GREAT VALLEY — State Senate candidate Dan Brown started getting phone calls last week questioning his commitment to the Second Amendment’s protections for gun owners.
Brown, the Democratic candidate in the new 57th Senate District, asked where the callers — including some friends of his — had gotten their information.
It seems the executive director of the New York Firearms Association singled out Brown and another Democrat on the association’s Facebook page, calling him “an enemy of the people” for his Second Amendment views.
“I’ve been a gun owner and hunter all my life,” Brown said.
Brown first tried to respond to the Firearms Association’s “ridiculous charges,” but found he was blocked from the site. He saw one of the names of a person who liked the posting: state Sen. George Borrello, the Republican incumbent and Brown’s opponent.
Aaron Dorr, executive director of the Firearm Association, praises Borrello’s leadership on protecting Second Amendment rights in the 60-second spot — but not Brown.
“Daniel Brown supports the entire radical left’s gun control agenda and he would be a yes vote on their plans to mandate mental health exams and civil liability insurance on gun owners,” Dorr states in the video. Another video making the same charges against another Democratic Senate candidate was also posted.
“It’s an outright lie,” Brown said. “I have been getting Facebook messages and phone calls over this. To come out with this at the last minute. They don’t even know me. They are assuming because I’m on the Democratic line I must be against guns. It’s a script. It’s ridiculous.”
Brown is a former longtime National Rifle Association member.
The next day, Saturday, a campaign story and photo of Borrello at the Olean Rod and Gun Club talking about the Second Amendment appeared in the Times Herald.
Brown turned to his Facebook page to dispel the notion that he was anti-gun. He asked his friends to share his postings.
One featured a photo of Brown as a high school senior in Ellicottville, where he won marksmanship trophies. He posted: “Today I was labeled a Left Wing gun-control extremist by an organization I’ve never met with or a leader I’ve never spoken to.”
His first gun was a .22-caliber rifle his late father purchased for him. Another photo shows Brown’s stepson holding a rifle over a deer he shot on the Brown’s Great Valley dairy farm land.
Brown said he has some concerns over the New York’s gun laws, but the place to start to change those laws is the State Legislature, where Brown would be in the majority if elected.
“I was more of a marksman than a hunter, but I hunt on my property and let others hunt there,” Brown said.
“It’s frustrating,” he said of the last-minute charges by someone he doesn’t know and has never spoken with. “I’ve done nothing but take the high road in this campaign.”
