President Obama in his zeal to purge the nation of gun ownership is expected to travel to Connecticut to make another tearful plea for Congress to both pass a semi-automatic fire arm ban and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s wolf in sheep’s clothes national background check legislation.
Obama could not choose worse optics if he is attempting to convince a majority of Senators who are skeptical of additional encroachments on the right to keep and bear arms to vote for his proposals, as the Connecticut backdrop should remind everyone of the draconian response just enacted by that state legislature.
Reid has already declared that the semi-auto ban has been defeated, even though he will allow it to come to a vote, so Obama’s only hope of an immediate legislative victory is the national background check proposal.
Yet by going to Connecticut, where background checks and gun bans predated Newtown, Obama reveals his true intentions.
It is not to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those who have been adjudicated to be mentally ill, but rather to create a national database to lay the foundation for future confiscation of firearms.
Even the rhetoric surrounding the national background check itself is a canard.
How do we know this?
Since 1994, every individual purchasing a firearm through a retailer has already been subjected to a national background check with the records only legally retained for a set period of time after the purchase. Over the years, this time frame for the destruction of the records has been a source of debate, but the records have always been required to be destroyed.
The new national background check proposal that career anti-gun ownership Senator Charles Schumer is attempting to shepherd through Congress would eliminate the destruction of these records.
This basic point was so central to what Obama, Reid and Schumer are trying to accomplish that they allowed a potential deal with Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn to fall apart over the issue of whether the records should be destroyed.
[my emphasis]
Obama’s executive orders set the parameters for data gathering and the propaganda offensive against firearms, in which the CDC will act as the progressive’s political proxy. And while its certainly true that the left hoped to use the tragedy at Sandy Hook to pass a new “assault weapons” ban and a ban on “high-capacity magazines,” I think that those proposals were meant to give Congress something to vote against while “compromising” on “universal background checks” (as statists on the right like John McCain have signaled a willingness to do).
In fact, McCain has become something of a barometer on these types of issue: if he agrees to “compromise,” you can be certain it is on that particular point that the Democrats are most hoping to win — McCain being one of the most steadfast of the purely political animals on the GOP side, and as such, an easy target for ideologues who have pushed a national narrative of a desire for compromise. In particular, if by “compromising” on one point while voting against several others, McCain believes he’ll receive plaudits from the non-whacko birds in the major leftwing media for being one of the “reasonable” kind of Republicans, that’s what he’ll do. Or, to put this another way, the progressives know which Republicans will sell out their base for some backslaps and pottage, so they maneuver their legislative desires to target those figures — and then they set up their strategy to coax the dupes toward accepting what it is they really wanted all along.
Which is why we need to let McCain, et al., know that we know what’s in this legislation and what it prepares the ground for going forward. Therefore, any Republican who votes for this should be singled out and castigated in perpetuity for his or her willingness to break the oath to the Constitution that is required upon taking office.
To the Democrats, the breaking of that oath is a point of activist pride, considering that many of them has as their goal a weakening of the Constitution’s constraints on their powers. But to those on our side of the aisle — save for perhaps the establishment statists and the babycons (whom up until the other day I hadn’t even heard of) — fidelity to the Constitution and to the ideas that animate both it and the Declaration out of which it was born, is a prerequisite for a stable rule of law, and it isn’t up for political “pragmatic” / “realist” negotiation.
[…]
This new national background check legislation is not designed to stop criminals from getting guns, it is designed to use the tragedy of Newtown, Connecticut to establish a national database of gun owners.
It would serve no other purpose except to allow the federal government to have a pathway to confiscate guns.
America’s eyes have been opened to what anti-firearm politicians want through their actions in California, Connecticut, Maryland and New York. The cloak of reasonability has been lifted and the predator is bearing its teeth.
In those states, one U.S. Supreme Court Justice’s vote stood between the people and confiscation.
And one national election could easily change both a future Court vote reconsidering Heller and those in Congress on gun bans and confiscation.
This is why this Congress must defeat Obama, Reid and Schumer’s attempt to put a pathway to gun confiscation on the federal books under the guise of expanding a national background check.
It is also why any Member of Congress who supports the Obama, Reid and Schumer national background check bill is actually voting to allow the future confiscation of firearms. There simply is no other justification for the inclusion of a permanent gun owner database within the bill.
Next week, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN will try to tell the American people that the vote in the Senate is about stopping future tragedies and having a national background check system.
Obama will stand in Connecticut and Colorado crying crocodile tears as he exhorts Congress to pass a national background check.
All of them know they are lying, and the true objective of the legislation.
The entirety of the gun control effort is an effort not at protecting children or punishing criminals, but at controlling individuals by creating new categories for criminalization — with the eventual disarming of the populace the desired end. In this way, it is similar in purpose to ObamaCare, which has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with nationalizing the health care system and massively increasing governmental power, with a single-payer health care system the real desired end.
In my first post this morning I sketched out what I’ve called the visible contours of the statist path to eventual gun confiscation, if not in fact than in effect, with the government making it so expensive, so dangerous, and so distasteful to own firearms that most people, they hope, will simply relent — or else be priced out of the market. Laws that prevent people from willing their private, legal effects to a family member, or handing them to a friend to use, are laws that are meant, over time, to get us used to the idea that nothing we own is truly ever ours — and that if the government can get enough of a push from the press, and has the right numbers in its legislatures, Constitutional protections will be violated under the assumption that they haven’t been until some court says they have.
Chuck Schumer thinks that maybe he has those numbers now.
It is a form of conditioning, with the object being to ease us into the post-constitutional era of European-style socialism and a centralized power that effectively obviates the power of the states to resist it. It is a repudiation of the Bill of Rights — and as such, a repudiation of the idea of laws that precede man and therefore are not subject to his dominion.
We must resist them. Because one can’t compromise what is a natural right; he can only insist upon it or allow it to be taken from him.
Because one can’t compromise what is a natural right; he can only insist upon it or allow it to be taken from him.
H8r.
“McCain believes he’ll receive plaudits from the non-whacko birds in the major leftwing media for being one of the “reasonable” kind of Republicans, that’s what he’ll do.”
You give him the benefit of doubt. Don’t.
Compromise? Exactly what are those among the gun-grabbers offering to surrender in exchange? Not grabbing more? “Give me all your lunch money! Oh, wait, I’ll let you keep a quarter to call home… Aren’t you glad I compromised with you?”
J. Madison, as Publius, who never did live and write:
*** But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. ***
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