Progressives love
to ridicule Americans who are concerned that their Second Amendment rights are
being threatened by a gun control-obsessed Obama administration. “No one is
coming for your precious guns,” the hoplophobes taunt. “We just want
commonsense gun laws.” Except that the pursuit of “commonsense gun laws,” which
already exist, is just a smokescreen – President Obama and his crew really are
coming for your precious guns.
Obama has made it
no secret that he intends to push hard for stricter gun control in his final
stretch in office. He emphasized that determination by appearing to be overcome
with emotion when discussing the Sandy Hook shooting in a speech on gun
control on January 4. That tearful moment – staged or not – spoke powerfully
to his fan base, because leftists are all about feelings rather than
facts; they feel for the children lost to gun violence, and if you object
to “commonsense gun laws” then you are obviously a heartless right-winger who doesn’t
care if children die. Never mind that the measures they want to implement not
only would not have prevented most mass shootings, but – like the impotency of
“gun-free zones” – they are more likely to prevent law-abiding gun owners from
defending themselves and their loved ones from mass shooters.
Just prior to that speech,
Obama issued executive actions expanding background checks on people buying
firearms online or at gun shows. “This is a dangerous level of executive
overreach, and the country will not stand for it,” Speaker
Paul Ryan responded. “The president is at minimum subverting the
legislative branch, and potentially overturning its will.”
Also at the beginning of the
year, the Obama administration finalized
a rule allowing health care providers to report
the names of mentally ill patients to an FBI firearms background check system.
Now watch the definition of “mentally ill” begin to expand to include any
belief or behavior that the left would like to stamp out – fervent adherence to
the Constitution, homeschooling, and climate change “denial,” for example –
enabling the government to categorize those gun owners as mentally ill and
disarm them.
That’s not all. The Washington Examiner
announced that Obama plans to build a new gun control
force of 430 agents, more than eight times the size of the team of commandos he
is sending to the Middle East to take on ISIS.
And yet in a
televised townhall meeting a few days later, Obama treated concerns about gun
control overreach as paranoia. CNN moderator
Anderson Cooper asked the President about worries that his administration wants
to seize all firearms as a precursor to imposing martial law. He blamed that
notion on the National Rifle Association (NRA) and others who worry that “somebody's
going to come grab your guns.”
Obama dismissed
that concern as crazy talk. “Yes, that is a conspiracy,” he said, then added
unconvincingly: “I'm only going to be here for another year. When would I have
started on this enterprise?”
Actually, the legal
groundwork for that enterprise has long been underway, and it is picking up
momentum, especially in California, which is always on the cutting edge of
progressive lunacy. Already this month, three separate gun
control bills attempting to categorize just about every firearm as an “assault
weapon” have been introduced in California, which already has the strictest gun
laws in the country and nothing to show for it except increasingly fed-up,
law-abiding gun owners.
Senate Bill
880, authored by Democrat Senators Isadore Hall III and Steve Glazer, would
change the definition of “assault weapon” to include any semi-automatic,
centerfire rifle, or even semi-automatic handgun that does not have a “fixed
magazine” but has any one of a list of “evil features.” The bill defines
“fixed magazine” as one that “cannot be removed without disassembly of the
firearm action.” This would include potentially millions of firearms, including
handguns, that would then need to be registered as “assault weapons” with the
Department of Justice.
“Senate Bill 880 is
another bill representative of the gun control frenzy we’re seeing from
big-city Democrats these days,” says Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms
Policy Coalition. “Legislators like Hall and Glazer absolutely want to take
your guns one bill at a time.”
That goes for California’s fifteen-year-old
Unsafe Handgun Act, which includes a roster of handguns that meet the state’s increasingly
stringent safety requirements; that roster is
getting gradually smaller. The Calguns Foundation estimates that “at the
current rate the number of approved handguns will dwindle to practically zero
within the next six years… leaving a state of some 38 million unable to
purchase new semi-automatic handguns.”
