Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday introduced a bill that would require background checks to be run on anyone buying explosive powder, a reaction to last week’s Boston Marathon bombing.
Reid introduced the bill, S. 792, for Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who has been out sick for much of the year. But in a press statement, Lautenberg said the Boston bombing shows that background checks are needed for explosive materials.
“It defies common sense that anyone, even a terrorist, can walk into a store in America and buy explosive powders without a background check or any questions asked,” Lautenberg said Tuesday. “Requiring a background check for an explosives permit is a small price to pay to ensure the safety of our communities.
Note the clever wordplay. What they want to ban is blackpowder, gunpowder, reloading supplies, and everything else associated with ammunition and firearms ownership. Frank Lautenberg is famous for being as anti-gun as they get. The shoddy attempt at avoiding saying “we want to ban gunpowder and disarm the citizenry” and instead saying “explosive powders” makes it sound like we’re getting attacked by Persian sorcerors.
If one were to look at it logically, they’d find that the Boston terrorists didn’t use gunpowder for ammunition, or black powder, or anything else related to guns. I’ve mentioned it before, but terrorists and US gun culture are mutually opposed. People in US gun culture are the type who either fancy themselves as someone who would stop terrorists… or are people who have stopped terrorists.
A New Hampshire fireworks store has told the FBI that it sold four-hundred dollars worth of fireworks in February to accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The gunpowder in fireworks is often used in bombs.
“He just wanted the biggest, loudest stuff we had in the store,” said Megan Kearns, the assistant manager of Phantom Fireworks, in an interview with ABC News affiliate WMUR.
So the proposed bill, which regulates only gun owners, and is only targeted at gun owners, would do absolutely nothing when it comes to what terrorists have done. Lautenberg’s bill exists only to harass gun owners and reloaders and destroy American gun culture. Firework gunpowder and ammunition gunpowder have been very different things for a long, long time now.
From the Hill:
Under current law, people can buy up to 50 pounds of explosive “black powder” with no background check, and can buy unlimited amounts of other explosive powders, such as “black powder substitute” and “smokeless powder.”
Lautenberg’s bill would require a background check for the purchase of any of these powders.
It would also let the attorney general stop the sale of explosives if a background check shows the applicant is a known or suspected terrorist, and if there is a belief the explosives will be used for terrorism.
He is going after gunpowder, not after what the bombers used. They bought fireworks and disassembled them. Lautenberg wants to destroy US gun culture one piece at a time.
It would also require a permit to make homemade explosives, and direct the government to study how to better trace the use of explosive powders.
So is Lautenberg that stupid or does he just think you are? Terrorists would try to get permits to make homemade explosives? Really?
There also seems to be a cultural component to this. I’m sure once he’s banned guns, next Lautenberg will be the type to want to ban fireworks, and leave all fireworks displays to specific fireworks-trained government-appointed authorities on fireworks who will handle that dangerous work and keep fireworks out of the hands of dangerous terrorists like you, so peons like you can celebrate International Workers Day and see the glorious fireworks of the state. Were he on a smaller scale, he’d be the type to ban fireworks for “the children” because some North Park kid got his hand blown off, leaving you with snakes and snap-pops.
He’s surely that kind of nanny-state asshole as well as dictator wannabe.
Part 1 here, mostly about food and people who want the government to dictate to them how they should eat.
And today, part 2, as we look at a Time Magazine piece titled “Tread on Me“.
America was born from resistance to tyranny, and our skepticism of authority is a healthy tradition. But we’re pretty free.
That’s good enough, right? We’re “pretty free”. It’s about time we move on in the Tytler Cycle and get back to bondage! Woo-hoo! Bondage! The state will make us free from responsibility and dangers of the world! They know what’s best for me!
the Don’t Tread on Me slippery-slopers on both ends of the political spectrum tend to forget that Big Government helps protect other important rights
Doesn’t work that way. This is a question of whether people believe in more or less government control. Americans believe in less government control, have traditionally always believed in less government control, and only ever believe in having government control them when they’ve been brainwashed and programmed.
