Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced Thursday that the Senate will “take a pause” and return to consideration of gun legislation at a later date.
But they are not stopping.
“Yesterday, President Obama said it was a shameful day for the Senate, and it probably was, I agree. But we should make no mistake: This debate is not over, in fact this fight is just beginning,” Reid said on the Senate floor Thursday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday said passage of tougher gun controls is “inevitable,” projecting optimism less than 24 hours after the Senate voted down legislation central to President Obama’s strategy to reduce gun violence.
“It’s a matter of time,” Pelosi said Thursday during a press briefing in the Capitol. “It might be inconceivable to the NRA that this might happen; it’s inevitable to us.”
The anti-rights leftist gun-grabber movement will always push for tyranny, and will not stop.
“Something must be done, because that’s what the American people expect and what they deserve,” she said. “We’re just not taking no for an answer.”
Pelosi and her anti-rights ilk will never give up, they will push to disarm us, and they do not stop. But she will be given no for an answer. When she refuses to take no for an answer and inflicts her whims upon us, she fully becomes a tyrant.
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Andrew Wilkow today noted that a simple example of how the Second Amendment works is a metaphor with a man as the government and a woman as the people. The woman is armed.
The man asks why the woman needs a gun, and says she shouldn’t have it. She says “I need it so you won’t rape me”. The man angrily assures her that he will not rape her. “Then you will never have a problem with my gun,” answers the woman.
The Manchin-Toomey “wrote it on our yacht” background check-prelude to registration bill went down 54-46, failing to get the 60 votes to pass.
The AWB goes down 40/60. Remember a few weeks ago when Reid claimed they didn’t have even 40 votes for it? He wasn’t kidding. They barely ended up with that much. It’ll be a few minutes before the roll is up, but assuming Republicans voted against it unanimously, that means no fewer than 15 Democrats joined them.
It’s a good start to stalling the tyrannical aspirations of government.
Today’s vote is a damning indictment of the stranglehold that special interests have on Washington. More than 40 U.S. senators would rather turn their backs on the 90 percent of Americans who support comprehensive background checks than buck the increasingly extremist wing of the gun lobby.
Why is it that anti-gun tyrants love using the number 90% so much? They make up numbers saying guns are going to Mexico at a rate of 90%, and they claim 90% of people support draconian checks as a step towards registration, confiscation, and obliteration of gun rights. Do they just love targeting minorities of 10%? Oh, that’s right, they do.
Soon he’ll fade back into obscurity once the schtick of having a lying Brit who threatened violence and lectures down to Americans wears off. Oh, and it has.
President Obama angrily blamed the defeat Wednesday of his centerpiece gun-control proposal on lies spread by the National Rifle Association, calling it “a pretty shameful day for Washington.”
“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” Mr. Obama said in the White House rose garden about 90 minutes after the vote. “It came down to politics.”
There’s also a certain type of projection on the left. They accuse others of lying while they do. The NRA warned of true objectives.
“They claimed that it would create some sort of big-brother gun registry, even though it did the opposite,” Mr. Obama said. “This pattern of spreading untruths … served a purpose. A minority in the U.S. Senate decided it wasn’t worth it. They blocked common-sense gun reforms, even while these families looked on from the Senate gallery. It’s not going to happen because 90 percent of Republicans just voted against that idea.”
Of necessity, to work, it had to create a big brother gun registry – which would be either an amendment or a future bill when this one was found. There was no secret that Democrats were pushing for a big-brother gun registry. But, as Levar Burton would say, don’t take my word for it – take NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer’s:
There’s that 90% statistic again, too. They just love it.
And again, the “families” are being led by Democrat propagandists. I say “families” because Mark Mattioli isn’t represented, nor are many other Newtown families who don’t hold the same opinions as those who are politically aligned and campaigning for the Democrats’ rights-control schemes.
“You’ve got to send the right people to Washington,” he told voters. “That requires strength and it requires persistence. I see this as just Round One. Sooner or later, we are going to get this right. The memories of these children demand it.”
The American people and those who’ve fought for liberty don’t want their tyranny.
