Christie on gubs

The New York Times has an article by Alexander Burns about the New Jersey governor's changing stance:

The Democratic attack ad from 2009 showed Chris Christie’s face beside a row of bullets, branding him as an ally of the National Rifle Association. A narrator warned that, unlike Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat who was then New Jersey’s governor, Christie “stands with the NRA and opposes banning armor-piercing rifles.”
Christie (photo),  a Republican running for governor that year, brushed away the criticism. His campaign sent out a news release saying that Christie “supports the assault weapons ban and all current gun laws” and that he would “toughen gun laws to fight criminals and make New Jersey safer”. But, as he prepared to run for president half a decade later, Christie steadily abandoned that position, overhauling his policies to match a rhetorical swerve toward the pro-gun right.
A review of Christie’s record found that he has exercised his executive powers with increasing assertiveness, using his veto to block new gun restrictions, and wielding pardons and executive orders to revise the way state laws are enforced.
Christie now rejects a ban on assault weapons, and has renounced his past endorsement of the state’s tough gun laws, declaring that he would make it easier for residents to carry concealed weapons if he could. He said that he had “learned a great deal” about guns as he traversed the country, and had grown more suspicious of gun restrictions. “When these things involve public safety, I’m for public safety,” Christie said on CBS' Face the Nation. “But if they’re laws that are just going to make legislatures and governors feel better, they shouldn’t be put in place and infringe Second Amendment rights.”
Campaigning in the conservative early presidential primary states, Christie has used his recent record in New Jersey to cast himself as a champion of the Second Amendment and as ballast for his criticism of President Obama’s recent gun-control push.
In New Hampshire, where Christie has staked his campaign, gun-rights activists say the New Jersey governor has insistently sought their support.
Bob Clegg, a former state senator who leads the group Pro-Gun New Hampshire, said Christie had “changed to a point that makes him somebody that I could support. He’s done exactly what we hope people do when they’re given the facts, and that’s become more aware of the Second Amendment and more aware of people’s rights,” Clegg added.
Some of Christie’s explanations of his stances on guns have been inconsistent. He has recently claimed that he learned extensively about gun crime as the chief Federal prosecutor in New Jersey, and grew more supportive of gun rights as a result.
But, when Christie ran for governor in 2009, he cited that same tenure as a prosecutor to explain his support for gun regulation, citing handgun violence as a serious problem.
Christie’s political migration on guns unfolded slowly. In his first term, he took only a few modest steps to please gun-rights advocates. He commuted the sentence of a man, Brian Aitken, who was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for transporting guns he purchased legally in Colorado. In 2013, he reversed his support for a ban on fifty-caliber rifles, and vetoed a bill that would have done just that.
But, at that stage, Christie still tried to straddle the issue: he signed bills tightening penalties for a range of gun crimes and barring people on the Federal terrorism watch list from buying guns. When he vetoed the fifty-caliber rifle ban, and a measure requiring guns to carry “smart card” tracking technology, he did so in pragmatic language, calling the proposals unnecessary or unworkable rather than constitutionally offensive.
In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Christie met with families of the victims and called for a national conversation on guns. When he ran for re-election in 2013, the NRA gave him only a 'C' rating on gun rights. (The group declined to invite him to its convention this year.)
But Christie’s approach in his second term has been different.
Starting in 2014, Christie has issued a series of contentious vetoes, striking down bills that would have banned high-capacity magazines and that would have required law enforcement be notified when New Jersey residents sought to have their mental health records expunged while buying a gun.
Rebuffing overtures from Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman and gun-control activist, Christie sent back to the Legislature a bill that would have made it simpler for courts to strip domestic violence offenders of their firearms, and asked that it pass broader domestic violence prevention legislation instead.
When Newtown families sought another meeting with Christie to discuss the high-capacity magazine ban, he declined, saying the ink on his veto was already dry.
State Assemblyman Jack M. Ciattarelli, a Republican from Somerset County who recently joined Democrats in an unsuccessful effort to override one of Christie’s vetoes, said the governor had plainly adjusted his position on guns as he has pursued national office. Ciattarelli, who is considering a run for governor in 2017, said that New Jersey’s gun laws remained strict and that he had not seen Christie “do anything to try to tear that down.”
“I understand that he may have to tack to the right as he runs for president,” Ciattarelli said. “There is a difference between running for governor of New Jersey and running for President of the United States.”
Where in his first term, Christie used his clemency powers in just one gun-transport case, involving Aitken, he has recently pardoned a half-dozen more out-of-state gun owners for carrying their weapons through New Jersey in violation of state law.
In 2014, Christie’s acting attorney general, John J. Hoffman, issued a directive to local prosecutors urging them to avoid imposing punitive prison sentences on out-of-state gun owners who move legal weapons through New Jersey.
Christie’s recalibration on guns reached its climactic point in June of 2015, when he issued an executive order creating a commission on New Jersey’s process for issuing gun permits. Shedding the technocratic language of his first-term veto message, Christie hailed the value of the Second Amendment in florid terms, and warned that state law must not infringe on “the lawful exercise of a fundamental constitutional right”.
Instructing Hoffman to streamline the granting of gun permits, Christie wrote that state law must “reflect the appropriate level of government regulation of this fundamental, individual right to self-protection.”
Christie has described Hoffman and his commission on gun permits as acting independently of his office. But gun-control supporters in New Jersey say the commission and the attorney general’s role are part of Christie’s abrupt shift to the right in the midst of a presidential campaign.
Loretta Weinberg, the majority leader in the state Senate and a longtime proponent of gun regulation, said Christie knew full well he had to use his executive powers to bypass the Democratic majority in the Legislature. “He can’t pass legislation, because you need a legislature to do that,” said Weinberg, a Democrat from Bergen County. “Did he do an executive order and create a commission, and tell the attorney general to implement it? Oh, yeah.”

Rico says he'll take converts to the Second Amendment where and how he can get 'em... (And there's armor-piercing ammunition, but there's no such thing as a 'armor-piercing rifle'...