But standby for incoming collectivist BS…
Like the right of a child to watch a marathon or attend first grade without getting massacred—or, for that matter, the right to live near a fertilizer factory without it blowing up your house.
There are no such rights. To be free from danger is not only impossible, but even reduction of danger is not a right – it something paid for by someone’s work – whether it be the soldier, policeman, or factory manager and safety staff.
I guess you could call me a statist.
How about one who will lick the hand that feeds with his chains resting upon him, and someone who I would wish posterity would forget was my countryman?
Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither.
You forgot the last part – they deserve neither – and will lose both.
But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.
There are no such rights as to be free from danger – and there can be none.
This kind of high-minded utopian fantasy was cranked out back in the 1930s and 1940s by the FDR administration. There were even oaths made to defend the freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Photo by ShortTimer
It is, by itself, nonsense.
Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
You cannot legislate industrial accidents out of existence (unless you obliterate industry entirely – which is a goal of the left as a tool to fight Manbearpig).
You cannot legislate madmen out of existence. You can forcibly disarm the populace, and leave them at the mercy of governmental ruler madmen like maniac cop Chris Dorner. You can leave them at the mercy of government to make them “safe”.
You do all of those by destroying liberty, something that high-minded collectivist utopians have done in the past to construct human nature into what they want it to be – to “mold the world closer to their hearts’ desire”.
And it almost always looks the same in the end.
In contrast to those statist desires, you can safeguard the liberty of 6 year-old Charlotte Bacon. You need a rough man ready to do violence on her behalf to safeguard that liberty – that liberty needs to be bought, but the left is terrified of the tools of violence to the point where they irrationally declare that to make the gazelle safe from the lion, you must strip the gazelle’s horns.
By the left’s logic, to make the child safe, you must leave her unguarded; and target those who would do her no harm but instead do seek to protect her. There are people who are actively willing to put their own lives in harm’s way, but they are called monsters for demanding real security. They are demonized for understanding the tools and nature of violence as defense and deterrent.
You can begin to defend the life of 8 year-old Martin Richard more by identifying the threat and dealing with the threat when it rears its head. What killed him was islamic terrorism. We know this. We all know this, but our government denies it on the basis that their ideology rejects making that judgement. By the response of the authorities in the Boston bombing case, there will be no more fatalities from those particular two terrorists. The hundreds of lives saved, like the baker’s new suit in the Broken Window Fallacy, are easily forgotten because they never materialized. There were no more terrorist attacks from those two because the terrorists were pursued (at a cost of life and harm) and stopped.
Yet there are still high-minded utopians who believe that if they just apologize enough, that if they are sensitive enough, they can stop people who chant for their deaths in the street through just well wishes.
And here’s where the Time writer gets worse:
Our rights are not inviolate. Just as the First Amendment doesn’t let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, the Second Amendment shouldn’t let us have assault weapons designed for mass slaughter.
This is, as Jonah Goldberg would say, bonesnappingly stupid.
The First Amendment totally and completely does let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
If the government could mandate a white-noise generator that would specifically tune into the sound of a human voice shouting the word “Fire!” so that it could never again be said in a theater and the First Amendment were restricted, what would happen when there is a fire and no one can shout the word? What happens when no one can give the alarm? What happens when that lifesaving tool is denied? It would result in people burned to death.
The Second Amendment totally and completely does let us have modern firearms. I have yet to take or instruct a firearms class wherein I have taught or been taught to use an “assault weapon” for “mass slaughter”. Sorry, just doesn’t work that way.
The Second Amendment protects the natural right of self defense. It codifies it in the Constitution and ensures that the tools of self defense will not be denied. It does the same in that sense as the First Amendment protecting the word “Fire!”. It exists as the last full response against oppression, large and small, whether it be a lone criminal or the force of a dictatorial government.