We didsend the right people to Washington. We sent Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.
But do note what Obama said in there. The meaning is clear.
…requires strength and it requires persistence. I see this as just Round One. Sooner or later, we are going to get this…
He uses some of the Newtown families as props, and it seems many of them are willing props – but he doesn’t care about them any more than he cared about the hundreds of dead children in Mexico murdered by his Fast and Furious program.
And lastly, but not least, the Assault Weapons ban and the limitation on the size of magazines, let me say this as clearly as I can: this is just the beginning.
… the Newtown families, political novices just a few months ago, are proving to be savvy, effective advocates as they promote the gun legislation that has finally begun to move through the Senate. The families are well-educated, and many are well-off. They have been polished and sharp on TV. They’re mostly non-political, but quite accomplished in their own fields. With access to money and media, they’re using persistence, visibility — and, most all, their unique moral authority — to help prod Senate action. They also have their own lobbyists — several of them, in fact.
They’re pushing anti-rights legislation. Maybe some among them think it’ll “save children”, but as I illustrated last time, the things they’re asking for wouldn’t have prevented Sandy Hook. They are pushing for exactly what anti-gun groups have been pushing for for years, though.
They’re pushing for something that is a step towards widespread disarmament, emotionally pushing for things that they feel are so critical that they “must” be done, emotionally pushing for things so hard that “now is the time” before anyone starts to look at the bigger picture calmly and at the long-term implications of what happens when citizens are left disarmed.
Then there are the comments by their Democrat political handlers:
“These are smart, articulate people, who don’t have a scintilla of Washington about them,” said Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, which has been helping the families navigate D.C. “But they virtually cannot be denied a meeting. There are not many groups of people that can get a meeting with any senator they want, whenever they want.”
He’s a lying about his group. They Democrats came in and the families have been embraced by the Democrat party and anti-rights, anti-gun citizen disarmament groups as the heartwrenching emotional story they need to use to acquire more power. There’s keeping rights, restoring rights, and loss of rights. They’re pushing for loss of citizen rights, and they’ve got leftist Democrats guiding them the whole way. There is nothing “third way” about Bennett’s group, either – they’re a partisan Democrat group used to target low-information moderates. Their notable members include such partisan leftist Democrats as Kathleen “F the Hatch Act” Sebelius and Ken “Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever” Salazar.
He is right about the demands they can make. They can portray anyone who rejects them as devoid of sympathy, of being a cruel monster who wants dead children. They and their handlers are exploiting the respect we offer the grieving to push their agenda.
A group of experienced operators is guiding these families — to a degree that has irritated some pro-gun Republicans. An uber-strategist for the families is Ricki Seidman, a familiar face at the top levels of Democratic politics ever since she ran the Clinton-Gore campaign’s famous 1992 war room. Seidman, a senior principal with TSD Communications, was Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director during the 2008 general election, and helped the White House win confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotmayor.
Bennett’s Third Way connected the families with a lobbying firm, Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, that set up more than 25 Hill meetings this week alone. And Lara Bergthold, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns now with Griffin, Schein in Los Angeles, is helping to manage the media onslaught.
These are political operatives using the families as props (at best). It would be nice to believe that the families in their grief are simply pawns in this, but then there are comments like this:
“This is now part of my day-to-day life, and it is a full-time job to me and my family,” Jillian Soto said. “To be honest with you, I still don’t know how the mechanics in Washington work. I still find it absurd that senators can even say my sister wasn’t murdered with an assault rifle. She was shot multiple times in front of her kids, and that’s not OK to me. It’s not OK to most Americans.” (As her raw language indicates, Soto is working with Bloomberg’s group.)
An assault rifle is select-fire, so no, she wasn’t murdered with an assault rifle. Those are highly restricted and have been since the GCA of 1934. The killer did not have an assault rifle. So no, she wasn’t. Soto’s indignation is intended to get you mad at pro-rights senators for questioning her – with her dead sister as a moral bulwark, she can scream and it’s considered callous and heartless and horrific to correct her. The constant push against the rights of citizens, ignoring the actual data, is now, to her, “part of my day-to-day life and it is a full time job to me and my family”. She’s going to press to restrict your rights full time based on the acts of a madman – a madman who would never be stopped by the solutions she champions, and if her solutions pass, a lone madman who in time will be replaced by an administration of madmen – as history shows us again and again.
