the Republican party as a whole is a squish. Even the questions ABOUT guns during other debates were “should we restrict guns more?” and arguments against that. NOT for MORE gun rights, which is what we need to make the argument about. It’s like asking someone when they stopped hitting their wife. There’s no way to win unless we change the conversation, and go from defense to offense.

    1. National carry bill. Not reciprocity, but a national carry bill that doesn’t mess with reciprocity (look to VA for what happens when you mess with reciprocity). Ideally, you just alter H.R. 218, and make it address all gun owners.
    2. Hearing safety act. Get suppressors out from under NFA. The first step in destroying their modern gun control schemes. And a powerful signal that even very old regulations aren’t safe from the guns 2.0 movement.
    3. Additional funding for police ranges in urban areas, with the proviso that they be opened to citizens. Make it a “cop bill” that’s about regular people. Makes it hard for opponents to argue.

    I could go on, but notice NONE of the establishment is pitching for us to ADVANCE gun rights, only retard the slow march against them. Republicans have been “for” national reciprocity for how long now? They love it because it’s common sense and a great campaign issue, and DON’T want it passed because then they lose a powerful issue to motivate voters and actually have to *gasp* find ANOTHER pro-gun rights position and push that, and actually become part of gun rights! Quelle Horror!

    • How do you go on the offense when you don’t have the numbers? E.g. this:

      >> National carry bill.

      I can guarantee you that it would be opposed by vast majority of the population, unless the resulting regime is very strict (i.e. more similar to what you see in NY, rather than in TX).

      The other two are good ideas, and can be done if properly packaged, but even then I doubt they would get enough support. Unless in a form of some quid-pro-quo to get some Democrats to vote for it, such as extending NICS.

  18. Yep Hasdru-They all say the same thing. I didn’t miss the donald a whit. Ted was the designated fox whipping boy. Nothing said would ever dissuade me from voting for the overwhelming 2A choice-TED CRUZ. An actual pro-2A record. AS for FOX I only watch O’Reilly and that’s mainly to yell at the screen in true OFWG fashion. Oh yeah-nonsense Marco. Vote for Ted. Or the completely unelectable Paul. Easily the most pro-2A guys. All the whining about crap that will never happen is just…whining.

    • Cruz has more credibility with me than many of the others. Paul probably is not very electable, but I do trust him more than most politicians.

    • Woman takes offense to being called “bimbo”, and other women described as “fat pigs”, and takes further offense to being told that “blood comes out of her whatever”. Shock! Horror! Feminist takeover! We’re doomed!

  20. I did’n’t watch, but hearing everyone say the same thing about guns would have been boring and pointless, no? I doubt any of them is going to say anything risky when there’s no need. So it’s a non-event for a reason in my mind.

  22. Asking about guns makes republicans look good. I just wish when the subject came up a candidate would say owning guns is a civil right.
    Most people who don’t own guns don’t think it is a civil right. There a liberal democrats who watch all the debates. That would be the first time many would hear owning guns are a civil right.

  23. The debate wasn’t more mature because trump wasn’t there, it was mature because it wasn’t being moderated by CNN, NBC, or any of their affiliates.

  25. Because Fox does not want Rand Paul to have one more topic for himself to prove he is probably the best candidate.

    • True. Paul lacks charisma, but I trust him with Constitutional Enumerated Rights more than most of the others.

  26. BTW the 2nd ammendment doesn’t give us the right to bear arms, IT CONFIRMS OUR RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS.
    And if anyone forgot, the presidential oath is short and sweet,,, uphold the constitution of the United States.
    There should NEVER be a gun question.
    So B. Hussien O. can go to prison too with Hillary when she gets her orange jumpsuit..

  27. One question that I might have missed being asked of candidates, “Have you read The Constitution”?

  28. Most of these debates are usually just media circus events. I usually just read the high points, if there are any.
    I actually would like to be a moderator at these events and pick the actual tough questions of these clowns, versus the usual fluff and puff.

  29. You had it with unanimity. Just like dems on abortion. They’ll all give the same answers.

  30. “Why Didn’t the Fox Republican Debate Have a Question About Guns?”

    I will tell yo exactly why.

    Because to the NeoCons on Foxnews, Guns and Gun Rights are NOT an issue.

    Something has changed in the political landscape.

    Republican Legislators no longer carry the banner of Gun Rights.
    That issue has swung more to the Independents and the Libertarians.
    On many issues there is really NO DIFFERENCE between Democrat and Republican.

  32. “Without The Donald distracting everyone with his hair and hair-brained schemes”

    Welp, there goes The Truth About Guns (but not much else) down the toilet with Fox for me. Shame, I otherwise liked the site.

    Running out of sane people and companies who give a shit about the future of our once great nation.

    Bye.

  33. Why no gun questions? Simple answer:

    No recent shootings for the media Blood Dancers to play in. Remember, if it bleeds it ledes.

    Too much riding on The Trump v Cruz WWF event anyway.

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