If used improperly or abused, it’s a crime, just like yelling fire when there’s no fire. If used properly, it’s a wholly necessary lifesaving right; and it protects tools that allow for lives to be saved. And just like the loss of yelling “Fire!”, if it is taken away, it ends up the same – the result is people burned to death.
–
To revisit this quote from the “Tread on Me” masochist:
Those of us who support aggressive government action to protect the public ought to acknowledge that it does, at the margins, limit individual rights—the rights of gun owners, the rights of business owners, the rights of the accused. Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither. But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.
The Bill of Rights is there to limit government. Governments create oppression. In a state of nature, there may be terror, but there is no all-encompassing institution that can deny you your natural rights. The Constitution is there as a contract of free men that created a limited government with the intention of protecting all of our natural rights possible while providing us tools to ensure greater protection for all as well.
I’ve been told that invoking the death of innocents is an emotional appeal rather than a logical argument. And I do admit these tragedies make me angry. But I think it would be logical for our government to try to limit these tragedies in the future.
You want to protect people, do it yourself. You want to prevent tragedies, do it yourself. You want to tread on me because you’re a coward? Then you become an oppressor, Mr. Grunwald, and you are trading bought-and-paid-for liberty for security that is not only fleeting, but wholly nonexistent.
We already sacrifice liberty all the time—our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with our shoes on, our right to run our businesses however we please.
The writer is an amoebic poltroon who kneels before the might of the state. We shouldn’t sacrafice our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with shoes on, or our right to run our businesses however we please. Excluding abuse of our rights, which infringes on someone else’s natural rights, it’s not the place of the government to do anything. Just because the government has abused rights in the past, doesn’t mean we should tolerate it any further.
The rights of the next Martin Richard and the next Charlotte Bacon matter, too.
Yes, and the next Martin and the next Charlotte may be killed by leftists with utopian wishes who demand schools be gun-free zones, ensuring that only criminals and madmen intent on mayhem will be armed. The next Martin and Charlotte, if they survived being left in a defenseless free-fire zone for 12 years of mandated government schooling, may not like being x-rayed by government lackeys who see them nude any time they get on a plane. They may not like that when they go to start a business, that their government demands so much from them that it’s easier just to not start the business, that their freedom has been curtailed so much that they don’t have options for a business.
But they may grow up thinking they’re “pretty free”, because there’s always something worse.
The next Martin and the next Charlotte are not one or two children, they are millions of children who will grow into adults in a nation where they are less free. The next boy may be bashed for being gay because he’s left disarmed against a mob, the next girl may be another Amanda Collins, who was raped because she was disarmed by government. The next boy may have developed the motor that runs on static electricity, but will never make it because the government has regulated him into oblivion. The next girl may not want to have her privacy violated by government every time she enters a private contract with an aircraft company to fly her somewhere.
-
There are no shortages of people demanding destruction of liberty. From Cass “We Must Dominate You For Your Own Good” Sunstein, to any of the intellectuals Thomas Sowell criticizes as dominating sheperds who demand you be their sheep, there is never a shortage of men who wish to dominate and control their fellow man.
There is always a question of how many people believe that becoming sheep is noble, and how many reject that destructive notion of bondage.
Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, explains to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell how he and other “journalists” prevented Capitol Hill police from removing an anti-gun advocate from the Senate gallery after she yelled at Senators who voted down an amendment to expand background checks.
And so says the leftist reporter:
GRIM: I interviewed her along with a number of other journalists right afterwards. They were trying to escort her out of the building, but journalists kind of formed a human shield around her because they all had their microphone in front of her. The Capitol Police realized perhaps arresting a hero of Tucson, right after the Senate knocked down this sensible gun bill, wasn’t the best move, so they let her continue to talk.
There is nothing sensible about the bill. It criminalizes citizens who have done nothing wrong, it would’ve subjected you to additional regulation while doing nothing to stop crime.