This is a very clever political movement being handled by the Democrats. They’re going to dance in the blood of those children as long as they can to get more power.
What started as a support group is now a lobbying force unlike any other to descend on Capitol Hill. The family members typically begin their pitch to senators softly, telling the story of the child that they lost. They gently say they could not have imagined themselves in this position, but they’re doing it to honor the memory of their children. They say they’re supporters of the Second Amendment, and just want to have a conversation.
They don’t want a conversation. That’s a lie, just the same as their “I’m not racist, I have a black friend” claim of support of the Second Amendment. They have demands.
But there’s nothing subtle about the way some of them conclude their visits: by leaving behind a color card with a photo of their slain relative. Nicole Hockley, who introduced President Barack Obama in Hartford this week, hands senators a card with three photos of her son Dylan, who was 6 when he was gunned down. One frame shows him grinning, in a Superman shirt.
“Dylan Hockley, 3/8/06 – 12/14/12,” the card says. “Honor his life. Stand with us for change. NOW IS THE TIME.”
“Now is the time” is the kind of fierce urgent emotional demand that stifles debate. The entire purpose is to generate an emotional response and demand NOW NOW NOW without stopping to question why or what is being done.
The universal background checks they want, the universal registration that background checks require to be complete, the denial to citizens to actually bear, trade, or acquire arms, the denial of citizens to own modern arms – none of that would’ve prevented the murders at Sandy Hook. But they demand action “NOW NOW NOW” because that stifles debate. They demand “NOW NOW NOW” and any question of why, or what these things will change is stopped by bringing up their dead children. The argument for immediacy and the argument for necessity are well-known pleas of tyrants, and are the hallmark of liberal fascism, where something must be done for your own good right NOW… Again, if you take the time to ask about why, or what the long-term effects are (say as in “we need to pass it to see what’s in it” Obamacare), you’re shouted down.
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I’m a veteran. When I write things like “for those who’ve fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know”, I mean it. It’s not a cliche, it’s a reality. There are a lot of people, myself included, who fought for our rights and our Constitution. Our nation is unique in that we don’t swear an allegiance to a president or a king or an autocrat. We swear our oath to a piece of paper. We swear it to a contract made by free people to create a government that serves us. We swear our oaths to that Constitution and the protection of those natural rights it guarantees.
The natural right to self defense against oppression, against tyranny large and small, whether it be a dictatorial government or a lone criminal, is something that many men and women have fought and died for. The forces against the natural right to self defense are those who would be our masters, who demand autocracy and think they know best and should tell us how to live – tyrants.
The demand that we surrender rights that our forefathers and sometimes our friends fought and died for is unacceptable.
Those rights were fought for, and men and women died for those rights, so that people back home could be safe with the protections those natural rights provide. They the honored dead and we the veterans did not fight for those rights so that those rights could be hastily abandoned to a political cry of “now is the time”.
No. Never is the time.
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The Newtown families, if truly driven by grief, will still have my sympathy, but what they demand in the name of children and family who would not even be protected by the unconstitutional laws they demand is anathema to those who have served and those who remember our honored dead who fought for those rights. The contract that our honored dead and we the veterans signed was to protect those rights. Against more than two hundred years of adversaries within and without we’ve fought to preserve those rights with millions of men and women who’ve served and hundreds of thousands who’ve died in service – all to protect those rights.
The emotional demand that one tragedy, manipulated by fiendish politicians for their own power and demand to control the American people, mean that we the citizens give up the rights bought and paid for in blood by our honored dead and our veterans and often ourselves as veterans is one that can only be answered with a resounding no.
Today those demanding the surrender of our rights and our arms do so with words, because we have arms. With history as our guide, when we have no arms, they won’t use words anymore. This is again why we have fought for those rights.
