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A NEW GUN CONTROL APPROACH
A NEW GUN CONTROL APPROACH
One of the major objectives of the new administration is to close the private sale of firearms loophole and require that any sale be registered. Of course, criminals won't ever comply. HR 25 goes even further by requiring that anyone owning or transferring a weapon be licensed by the government. It has many provisions that are retroactive, criminalizing current possession of that which was previously legal. It won't pass yet, but that's where the anti-gun lobby is headed.
More and more state and local police agencies are hiring anti-gun Chiefs of Police who continue to bombard the public with dire warnings against using a gun to protect oneself during a home invasion. They would rather we call 911 and passively put ourselves stay at risk until they get there. That could well be deadly.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is going one step farther. The Lakeland Times reported on 9 January, 2009 that "The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has a simple, blunt message for hunters in Wisconsin: When a DNR warden asks you to give up your legal firearm, do so, plain and simple, no matter what. What's more, that goes for all citizens, the agency has asserted. Citizens with firearms, the DNR argues, should always do exactly what law enforcement officers tell them to do, regardless of the circumstances of the situation.
"To which one former hunter education instructor for the department has an equally simple and blunt response: The agency's directive is unconstitutional, plain and simple, and citizens don't have to hand over their firearms without any probable cause. That viewpoint is the reason Mark Palan, the owner of Palan's Outpost Sporting Goods in Iowa County, has the word 'former' attached to his title. After 14 years as a volunteer instructor, the DNR cast him out last year for, in the agency's words, misrepresenting agency standards to hunter education students." Actually, Palan was correctly representing the illegal nature of the DNR position to his students. That is why he was fired.
States are also being bombarded with new legislation trying to ban private reloading of ammunition and requiring that all new ammunition be coded for tracking and identification. Karen Cohilas, a reporter in Georgia writes, "One of the bills the Senate will consider when they convene is an ammunition coding bill. It would require manufacturers to engrave a unique code on the bottom of each bullet, so it can be traced. A measure that could help in the prosecution of people using handguns to commit crimes. Many gun rights enthusiasts say the bill is a violation of their second amendment rights. Sheriff Kevin Sproul said, 'It looks like they're trying to get around the regulation of ammunition, instead of the gun sales, but the ammunition of it.'"
That's precisely what they are doing. In the last decade, very few politicians could get re-elected by taking an anti-gun position, but the new popularity of Obama has emboldened the anti-gun lobby into thinking politicians can now get away with restricting weapons. That's why the public is making a run on weapons and ammunition, and I happen to think it is justified. The big concern for gun owners should be the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General. He's markedly anti-gun and well aware of the new roadblock the Supreme Court has erected after ruling that the Second Amendment is an individual right rather than a collective militia right.
As CNN reported, "Attorney General-designate Eric Holder conceded during his confirmation hearing Thursday that the government's options for regulating the possession of firearms have been narrowed in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling that the Second Amendment ensures an individual right to bear arms." But that isn't going to stop him. Notice his response that, "Reasonable restrictions are still possible." But he granted that, "we're living in a different world" since the high court's 5-4 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. Holder said that he previously viewed the Second Amendment as a 'collective right' to bear arms, not an individual right." The objective of that interpretation was to say that Americans only have the right to bear arms when serving in the National Guard. Of course, even that is spurious because in the days of the constitutional state militias members used their own personal arms. It was clearly an individual right that had to be maintained in order for the militia to operate.
That's where Holder is coming from, so no one's gun rights are safe during the Obama regime--in spite of Obama's assurance during the run on guns that he wasn't going to take people's guns away. -Perhaps not outright, but he will certainly push for universal registration and tracking--a prelude to gun confiscation.
Despite Holder's call for a National Gun Registry, the NRA has decided not to oppose Holder's nomination. The NRA is too worried about being labeled extreme and is bending over backwards to be accommodating to government gun restrictions when they should be resisting at every turn.
Gun Owners of America is the second largest pro-gun lobby and never compromises on second amendment rights. Note the difference in their position on Holder: "Barack Obama is wasting no time poking a sharp stick in the eyes of gun owners. The incoming President's choice for U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, is an anti-gun extremist who has assailed gun owners since his days in the Bill Clinton administration. Holder, who served as Deputy Attorney General from 1997-2001, supports a 3-day waiting period for handgun purchases, one-gun-a-month rationing, licensing and registration of all gun owners, mandatory so-called smart gun technology, a lifetime gun ban for certain juvenile offenses and regulating gun shows out of existence. As Janet Reno's top deputy, Eric Holder was the go to guy on gun control issues... In 2000, Holder was instrumental in the Clinton Administration's effort to strong arm firearms manufacturers into voluntarily accepting regulations that had stalled in the Congress. In a brazen legislation-by-extortion plot, the federal government filed suit against gun makers but offered to drop the suit if the companies would bow to the administration's demands. Again, GOA and its members took the lead in opposing Holder and the Clinton Administration and slowed down implementation of the agreement until it completely went away when Clinton left office. One company went along with the deal but after intense pressure from gun owners, no others joined the unholy alliance. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, Holder pushed for more gun control and greater restrictions on gun shows, even though the terrorists were armed with box cutters that could be purchased at any hardware store.
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02-23-2009, 05:51 PM
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