The head of the National Rifle Association mocked President Obama’s Rose Garden “tantrum” after losing the gun control fight in the Senate, charging Thursday that Obama suffered the worst defeat of his presidency because “he bit off more than he could chew.”
David Keene told Secrets that the president and his team misplayed their hand because they don’t have a sense of the public’s attitude toward gun control. “They just can’t gauge the public reaction to what they do because they don’t have any sense that the public has feelings different than they do,” said Keene.
“He thought and his folks thought that Newtown changed everything. Newtown was a tragedy but that doesn’t change people’s basic values and feelings,” added the NRA president.
Fact is, people are opposed to it. The culture of the nation is opposed to having the government chip, chip, chip away at our rights. This is the Country Class telling the Ruling Class “no”.
The loss devastated the president, who ranted about the NRA’s power during his Rose Garden address after Wednesday’s vote.
Keene, however, saw it differently. “It was the biggest legislative defeat he suffered but that does not justify the unseemly picture of a president of the United States throwing a public tantrum.”
Keene is spot-on here. Obama was mad and ranting, calling the NRA and the pro-rights lobby “liars”. Mind you, this is the same president who had the ATF send guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels and then claim executive privilege to hush it up.
Keene said that many lawmakers who voted against the background check expansion felt that if it passed, gun control advocates would simply return to the issue to chip away more at the Second Amendment, so they decided to “just stop it now.”
All you have to do is listen to what the Democrat anti-rights activists say:
In a way, Keene signaled that to the sponsors of the Senate compromise, Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. Keene recalled that he took a day off last week to fish for trout on the Missouri River in Montana. “Unfortunately, I took my cellphone with me and my cellphone rings in the midst of my float and it’s Joe Manchin, who’s talking about how reasonable his idea is. And finally I said, ‘Look, I’m in the middle of the Missouri River, I’ve got a trout on the line. I don’t agree, you will have to make your own decisions, and I hung up. You have to keep your priorities straight.”
There is no compromise, and there’s no use in talking to someone who just wants to stick in the tip a little bit, baby. No means no.
On April 17, New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg issued a statement to the public that he intends to propose a bill or amendment to regulate black powder, and other forms of explosive components, in the wake of the Boston Marathon Massacre. The bill would demand full Federal background checks of anyone seeking to purchase the minor explosive, similar to recent attempts by Congress to require full background checks on the sale of firearms.
In the wake of the deadly bombing attacks in Boston, U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) today announced that he will reintroduce legislation he has proposed in a prior Congress to require that sales of explosive powder be subject to a background check. He will also file the legislation as an amendment to the gun violence prevention bill currently on the Senate floor
“It is outrageous that anyone, even a known terrorist, can walk into a store in America and buy explosives without any questions asked,” said Senator Lautenberg. “If we are serious about public safety, we must put these common-sense safeguards in place. While the police have not revealed what specific explosive materials were used in Boston, what we do know is that explosive powder is too easy to anonymously purchase across the country.”
See, in 48 other states, you can walk to a gas pump and fill your tank with gallons upon gallons of gasoline.
In 48 states, you can go and pump as much gas as you can afford into your car or an approved container. In New Jersey and Oregon, you have to kneel before the might of lobbyists and you have an attendant pump gas for you, but you can still buy as much gas as you want.
Fortunately, highly combustible, flammable, and also explosive gasoline has never been used to kill anyone in any kind of attack, ever ever. Well, except for killing 87 people at once. And it’s used all the time by arsonists.
So gasoline is totally more dangerous. It shows again that there are dangerous chemicals and things all around us, and it’s the people we have to deal with, not the tools… because a dedicated villain will always find the tools.
But Lautenberg, who lives in a state where people are considered too stupid to pump their own gas, demands that we regulate black powder.
Of the $27.8 Billion spent each year on firearms, ammunition, clothing, reloading equipment, optics, and accessories by the American public, only about 7-8% of all gun owners reload their own ammunition on a regular basis. This means that only a relatively small amount of people purchase black powder explosives each year, and in comparison to other flammable, explosive, and dangerous household products such as fertilizer and gasoline, the singling out of black powder for stricter regulation bears little statistical evidence that its use in criminal activity is widespread.
