Archive for the 'Assault Weapon Ban' Category

Via Instapundit, Joe Manchin in his words:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Monday that he opposes an assault weapons ban.

Speaking on MSNBC, Manchin, who has an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association and in December called for federal action to reduce gun violence, said he thinks there’s a better way to reduce mass shootings without introducing new restrictions for gun owners.

“I do not support an assault weapon ban because the definition of assault weapon is still hard to come by,” Manchin said. “So I am not going to comment on people’s legislation. I do not support that approach right now.”

Manchin is part of a quartet of legislators working to tighten background checks required to purchase a gun. The other members of the group are Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

Of course, the fact that the definition of assault weapon is itself defined in the legislation (an example of circular reasoning) is a ridiculous reason for not supporting it.  But of course, Joe is lying.  The real reason that he isn’t supporting a new AWB is because it cannot pass.  The real reason he should oppose it is because it is unconstitutional and immoral, though Joe isn’t too worried about trivialities like that.

What Joe is doing is working with totalitarians to enact universal background checks, thus setting up a national gun registry.  I expect this out of Joe.  I am saddened to see it out of Eric and Paul.

Wonders Norman:

After listening to most of the arguments concerning gun control, I have yet to hear an answer to this question: Why would any intelligent and reasonable person with a social conscience oppose a ban on assault weapons?

Bless your heart, Norman.  I’m sorry that no one is paying attention to your questions.  I will be happy to explain what would motivate someone to oppose a ban on “assault weapons.”

God.

Via David Codrea, international scholar Jim Carrey has escaped from the asylum and taken a formal position on assault weapons.

Any1 who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting.

Says the man with body guards.

The window was open and we could see everything because they were filming right below the window 20 ft. away. We could see Jim Carrey and hear what he was saying. It was so great. After watching for an hour, they stopped for a lunch break. His bodyguard drove a big black van right below the window and opened the car door. Jim Carrey walked over to the door. I leaned out the window and yelled, “Hey Jim Carrey!!!” and he looked up at me smiled, waved and said, “Hey!” I lost it and started screaming. It was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.

Prior:

Sylvester Stallone On Assault Weapons

International scholar, Rocky, has some brain damage.

“I know people get (upset) and go, ‘They’re going to take away the assault weapon.’ Who … needs an assault weapon? Like really, unless you’re carrying out an assault. … You can’t hunt with it. … Who’s going to attack your house, a (expletive) army?”

Well, first I’ll answer on your level, dude.  Like, assault weapons are all cool and stuff, and you’re just being, like, you know, grodie to the max.  Dude.  Gag me with a spoon.  Just be awesome and chill.  Like, you know.

The next answer may require some reading.  Go read the Federalist Papers.  Then read the constitution.  Then read about Mr. Stephen Bayezes, who is alive today because he owned an AR-15 and used it with a 30-round magazine during a home invasion.

Finally, read all about the newest trend in home invasions all across America, i.e., 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-man teams of criminals to ensure the highest rate of success and safety for the home invaders, and lowest rate of successful resistance by the occupants.

Like really, dude.  Don’t be grodie to the max and stuff.

I had previously said “Universal background checks have nothing whatsoever to do with keeping weapons out of the hands of criminals, or a reduction in violence of any sort.  The system, if set up, is a predecessor and necessary prerequisite to a national gun registry.”

Feinstein’s proposals:

The bill will exempt firearms used for hunting and will grandfather in guns and magazines owned before the law’s potential enactment. However, the grandfathered weapons will be logged in a national registry.

A national gun registry – it’s one of the touchstones of success for the statists.  And universal background checks and a national gun registry go together like a hand in a glove.  When they make laws they are looking long term.  In fact, take note of one part of her legislation.

The legislation being pushed by Feinstein — who has long history of calling for gun bans — would prohibit the sale, transfer, importation and manufacture of certain firearms.

Neocon Charles Krauthammer (no friend to the second amendment) theorized the approach for them.

It is simply crazy for a country as modern, industrial, advanced and now crowded as the United States to carry on its frontier infatuation with guns. Yes, we are a young country but the frontier has been closed for 100 years.

Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquility of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically.

It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today.

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic – purely symbolic – move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. Its purpose is to spark debate, highlight the issue, make the case that the arms race between criminals and citizens is as dangerous as it is pointless.

De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades.

What needs to happen before this change in mentality can occur? What must occur first – and this is where liberals are fighting the gun control issue from the wrong end – is a decrease in crime. So long as crime is ubiquitous, so long as Americans cannot entrust their personal safety to the authorities, they will never agree to disarm. There will be no gun control before there is real crime control.

Universal background checks and assault weapon bans are mere window dressing.  The goal is to desensitize the public and cause this to occur over one or two generations.  You can keep the rifle you just purchased.  But you must register it with the federal government and you cannot bequeath it to your children or grandchildren.  Thus do they wish to accomplish confiscation by means other than sending SWAT teams into your home.  The question is, will you let them?