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There may be solutions to limit the horrors in the world, but abrogating the right of self defense that is intrinsic to the contract of our safe and secure society is not an option. We may still have individual madmen and criminals, but we have no tyrants here – our tragedies are counted in ones and tens but never in millions.
Stalin famously said that a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. To a dictator’s perspective, he’s right.
To a free man’s perspective and to a patriot perspective, that’s not the case. A single death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a million individual tragedies. The twenty-six individual tragedies at Sandy Hook do not outweigh the incomprehensible human suffering and death endured by millionsof individual citizens who fought so that we could live free covered by the protections of the natural rights our Constitution provides. The willing and also unwilling sacrafices of those millions of individual tragedies and sufferings thus prevented millions more individual tragedies. Those who fought and died knew that they fought for that piece of paper and the rights it guaranteed.
The actions of one madman and the desire to correct those twenty-six tragedies can be understood. They are fathomable. The rows upon rows of graves of those who fought to prevent greater tragedies are often beyond comprehension and thus some folks can miss the far bigger picture. They aren’t seen as a million individual tragedies and lives of suffering undertaken for a larger cause to ensure greater rights that protect us all – those lost lives are right in front of us and yet some forget both those lost lives and the payments in blood they made on liberties.
Each one is an individual tragedy.
Each individual tragedy was undertaken as an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
And yet there are those who would still trade away that liberty bought at so dear a price for temporary security… and they would soon find themselves with neither.
One of the gun-grabbing members of Michael Bloomberg’s organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, recently found himself trying to lure a man into a sexual encounter through the liberal use of alcohol. When the charm and alcohol didn’t do the trick, James ‘Jay’ Schiliro (R) decided to go a different route – firing a handgun into a wall in an attempt at intimidation.
The mayor who, as the title suggests, is against illegal guns, was forced to hand over his firearm collection, and has been charged with several crimes.
Yup.
According to the Examiner, Schiliro was one of 600 mayors who recently signed a letter asking the U.S. Senate to enact tougher gun laws.
You know, the kind that would keep a drunken mayor from demanding gay sex with a handgun. Is that anywhere in President Obama’s executive orders?
Of course people like Bloomberg need guns, and of course other ruling class tyrants like Schiliro need guns. Some just choose to exercise their power in different ways.
That’s New York City’s nasty little fascist mayor, the ersatz and erstwhile “Republican” who used the party to sneak into Gracie Mansion in the wake of the Giuliani administration’s successful war on street crime, and then double-crossed the GOP in his bald-faced but successful attempt to subvert term limits, lecturing David Gregory in his Boston honk that he knows what’s best for New Yorkers — and us.
Yes, it’s the Soda Jerk himself, tossing his pint-sized weight around as he attempts to remain politically viable after his reign as the successor to such corrupt and incompetent wretches as Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Abe Beame and David Dinkins mercifully comes to an end. Let’s unpack a little of what the Terror of Tinytown had to say.
We’re not banning anything. All we’re saying is, we want to show you just how big the cup is. If you want 32 ounces, take two cups to your seat. If you want 64, carry four. But our hope is, if you only take one, you won’t go back.
If you believe that, Bloomberg has a bridge to Brooklyn to sell you. And to which the only proper response — the one that until New York turned into a city of Upper West Side conformist sheep he would have justly received — is (to quote Kurt Schlichter) “bite me.”
It’s a good post, worth reading, though he had to go back and update it to make note of Bloomberg’s new $12,000,000 anti-gun ad campaign, all for your own good.
It’s a campaign against individual autonomy and the freedom to live your life – all for your own good.
“I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom”
I found myself asking the same questiosn Allahpundit did before even reading it – who in the bloody hell is “we”? Who is this “we” that has the authority to stomp all over citizen rights? Who is this “we” and how did they get this power? Who is this “we” and how is this justified? Who is this “we”, who the heck do they think they are, and do they really need to be shown the consequences of stepping on US citizen rights?
The $12 million ad blitz targeting senators wavering on gun control will be just the beginning, Mayor Bloomberg warned Sunday.