Gunpowder is classified as a low explosive because of its relatively slow decomposition rate and consequently low brisance. Low explosives deflagrate (i.e., burn) at subsonic speeds, whereas high explosives detonate, producing a supersonic wave.
From Lautenberg’s site:
Current law allows an individual to purchase as much as 50 pounds of explosive “black powder” without a background check, and also permits an individual to purchase unlimited amounts of dangerous “smokeless powder” and “black powder substitute” without a background check.
And it will cost you shipping out the wazoo. It’s not cheap to ship that stuff, because you have to comply with DOT regulations and hazmat to ship it already. Smokeless powder is just a chemical that burns quickly. When in a shell, with a primer on one end and a bullet on the other, and inside a steel chamber, it becomes useful. Until then, it’s just a fast-burning chemical compound, and one that happens to be an intrinsic part of the Second Amendment, as ammunition is part of bearing arms.
If one were a terrorist, again, by contrast, you can buy all the gasoline you want. So you could buy hundreds or even thousands of gallons of gasoline and do whatever you wanted with it.
Ignoring all of that for a moment, consider that Al Qaeda’s online publication, Inspire magazine, has directions on how to make very specific types of explosives. They detailed the pressure cooker bomb, but they also detail how to use chemicals to mix much more destructive explosives. The internet is full of destructive bomb-making recipes for those looking for them, and Lautenberg, along with the rest of his dictatorial cohorts, is apparently completely lost on the first word in the acronym IED.
Improvised explosive device.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There is always a way for the motivated terrorist.
War is not a contest of force, whether conventional or unconventional, declared or undeclared. It is a question of will.
If you ban one thing, they will find another to use. The more you ban, the more liberties are lost, the more the terrorists have terrorized you into crushing your own citizenry and treating everyone like criminals. They will have won, as the American people will feel defeated by the actions of their own government against the citizenry in knee-jerk response to terrorists who will never follow a law.
You have to stop the individual terrorists. Ultimately, it is the terrorist that kills, and he is who you have to stop.
-
As an aside, while we’re on the subject of background checks for everything, how about we do background checks on who comes into the country, and we stop letting in terrorists and people who will reasonably become terrorists, huh? Then maybe us US citizens can stop getting screwed with every time we go to do anything? And how about we do background checks on senators and congressmen and presidents, so if they show any tendencies towards grossly violating oaths to the Constitution and trying to stomp on citizens rights, we don’t let them work in government?
Everyone knows it wouldn’t. Police train with modern pistols, and are well aware that it takes little time to reload, and that criminals won’t follow laws limiting magazine size anyway.
This has already been demonstrated quite well at Clackamas Mall (where the CC holder didn’t even have to shoot) and Trolley Square (where the CCer was an off-duty cop carrying illegally against mall policy).
NJ Governor Chris Christie, who’s a Republican when it’s convenient, has decided that the state needs expansion of power at the expense of the citizen.
New Jersey has the second toughest gun laws in the country. The first facet of Christie’s plan seeks to make them even stricter. This includes banning future purchases of the Barrett .50 Caliber; strengthening the state’s existing background check requirement by mandating that mental health records are included in the instant background check process at the time of a firearm purchase; and requiring firearms purchasers to present a valid government photo ID, along with the already mandatory Firearms Purchaser Identification Card.
Banning the Barrett .50 is stupid. Criminals don’t use them (except when they’re exported by the ATF to Mexican drug cartels). They weigh 25 pounds and cost $10K. They’re a boogeyman of the anti-gun left, who don’t like guns that are big. Or small. Or any at all.
Mandating mental health records being included in the background check is a step towards the gun confiscation New York has already seen – it will mean seizing guns for seeking help, it will mean denying Constitutional rights and the natural right of self-defense to those who’ve asked for help. The point isn’t to keep guns from crazies, it’s to keep guns from everyone.
