Author: Sebastian

Says General Wesley Clark on Geraldo:

I think we need to re-institute the assault weapons ban in the United States.  If people want machine guns, let them join the military.  We got em!  But for public and personal use, absolutely not.  That’s how they are getting across the border, and what the Mexican Government has asked of us is, “Please, cut off the flow of machine guns coming from the United States into Mexico.”

General Clark and Geraldo Rivera pretty clearly need a lesson in American gun laws, because when we speak of “assault weapons” we’re not talking about machine guns.  It’s amazing how this bit of disinformation just refuses to die.  Say what you will about Josh Sugarmann being dishonest, but he was right.  This issue is one of the most brilliant and effective disinformation campaigns ever waged in the court of public opinion.

Michael Bane is reporting that Georgia Arms, who remanufacture military brass, is facing having to shutter its production, and cancel law enforcement orders because of the Obama Administration’s decision to destroy surplus military ammunition components.

That’s right, Barack Obama hates guns and shooting to such a degree that he’s willing to cost the government money, put good people out of work, and inconvenience law enforcement, just to have a chance to piss on gun owners and shooters.  Remember, he supports the Second Amendment!

UPDATE: One other question.  Where is the organiztion that claims to represent hunters and shooters in this matter?  I know NRA is dealing with this, but where’s Ray Schoenke?  You know, the head of American Hunters and Shooters Association who endorsed Obama this election?  Do you endorse this Ray?  Do you endorse creating shortages of ammo for police departments and competitive shooters?

Apparently now we’re giving material support to narco-terrorists.  I shit you not, go read.

The web of interests concentrated in the National Rifle Association and which spends millions of dollars to lobby against gun control legislation in Congress may be inadvertently aiding in the reign of terror being waged by drug cartels in northern Mexico. Recent reports suggest as much as 90% of the weapons used by the cartels come from north of the border.

Here we go with the Mexico crap again.  This number has been bandied about for years now, but when you hear talk of guns in the hands of narco-terrorists, they are things like machine guns, rocket launchers, and other heavy weapons which are not available in the United States to civilians.

The gun lobby has consistently argued against any form of gun control, even against the logic of barring civilians from carrying concealed semi-automatic weapons. During his tenure as governor of Texas, George W. Bush signed legislation that allowed Texans to carry concealed weapons into churches, amusement parks and diners, among other public places.

Actually, churches and amusement parks are both places where carry is prohibited under Texas’ laws.  Some diners can be too if they derive more than 51% of their sales from alcohol.  But where is the blood on the streets that this was supposed to cause?  Forty states later, it’s failed ot materialize.

Now, the NRA is not likely to be engaged in such flagrant acts of illegality, but its attitude of moral indifference to the consequences of small arms proliferation throughout the US market clearly has made more weapons available for criminal entities to take advantage of.

So explain to me how we’re supposed to keep guns out of the hands of drug cartels who are already trafficking in a contraband product? Do you seriously think if we made guns illegal in the United States that drug cartels won’t be able to get guns?  They aren’t getting rocket launchers or machine guns from US sources.

The crux of the gun lobby problem is that its efforts have been aggressive and have arguably led to such a proliferation of small arms in US society that there is now a massive surplus, far beyond the real “need” experienced by the population at large

There’s that “need” word again. Who gets to define need?  It would seem based on sales of firearms lately that a lot of people seem to think they need one.

Let’s put the 2nd Amendment aside for a moment — reasonable law scholars disagree about whether or not the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” was intended to be linked only to “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”, or whether it was intended to grant all citizens the right to carry handguns and semi-automatic firearms.

This isn’t an academic debate anymore.  The Second Amendment is an individual right, and it extends to being able to keep firearms in the home.  Based on dicta in Heller, it probably also extends to some manner of carrying firearms as well.  That’s now the law of the land.

In fact, strict gun control would not require a ban on weapons licensed for hunting, sport shooting or personal safety. So, one could argue that, except for the desire to push the proliferation of small arms, for the profit of interests backing the intense lobbying of Congress, there is no serious threat to 2nd Amendment rights from gun control and no sound legal basis for the lobbying effort itself.

Yep, because it’s always lobbying on behalf of some evil moneyed interest with the left.  It’s never the fact that millions of Americans disagree with gun control and don’t want to see any more of it.  Who do they imagine the NRA’s four million members are then?  Or the approximately thirty million Americans who identify with the NRA but aren’t current members?  We are the NRA, not the gun industry (who has their own group).

But why bother seeking out an understanding on the issue when you can just build an elaborate fantasy in your head about a vast industrial conspiracy to encourage the proliferation of small arms?  It certainly feels a lot better than pondering the fact that millions of Americans simply don’t agree with you.