Another Request for Obama Questions, This Time Without the Venom

Really? Is President Obama really going to allow the United Nations to grab our guns? Does he really have disdain for our armed forces? Is our Commander-in-Chief really a two-bit, unpatriotic, closet-Muslim “moron”?

Those are some of the more tame comments you’ll find here when we asked you to pose questions for President Obama.

It’s no secret that Obama has polarized much of America, and this fall’s presidential campaign promises to get even more divisive before it’s over on Nov. 6. So maybe we should have anticipated some of the anger and hysteria that came out of our request for questions for the President.

But I’d rather think that many readers didn’t quite know the context for our request. Our October issue of Outdoor Life is devoted to election coverage from a sportsman’s perspective, and we have arranged with both the Obama and the Romney campaigns to submit a number of reader questions for the candidates to answer.

We editors have plenty of questions of our own, but we want to submit your questions, and work to get answers to the issues that matter most to America’s sportsmen: 2nd Amendment rights; federal funding for wildlife management; whether the next president will double down on domestic energy production, and how that might affect our hunting and fishing grounds.

But here’s the thing: we aren’t going to submit a bunch of inarticulate, disrespectful questions, to either candidate. To do so is not only unproductive, but it also confirms to those who are inclined to dismiss sportsmen that we are a gang of uninformed rustics. We emphatically are not, and here’s your chance to prove it.

Please submit questions that are answerable. They can be hard, harsh, unvarnished, and even provocative, but they need to be respectful and with wide enough interest that a presidential candidate should feel obligated to answer it. We intend to run your question (and the candidates’ answers), along with your name and hometown, in our October issue and here on outdoorlife.com.

If you are uncomfortable posting your question here, you are welcome to email me at olletters@bonniercorp.com.

As I said in my request for questions for Romney, it’s fine to use this forum to air your presidential preference, but please ask your question before you anticipate the answer.