Firearms purchasers already have to present a valid government photo ID.
For those unaware of it, New Jersey requires you to ask the government permission before buying a gun. You have to have a purchaser ID card – the state has to give you permission if you want to exercise a right. The application form can be viewed here.
The purpose is so that authorities can decide who gets to exercise rights and who doesn’t. These laws were passed predominately on the notion that the white ruling class needed to keep the black people (and poor whites) down. Now the Ruling Class simply chooses to keep the Country Class down.
At the announcement of Christie’s NJ SAFE Taskforce in January in the aftermath of Newtown, he talked about targeting and treating the root causes of violence.
There are three proposals listed, all of which are vague, but all of which actually seem to do something not entirely useless, while not actually infringing on Second Amendment rights. Actually looking at mental health isn’t a bad idea.
And then Chris Christie, who is a Republican when it suits him capable of tackling corruption when it suits him, but apparently very good at being a nanny-stater, comes up with this:
According to the Governor, too often lost in the debate about controlling gun violence in our society is the almost constant exposure young children and adults have to graphic violence. Part-three of his plan includes;
Requiring that retailers post at the point of sale the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ERSB) ratings. Additionally, requiring retailers to develop, maintain and conspicuously display their policy on selling video games with an M or AO rating.
Requiring Consent of a Legal Guardian. This is not different than the kind of parental supervision expected when a child under the age of 18 goes to see an R rated movie, Christie is requiring that a legal guardian provide consent when a minor purchases or rents a video game that has a rating of “Mature” or “Adult Only.”
If it’s a problem, it’s a problem for parents. They need to be the ones dealing with it. If parents groups are mad, they need to pressure retailers into meeting their demands (and many will happily do so, showing how caring they are, and thus generating a feeling of well-being among their customers).
And if you can’t buy it at a store, it doesn’t matter. This may come as a shock, but you can buy video games online.
The main sponsor on the U.S. legislation that banned many assault weapons in the 1990s is now talking about regulating violent video games in the future.
Speaking to an audience of 500 people in her hometown of San Francisco, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that game publishers need to make voluntary actions to avoid glorifying guns and violence following the Newtown elementary school massacre in December.
“If Sandy Hook doesn’t [make game publishers change] … then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the future,” said Feinstein.
She went on to claim that video games play “a very negative role for young people, and the industry ought to take note of that.”
Never mind that SCOTUS already said no.
In 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States struck a California law that would ban the sale of violent games to minors. The court voted 7-2 to block the law based on the protection afford to expression under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
And of course there are Republican busybodies as well. What they miss is that it’s a cultural argument to have without resorting to laws. While they are made to understand it by their constituents when it comes to the Second Amendment, they also need to be made to understand it when it comes to the First.
In January, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said that he believes “video games [are] a bigger problem than guns because video games affect people.” Last month, Rep. Diane Black (R.-Tenn.) claimed that the perpetrator in the Sandy Hook shooting was fueled by “unprecedented levels of violent games, music, and so on.”
Even if individually those statements have some grain of truth, there’s no excuse for the government, which was established to protect rights, to use force it was granted to destroy rights. They don’t seem to push for restrictions, but they certainly don’t sound like defenders of liberty.
In a series of bills Christie seeks to impose or strengthen criminal penalties when it comes to selling firearms to convicted criminals, possessing a firearm with the intent to unlawfully transfer, hiring a “straw purchaser,” unlawfully possessing ammunition and engaging in firearms trafficking, among other areas.
This crap gets really shady really fast. He’s not going to arrest Eric Holder the next time he comes to Jersey, so I’m not impressed.
Beyond that, these are sketchy laws, most of which are already illegal at the federal level, and probably at the NJ state level as well. Obama doesn’t enforce them at the federal level, so maybe Chris Christie could apply some pressure there and demand the feds to their job. That might be a better start, rather than going after people still barely able to exercise their rights in NJ. Of course, that’s assuming he’s not completely anti-Second Amendment.
