Or, “Introduction to tyranny, disguised as populism, and aided by state propaganda”. Reuters:
Unburdened by re-election worries and empowered by law to act without Congress, U.S. President Barack Obama could take action to improve background checks on gun buyers, ban certain gun imports and bolster oversight of dealers.
Prospects for gun control legislation intensified in the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, as more pro-gun rights lawmakers said on Monday they were open to the possibility while Obama and three cabinet members met at the White House to discuss the subject.
Having just won a second four-year term, Obama does not need to fear alienating voters who favor gun rights and he could press ahead without lawmakers on fronts where federal law enables executive action.
Speaking in Newtown, where a gunman on Friday killed 20 children and six adults in an elementary school, Obama vowed late on Sunday to “use whatever power this office holds” to try to prevent such massacres.
“Because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine,” Obama said at Newtown High School.
His administration has the power to issue executive orders or new rules, options that Obama is likely to consider in combination with possible new laws.
[…]
Critics say the system has holes because it does not include all the data it should on those ineligible to buy guns. The FBI, which runs the system, could incorporate more data from within the federal government – using evidence of mental incompetence, for example.
There are privacy concerns, however, and the Justice Department is still studying which types of data it can legally use, Schroeder said.
“That kind of system works effectively only if all of the potentially disqualifying information that has been gathered by any federal, state or local authority is accessible to the database, and that’s not the case today,” he said.
It is not clear what changes to the background checks would have prevented the mass shooting in Newtown, because the killer appeared to have used weapons his mother bought legally.
[…]
The administration also has leeway to act in how it defines certain categories of people prohibited from buying a gun.
Federal law bars anyone “who has been adjudicated as a mental defective,” but it does not specify whether that means only a court can disqualify someone, said Michael Volkov, a former Republican Justice Department official now at the law firm LeClairRyan.
[my emphases] Now, I know. I’m just part of the black helicopter crowd. But does it not worry the shit out of you that a leftwing authoritarian government, couching its agenda in the soothing label “progressive,” is now mulling over ways that the Executive branch can categorize us in order to maximize its political ability to determine which citizens are eligible for gun ownership and which are not — without any checks on its power?
This is positively Stalinesque — and yet here they are, scheming ways to take away individual rights considered sacrosanct by the founders and framers in order to exercise a more iron-fisted control over the masses.
After all, this is a President who has described political opponents enemies; the progressives routinely cite leftwing “studies” calling conservatism a mental illness; and even the contemporary Republican leadership is frustrated by the hidebound “ideologues” on the right who insist on “fetishizing” the Constitution.
Think this will end well? Yesterday, the President alluded to Americans carrying around “weapons of war.” This is demonstrably false, and yet because the President has said it and the media propagandists dutifully repeats it — both, by the way, knowing that no such thing is happening, and both pretending that no argument has been offered to give lie to the assertion — it’s becoming the found “truth,” and GOP leadership is once again prepared to cave to the pressure of a mist of lies it feels it isn’t in their interests, in terms of spending political capital, to dispute.
I won’t let my boys live as slaves to the State. Nor will I. I don’t grant temporary politicians the power to take away my natural rights simply because, following Woodrow Wilson, they don’t believe in such nonsense.
Many of us go about our day to day lives without seeing or understanding what is being done to deconstruct the Constitution and replace it with an amorphous web of progressive policy run through the administrative state, the courts, and now an imperial executive who has no fear of alienating voters.
And I fear that by the time they awake and look around to demand their liberty, only then will they notice that they surrendered it all a long time ago.
(h/t JHo)
This is a big fucking deal.
Can somebody slip “U.S. Secret Service agents” onto the list of prohibited persons?
Clearly, anyone who would actually want to exercise their Second Amendment rights is mentally incompetent, and should be disqualified.
Except for those, who aren’t.
Like Diane Feinstein.
liberty on the run
Obama Administration May Force Catholic Order Little Sisters of the Poor to Flee US
The President can issue Executive Orders all he wants. His agencies still have to enforce them, and Congress still has the power to defund active enforcement.
I doubt the President has the power to do anything major, but I can’t see much in print about that being true. But if he does order something like confiscation or banning of currently legal weapons, I would think he would subject himself to the possibility of impeachment. It might be an Andrew-Johnson kind of impeachment, but that’s probably where the D party doesn’t want to go at this point.
One can hope.
The general lay of the land concerns me, Slart. With gun vendors dropping like flies my takeaway is that the internal pressure has been building for some time against the 2nd. This kind of politically-sensitive carnage doesn’t occur overnight, especially in the wake of Heller et al.