“I have a responsibility … to try to make this country safer,” Bloomberg said on “Meet the Press” when asked if he’d spend big-time in next year’s elections to target the National Rifle Association and members of Congress for opposing gun restrictions.
To make this country safer for tyrants. He’s a big city billionaire who’s decided to go out and drop millions of dollars to destroy your rights. Feel safer yet?
“If I can do that by spending some money, and taking the NRA from being the only voice to being one of the voices, so the public can really understand the issues, then I think my money will be well spent and I think I have an obligation to do that,” he said.
“If 90% of the public wants something, and their representatives vote against that, common sense says they are going to have a price to pay for that,” Bloomberg said, referring to the proportion of people polls show support universal background checks.
The surveys that came up with those numbers are sketchy at best. When you explain to people exactly how “universal background checks” don’t work, and do fail, and do lead to registration and confiscation, then people start to see why there is still a sizeable group that opposes “universal background checks“.
Bloomberg said the country must not lose the opportunity to crack down on guns offered by the Newtown massacre. “It would be a great tragedy for this country and for tens of thousands of lives if (the opportunity) is lost,” he said.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. This is an opportunity to seize on emotion, to act in the moment, to do things they couldn’t normally do because heads aren’t clear yet. People haven’t bothered to look at the long-term effects, or even the short-term effects, and how none of the actions Bloomberg or his henchmen would take has anything to do with safety, but has everything to do with control. When people do look at it, they see that none of the actions would’ve prevented the murders in Connecticut, and the only people impacted are those who do nothing wrong.
Also, that story carries a couple of nifty visuals of media bias. Contrast this picture of Bloomberg:
To this of Wayne LaPierre:
Gee, media bias much?
For examples of Bloomberg’s new ads, we have “Responsible” and “Family”, in which a scruffy bearded guy dressed like a hunter tells us he’s a hunter and talks about family and things, all the while pointing a shotgun at waist-level and with his fingers in, on, and around the trigger and trigger guard; or, as Mary Katherine Ham at HotAir rather eloquently puts it:
Forgive me if I don’t feel like giving up my rights as a law-abiding citizen to a billionaire mayor who can’t instruct his recruits to keep their booger hooks off the bang switch.
Seriously? You expect us to buy that crap? With personal crusades against soda, guns, smoking, trans fats, and pretty much anything fun, you expect us to believe any of this crap?
Sorry, not buying it. And there aren’t many people who will be, either.
Should it be a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire ex-convicts? Yes, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently released 20,000 convoluted words of regulatory “guidance” to direct businesses to hire more felons and other ex-offenders.
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Most businesses perform criminal background checks on job applicants, but the EEOC guidance frowns on such checks and creates new legal tripwires that could spark federal lawsuits. One EEOC commissioner who opposed the new policy, Constance Barker, warned in April that “the only real impact the new Guidance will have will be to scare business owners from ever conducting criminal background checks. . . . The Guidance tells them that they are taking a tremendous risk if they do.”
If a background check discloses a criminal offense, the EEOC expects a company to do an intricate “individualized assessment” that will somehow prove that it has a “business necessity” not to hire the ex-offender (or that his offense disqualifies him for a specific job). Former EEOC General Counsel Donald Livingston, in testimony in December to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, warned that employers could be considered guilty of “race discrimination if they choose law abiding applicants over applicants with criminal convictions” unless they conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ex-offender’s recent life history.
It is difficult to overstate the EEOC’s zealotry on this issue. The agency is demanding that one of Mr. Livingston’s clients—the Freeman Companies, a convention and corporate events planner—pay compensation to rejected job applicants who lied about their criminal records.
The biggest bombshell in the new guidelines is that businesses complying with state or local laws that require employee background checks can still be targeted for EEOC lawsuits.
The article goes on to note that a security company that guards nuclear facilities was sued by the Obama EEOC in 2010 for refusing to hire a twice-convicted thief – even though state laws said the security company isn’t allowed to hire criminals.
Background checks for criminals going into a job where they’d be armed guards? Bad. Background checks, registration, permits and confiscation against joe citizen when he wants to exercise his rights? Good.
