In this last week leading up to the Republican State Assembly there have been several pieces generated by a PAC supporting one of my opponents with the primary goal of questioning my commitment to conservative values.

First, let me reiterate, I will not go negative. I never have and I never will. I will, however, attempt to clarify some of the facts.

I appreciate the citizens and organizations outside of the legislature who rate many of the bills upon which we vote. Their observations are very informative and often uncover new information we need. However, I do not use their recommendations as a voting list. Often there is more information that we are working with than just the language of the bill and consequently their analysis is not a very accurate picture of the true conservative perspective of a particular bill.

For example, in 2016 C.U.T. rated a red light camera ban as a no vote because the bill contained a safety clause, which was really not enough reason to reject the very good idea of banning red light cameras.

Additionally, I found it telling that in the letters and online articles that are attacking my voting record they left out the most recent year (2017) of the C.U.T. votes. In 2017 my vote rating jumped up over 25% above the previous year (from 47% to 73%). Their graph of my voting record would look at lot different if it also showed that dramatic upswing in 2017. The year of which they decided to end (2016) rated 12 of my votes for that year. I have not counted it up, but I know I voted hundreds of times in that year and those 12 votes cannot fully capture my voting patterns.

The other vote I feel compelled to defend is for SB13-195, which was concerning online delivery of concealed carry training classes. This was a part of the terrible gun control bills the Democrats rolled out five years ago. We were hopelessly out numbered in both houses. The bill, as introduced, banned any use of the internet or any other electronic means for any part of a training class. As I heard this bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee I saw a small possibility of taking most of the sting out of this bill.

I asked the bill sponsor if she would be open to amending the bill to allow online or electronic teaching tools in a training class if it was not the exclusive way the class was conducted.

She agreed, if I would support the bill. So I did and through that managed to defang one of the gun bills that we Republicans were powerless to stop any other way. Without that amendment a concealed carry training class today could not even legally use a power point in the class. With the amendment in place the only classes affected are exclusive online classes without any hands on, face-to-face instruction.