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.
-
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.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) mocked Second Amendment rights activists while announcing his support for a ban on assault weapons and limits to high-capacity magazine clips on the Senate floor today.
REID: In the 1920s, organized crime was committing murders with machine guns. So Congress dramatically limited the sale and transfer of machine guns. As a result, machine guns all but disappeared from the streets. We can and should take the same common-sense approach to safeguard Americans from modern weapons of war.
Starting from the end of this statement and working back, modern weapons of war aren’t legal (without a lot of licensing) precisely because of the National Firearms Act of 1934 that Reid is alluding to. But wait, you say – the National Firearms Act came out in 1934? Yes, yes it did.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”
Early progressives had decided that intemperance needed to be squashed, even if it meant murdering some 10,000 citizens who drink by having government poison them.
The 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, and just like that, the revenue stream for bootleggers and organized crime evaporated overnight. Coupled with the beginning of the Great Depression exacerbated by FDR’s policies impacting the entire economy, organized crime wasn’t making the same kind of money and thus it wasn’t the same threat it was in the 1920s.
Reid continued saying he’d vote for Feinstein’s “Assault” Weapons Ban:
That is why I will vote for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban – because we must strike a better balance between the right to defend ourselves and the right of every child in America to grow up safe from gun violence. I will vote for the ban because maintaining law and order is more important than satisfying conspiracy theorists who believe in black helicopters and false flags. I will vote for the ban because saving the lives of young police officers and innocent civilians is more important than preventing imagined tyranny.
There is no “balance” as you move towards tyranny, even if you mock those who warn of tyranny. There can be no right to grow up safe. These are wonderful abstract concepts that are high-minded, but impossible. You cannot “grow up safe”. The world cannot be made into a safe place.
“Maintaining law and order” would mean enforcing laws first. Obama doesn’t even enforce gun laws. Mocking people who oppose the bill as conspiracy theorists just means you don’t have an argument.
Lastly, Reid claiming to want to save the lives of young police officers by destroying the Second Amendment they swear an oath to – as part of the Constitution, just means that he cares about protecting organs of the state but not about the rights of the people – the same rights that cop swears to uphold.
As to “saving the lives of innocent civilians” being more important that “preventing imagined tyranny”, scroll back up and read about the Chemist’s War. The US government actively poisoned people in order to push its Progressive “good idea” of Prohibition, whether people wanted it or not. The same time that the Senate was looking at banning machineguns, the same government was poisoning people. Also in the early 1930s, not only was the government banning the right to own machineguns “for the greater good”, they were also infecting black people with syphilis as guinea pigs in the Tuskegee experiment. There were also forced sterilizations and such going on in the name of eugenic racial improvement, another Progressive idea, all “for the greater good”.
Reid, just like politicians at that time would’ve, is arguing that people should surrender their rights for their own good because government really wants to help them… It wants to help them so much it murders them for their own good – from poisoning people to support Prohibition to sending guns to narcoterrorist cartels to kill people to support gun control.
There is no “imagined tyranny”, there are just increasing levels of tyranny. With history as our guide, we know we need to stay well-armed to stay safe, and we know that a government that mocks us ultimately means us harm. They aren’t by, for, and of the people.
Harry Reid is also indulging in the Broken Window Fallacy. The complaints he makes today about protecting children and cops are ones that are visible. The tyranny that others warn against isn’t here yet, and takes time to materialize. But this isn’t some Manbearpig fantasy, we have all of human history to see the repetition of tyranny as Innocents Betrayed illustrates above. We know what happens when governments get powerful. We have seen the US government in the last four years send guns to narcoterrorist cartels and hush it up afterwards. We have seen the US government poison over 10,000 people just to push Prohibition.
There is no imagined tyranny. It exists, creeping, always encroaching, and always there.
ShortTimer
JBH
