Rand Paul and Voting Rights

I really liked this Jamelle Bouie post on Rand Paul's speech at Howard University. But to understand some of the current political alignments in America, its worth comparing Paul's stances on voting rights and gun rights. Here he is on voting rights (via Dave Weigel):

Paul tried to explain the larger context—something a Howard student, who has to take an African-American studies course in order to graduate, might have known already. "It's important to know the history of what happened," said Paul. "Democrats in the South were very, very harsh. They did have tests at the polls." But "I think if you liken using a driver's license to a literacy test, you demean the horror of what happened in the '40s and the '50s—maybe from 1910 to 1960s in the South. It was horrific. No American is favor of that. No Republican is in favor of that. But showing your driver's license to have an honest election? I don't think that's unreasonable." (emphasis mine)

Here he is on gun rights:

I oppose legislation that undermines Americans' constitutional right to bear arms. I worry that legislation mandating more regulations on law-abiding citizens will lead to an infringement on the ability to exercise constitutional rights without being subject to government surveillance.

When it comes to the right to bear arms, any regulation that potentially limits the ability of individuals to acquire guns is suspect and viewed as infringing on the constitutional right to bear arms. But when it comes to voting, he just doesn't have the same level of concern, and applies a more pragmatic "reasonableness" test. 

Now the reverse is certainly true, Democrats care more about the right to vote than the right to bear arms. But that is (in part) why groups like African-Americans support the Democrats in such large numbers. African-Americans really care about the right to vote and are very sensitive (for valid and obvious historical reasons) to legislation--that is facially race-neutral--being used as a tool of disenfranchisement. Rand Paul (and Republicans generally) don't have the same concerns, and you can see that from the pragmatic argument he is making above. At the same time, the core constituencies of the Republican party are really worried about their guns being taken away by the government, so much so that they oppose a lot of pragmatic efforts to reduce gun violence. 

If Rand Paul wants to attract African-American voters to the Republican party, while maintaining his libertarian ideology, he need to apply the same level of concern to voting rights as he does to gun rights.