As Eugene Volokh puts
it at The Washington Post,
calls for bans on the sale or home possession of semiautomatic weapons in general
are increasing. “These aren’t calls for restricting supposedly narrow
categories of guns that are allegedly used predominantly by criminals,” he
writes. “These are calls for banning the sorts of guns that tens of millions of
law-abiding Americans have in their homes.”
California Attorney
General and anti-gun extremist Kamala Harris recently announced that over the
last two years her Department had “doubled the average number of guns seized
annually.” She is now backing a separate
bill
that would require all rifles sold in the state to have permanently fixed
magazines. “The devastation wrought by gun violence on innocent victims,
children and families in this country, is an international embarrassment,”
Harris said in a
statement.
International
embarrassment? Here is something the internationalist left doesn’t understand:
what the rest of the world thinks about American guns is irrelevant. The rest
of the world is not America. No other country has or even understands our
Constitutionally-guaranteed Second Amendment right. So no other country’s
opinion matters.
The leftist media
too like the idea of drastic anti-gun measures. Last December The New York
Times posted a front-page op-ed for the first time since 1920. “End the Gun
Epidemic in America” proposed reducing the number of firearms “drastically —
eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.” As for the Second
Amendment: “No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation”:
Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly
modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition,
must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in
a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those
kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
The NRA is trying
to counter the left’s anti-gun hysteria. For example, the organization has
recently partnered with my friend Amelia Hamilton, a conservative blogger
and author of the Growing Patriots series of children’s books,
to produce a series of amusing fairy tales reimagined to show what might happen
if some of the hapless characters like Hansel and Gretel were trained in the
safe use of firearms. “Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun),” for example, depicts an armed Red and her
armed grandmother successfully defending themselves against the Big Bad Wolf. The Huffington
Post
huffed and puffed that by doing so, the NRA is trying to put guns into the
hands of children.
HuffPost also
complains that in the Little Red Riding Hood tale, “the NRA doesn’t explore
what would happen if the Big Bad Wolf showed up at the door wielding a firearm
himself.” Well, what if he did? All the more reason for Little Red and her
grandmother to have their own firepower to defend themselves – that’s why a handgun
is called “the great equalizer.” But the left likes to believe that good guys
with guns are inept, untrained, and a danger to themselves and others, so
having a gun for self-defense only invites more potential for harm.
In the
aforementioned townhall meeting, for example, a rape victim confronted Obama
about his gun control measures and said she would never allow herself or her
family to be victimized again. Here is the President’s condescending response:
There are always questions as to whether or
not having a firearm in the home protects you from that kind of violence… What
is true is that you have to be pretty well-trained in order to fire a weapon
against someone who is assaulting you and catches you by surprise. What is also
true is always that possibility that firearm in the home leads to a tragic
accident.
Translation: unless
you’re a Navy SEAL, you can’t be trusted with a handgun to protect yourself.
You’ll just end up hurting yourself or a loved one.
In any case, our
Constitutional right to own firearms ultimately isn’t about self-defense, or even
hunting; it’s about Americans defending ourselves against a tyrannical
government. The fact that gun and ammunition sales as well as NRA memberships
have soared since Obama took office is a clear indication of just how concerned
Americans are that we are potentially facing just such a threat from the Obama
administration and a possible future Clinton administration.
Candidate Hillary
Clinton is, if anything, prepared as President to go even further to remove
guns from American society. She has spoken favorably of the possibility of
initiating something here like the Australian mandatory gun buyback program. And
yet she has ridiculed
the NRA for believing that the gun rights organization is the only thing keeping
“the black helicopters from landing in the front yard and people’s guns being
seized.”
Hillary, who
travels with a phalanx of armed guards, can mock all she likes, but if she,
Obama, and the radical left continue pushing this issue, they will discover
that, like Brooke Shields and
her Calvin Klein jeans, Americans won’t let anything come between them
and their guns. If it comes to a showdown over gun confiscation, American gun
owners will have a firm answer for the government: Molon labe.
From FrontPage Mag, 1/24/16