This leftist-progressive modern liberal agenda does invariably elevate the failed, evil and wrong at the expense of the good and successful (just as Evan Sayet said).
When President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, the biggest question he’ll face will be how to get an ambitious second-term agenda through a divided Congress.
The answer: Go around it.
On climate change, gun control, gay rights, and even immigration, the White House has signaled a willingness to circumvent lawmakers through the use of presidential power. Already, plans are being laid to unleash new executive orders, regulations, signing statements and memorandums designed to push Obama’s programs forward and cement his legacy, according to administration aides and allies.
“The big things that we need to get done, we can’t wait on,” said White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer. “If we can take action, we will take action.”
Congress is unpopular because there’s no face to congress other than that of the whiny weakling John Boehner. The right hates congress because they’re constantly surrendering, and the left hates congress because the right in congress isn’t surrendering enough. The low information voter just hears complaints about congress and believes it, rather than looking at their own representative.
There is no congressional media office out trying to paint a picture of congress as a benevolent deliberative body in the same way that Obama has his numerous official and unofficial propaganda wings. Half the country that supports Obama’s agenda (until they find themselves targeted) represents a great amount of support. Half the country that supports their half of congress doesn’t support the other half of congress, so popularity remains low.
And in this void, with the elected representatives of the people both hated and demonized, comes that powerful figure to simply work around them. Checks and balances exist for a reason, and working around those checks and balances – imposed by free people who vote for their representatives to represent them – is someone who will simply make things happen. There is a certain allure to a “man of action” who will make decisions while others deliberate – it’s those exciting, dynamic “men of action” who seize power that make for compelling stories. A president who merely presides and works to uphold the rule of law and execute the orders issued by the citizens through congress isn’t as fascinating as a heroic figure who goes it alone and tells off the yammering talkers.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama kept up pressure on Congress Monday to pass tough new gun legislation, seeking help from law enforcement leaders in three communities that have suffered the horrors of mass shootings.
At a White House meeting, Obama said that no group is more important in the gun debate and he said he recognizes the issue “elicits a lot of passion all across the country.” But Obama also said he believes Congress will respond to appeals from police.
“Hopefully if law enforcement officials who are dealing with this stuff every single day can come to some basic consensus in terms of steps that we need to take,” he said, “Congress is going to be paying attention to them, and we’ll be able to make progress.”
Law enforcement leaders are bureaucrat politicians. They’re there to avoid liability and make decisions that will make sure they can retire. They take their oaths less seriously than their desire to lord over and control populations, because they’re used to lording over and controlling a police force, and see “the public” as something else to be controlled – and all of that lording over and controlling makes for a stable element for them to retire from.
Law enforcement leaders often do things that are illegal as well. One rather famous one was drug checkpoints inside the US in the case of Indianapolis v Edmond. The short short version is you can’t go violating the 4th Amendment “in the general interest of crime control”. Stopping everyone on the road and searching them for anything illegal may be effective, but it makes for a police state. A police state, to a police administrator, is an okay thing.
Keep in mind police already get special rights when it comes to the Second Amendment, whether active or retired. Some animals are more equal than others. There are good reasons for those statutes, and in free states they mirror what citizens can already do. In states ruled with iron fists, they give special privileges to the state enforcers.
San Diego Police Chief, William Lansdowne said in an interview that the implementation of new gun laws will take guns off the streets of America within a generation.
According to San Diego 6, Lansdowne said that it may take a generation but guns will eventually be taken off the streets through new laws like Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban:
“Chief Lansdowne, who plays an active role in the western region of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) association, said it may take a generation but guns will eventually be taken off the streets through new laws like Senator Diane Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban legislation. Some of the items his organization is addressing include; a ban on assault weapons, restricting high-capacity magazines, closing loopholes that allow firearm sales between private owners without background checks, and implementing much stricter background checks by using a comprehensive database.”
Ban modern guns, ban effective guns, ban citizens from selling to each other without begging permission of the state, and have the state simply deny everyone while tracking everyone for further confiscation. Shall not be infringed is meaningless to this bureaucrat cop.