Gun control only polls as a losing issue; it need never be comprehensive or consistent in action. The pressure alone is already capitulating whole hunks of the ostensible resistance — typically called Republicans, or if in the business community, boards of directors — and at best we’ll have an even more deeply divided nation.
At worst we’ll go out with these kinds of whimpers. The way things are going whether we even get to a funding stop enacted in this Congress remains to be seen.
Now you can understand the motivation for those scholarly articles about conservatives, republicans and religious people being less intelligent or less stable. Doesn’t matter if they are valid, it’s all just battlespace preparation.
Also, they don’t have to go after everything. If they can selectively freeze and destroy one target the others will get the message. They haven’t forgot their Alinsky, but then, neither have I.
Can’t say I’m surprised after Fast & Furious, HHS contraceptive mandate, amnesty via EO, drone-strike assassinations, Homeland Security sexually assaulting air travelers, and so on. He decided that some rights aren’t so inalienable after all. This is entirely predictable, but still very frightening.
this one guy wrote all the names of the victims on his shoes
so that helps
me I think since I been blizzarded I might go see the hobbit movie as a tribute this evening and then maybe next monday I can stop in south dakota for some memorial pancakes
I started posting to my blog again.
Now, maybe I have to buy some guns – and ammunition, and a quick access safe – and I have to train and practice so I can do all this responsibly.
Being a responsible citizen is really a bother, isn’t it?
What are the wages of serfdom, again?
Happy, someone stole nearly all of the maple syrup in Quebec, the largest producer of maple syrup in NA. Cost of a short stack will skyrocket unless you bite the bullet and get the blueberry sauce or go to IHOP were everything is fake.
cracker barrel still has gobs of those little maple syrup bottles
I can’t imagine they stoled all the syrups just to hoard it though maybe it’s just taking an alternate route to market
Oh, someone is going to sell it or already sold it. Some international maple syrup cartel, maybe. Several hundred metric tons of syrup is awfully hard to hide.
Is anybody else disturbed that Bumblefuck can call something like this “routine” and totally get away with it.
This is why they aren’t disturbed by our “failing” schools, turning out a nation of illiterate idiots isn’t a failure in their game.
cnn is reporting that some of the victims left pillow smells behind
Park City is quite awesome. Rather chilly.
Packed slopes, JD?
Oh, someone is going to sell it or already sold it. Some international maple syrup cartel, maybe. Several hundred metric tons of syrup is awfully hard to hide.
Personally, I think it was aliens what done it.
Note: In case you haven’t read this entertaining series by John Ringo, it’s about technologically advanced aliens arriving to start trading with humans and finding we possess nothing of any real value… until one enterprising man discovers that maple syrup acts like catnip on the aliens’ nervous system and commences to corner the maple syrup market and become the wealthiest man on the planet.
For myself I don’t find that much space between “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and “having no rules at all”. Certainly that space has been now filled to the brim and beyond with the 20,000 or so laws concerning firearms now on the books. That doesn’t even get to the laws concerning arms which don’t use fire.
To find the space they have done so far has required re-defining many of the words in the 2nd to have “special” meanings not used for the rest of the document. Obama will continue down the re-defining road with emphasis placed on “people” and “arms” as ripe for pruning out some of what may now be included.
How do we know Bloomberg isn’t behind the great maple syrup theft?
The great maple syrup caper has been solved!
…now that’s what I call a sticky situation!
“Maple-Syrup Mystery Solved“
Canadien Maple Syrup Cartel? Who knew?
At least on Christmas morning tots won’t have to stare down at their bare french toast and ask “Why me?”
That’s what I get for not refreshing.
I was just saying this morning that we are safer in our rights with a Republican in office not because they do anything special but, because they actually get scrutinized.
so they actually expanded the maple syrup supply putting downward pressure on the prices so that is very exciting
Leigh – not really today. Midweek is not bad.
Can the girls ski yet? Or would they rather hang out in the lodge with their tablets and iPods?
JHoward says December 20, 2012 at 8:26 am
This is a big fucking deal.
God bless Biden. just think – one heartbeat from the presidency.
Best life insurance policy a would-be tyrant could ask for.
He said sardonically
By some definitions, as a gay, I am mentally defective. I bet we can work up all kinds of definitions of mental defectiveness to cover most people. Five speeding tickets? Aversion to authority disorder? Theft of office supplies? Kleptomania?
I agree, this is not going to end well….
Peace, Freedom, Strength, and Love.