Lansdowne called for tougher gun laws in an interview with KPBS, and praised President Obama for his initiative on gun control.
“I could not be more supportive of the president for taking the position he has,” he said.
“I think it’s courageous with the politics involved in this process. But I think it’s going to eventually make the country safer and certainly safer for my officers that have to respond to these calls.“
And there’s the key. As a bureaucrat, he thinks this will make the mob he lords over and controls safer. It puts the individual citizen at a disadvantage (especially the woman who now is given the “right” to fistfight her rapist). It also ignores that the police are not responsible for your safety. They can’t be everywhere at once, so they can’t be held accountable for your individual misfortune. But they can make you into a criminal if you fight back; and they can make you into a criminal who can’t own tools of self defense; or someone who they will prosecute later for using those tools to defend yourself. Police don’t stop crime. To quote the intro to Law & Order, the police investigate crime and district attorneys prosecute the offenders. Nowhere in there are you defended – you’re the body found by the jogger at the beginning of the episode.
The bureaucrat cop doesn’t care that the public is disarmed at all. He isn’t disarmed. You’re the one without the gun – not him. If he’s in law enforcement for too long, he gets that jaded “everyone sucks” mindset, wherein the only people who matter are cops, and everyone else is going to be a criminal sooner or later. That isn’t the purpose of the police in a free society.
Lansdowne believes that the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut weakened the gun lobby’s power and has opened the door for new gun control legislation.
“We broke the NRA,” Lansdowne said off-camera.
This would be the equivalent of him saying “within a generation, with Connor’s reforms, we should be able to stomp out any integrationist ideas…” and off-camera “we broke MLK”. And yes, I will keep right on going there – gun control is racist.
Lansdowne’s position on gun control appears to be in the minority among sheriffs across the nation, however.
As CNSNews.com previously reported, sheriffs from Florida to California have stated publicly that they will not comply with any new gun control measures proposed by the federal government.
That’s the good news. Sheriffs, unlike police chiefs, are ultimately accountable. They have elections to own up to, and voters to be responsible to. A police chief answers only to a mayor – and many mayors have used the Curley Effect to totally destroy their cities, leading to police chiefs who are simply their paramilitary functionaries. Most places, it takes more work to destroy a county than it does to destroy a city.
Something else that police chiefs as well as outright politicians will say are things like this line:
Still, one murder is one too many. One illegal gun is one too many, too, because when someone is murdered in New York City — although that happens much less frequently than in the past — odds are an illegal handgun was used.
Mind you in NYC, an “illegal gun” pretty much means any gun that isn’t owned by the police or political cronies of the mayor. But this is also a Broken Window Fallacy argument.
Due to all the peaceable people willing to surrender their rights for what they think will be safety, there are a lot more people who are harmed, hurt, assaulted, robbed, murdered, and raped because they lack tools to fight back. But these crime statistics that would be prevented with defensive gun usage never materialize. In the rest of the country, DGUs are overlooked because they are underreported – if a crime is deterred, there is nothing to report, and the citizen who deters it is unlikely to call the police just to be hassled for a DGU.
Taking the idea that “one murder is too many” into “so we must disarm all the citizens” means that there will be more murders. And the “odds are an illegal handgun was used” statement is because virtually all handguns in NYC are illegal. But Bloomberg and his lackeys, like all dictators, can never control a populace entirely. Prison guards work very hard to do so and know that it can’t be done. Bloomberg then takes the usual route of all dictators and claims it’s because his system isn’t implemented everywhere. The problem is there’s still freedom somewhere, and he must destroy it. Police chiefs already have a subjected population – their officers, and a subjected area – their city.
Actual officers’ groups often oppose gun control, as they are the ones answering the calls and going to see people who were unable to resist criminals. A few police chiefs also understand this, but the vocal ones, and the ones calling for gun control yesterday, today, and tomorrow, are those that hate that they can’t control everyone (thus destroying all risks and making their life easy).
ShortTimer
JBH