Leon Panetta:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta joined the gun control debate on Thursday when he told troops at a military base in Italy that only soldiers needed armor-piercing bullets or assault weapons.

Asked by a soldier what President Barack Obama would do to protect school children from gun violence without infringing Americans’ right to own guns, Panetta said action was needed after the attack on a Connecticut school in December in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

He told members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team at Vicenza that there were areas where steps could be taken,

“I mean who the hell needs armor-piercing bullets except you guys in battle?”

Well, anyone who wants to protect themselves against a multi-man home invasion may decide that he needs “assault weapons.”  But one would think that the secretary of defense would have more important things to worry with, like the fact that we’re losing the campaign in Afghanistan.

But remember that this is the very same Leon Panetta who retains the services of body guards.  So here’s the deal, Leon.  Disarm your body guards or tell us that you’re a liar – that you really don’t believe what you say – that you know people need protection, but that you don’t care about that except for the really important people like you.

Then you’ll say in public what we all know to be true.  You’re a sniveling lackey just like Stanley McChrystal.

From NBC News:

But as a veteran law enforcement officer, what was most striking to Kehoe was that the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, had heavier firepower than Kehoe and his officers. The police had Glock pistols with 14-round magazines;  Lanza had a Bushmaster assault-style rifle, two handguns and multiple 30-round magazines that allowed him to squeeze off an estimated 150 shots.

Although it’s still not clear if Lanza ever fired at responding officers — Kehoe thinks he took his own life when he heard the police sirens —  the disproportionate balance in firepower bothers him.

“We never like to think we’re going to be outgunned in any situation we’re dealing with,” he said. “We do a good job of  securing dynamite in our society. … (Assault rifles) are another form of dynamite. … I think they should ban them.”

I think you’re not getting the full story, so I have posed the following questions to the Newtown Police Department:

(1) Do your officers have tactical shotguns (e.g., Mossberg 930,
Benelli, etc.) in their units?  If not, do they have any kind of
shotguns in their units?
(2) Do your officers have AR-15s in their armory?
(3) If so, do they carry them in their units?
(4) Are their AR-15s the equivalent of assault rifles, i.e., do they
have selective fire capability, or are they only semi-autos like
civilians arms?
(5) Did any of your officers carry any firearms other than their side
arm in response to the Sandy Hook disaster?
(6) If not, could your officers have made the choice to have carried
any firearms other than their side arm in response to the Sandy Hook
disaster?
(7) Finally, it has been reported that the response time to the Sandy
Hook disaster was 20 minutes.  Is this accurate?

Thank you so much for your attention to these questions.

What you want to bet that I never get answers to these or any other questions?

From CBS New York:

People familiar with closed-door negotiations told The Associated Press a tentative deal was struck over the weekend.

The tentative agreement would further restrict New York’s ban on assault weapons, limit the size of magazines to seven bullets, down from the current 10, and enact more stringent background checks for sales. Other elements, pushed by Republicans, would refine a mental health law to make it easier to confine people determined to be a threat to themselves or others.

Yaaaaaay!  This means that some of Kimber’s 1911’s (with seven round magazines) are legal, while the ones that have eight round magazines are “assault weapons.”  And maybe for a real laugh NY will include the eight- and nine-shot revolvers in their AWB while excluding the 5- and 6-shot revolvers.

Notice also that the NY republicans pressed for making it easier to falsely imprison innocent people.  New York.  Good for a laugh if nothing else.

We’ve discussed it many times, this proposed extended and expanded assault weapons ban proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein.  The new legislation may fail, but the White House has it’s own front in this war on firearms.  But their own propaganda betrays a serious weakness in their approach.

The White House is also developing strategies to navigate the rocky and emotionally fraught terrain of gun politics once final policy decisions are made. The administration is quietly talking with a diverse array of interest groups, including religious leaders, mental-health professionals and hunters, to build as broad a coalition as possible, those involved in the discussions said.

The president is expected to face fierce opposition from the NRA and its allies in Congress, including most Republicans and some Democrats.

But Biden signaled to those involved in the policy discussions that the White House is not afraid of taking on the NRA, the nation’s largest gun rights group. At the Dec. 20 meeting, according to Stanek, when one law enforcement leader suggested focusing on only the most popular proposals, Biden responded: “Look, what I’m asking you for is your candid opinion and ideas about extreme gun violence. Leave the politics to the president. That’s our job with Congress.”

They want to turn hunters against the NRA and modern sporting rifles.  Fat chance.  That didn’t work out so well for David Petzal or Jerry Tsai.  Their plans to divide and conquer the NRA will meet with disastrous results.  Every minute spent on such a tactic is wasted, and thus we have to hope that they expend a lot of energy on it.

But the later part of the strategy, i.e., politics, is far more fearsome and they have proven very adept at that approach.  Gun Owners of American (h/t Mike Vanderboegh) gives us an inside baseball look at the current tactics.  In summary, John McCain is working against gun owners by pressing (along with the Democrats) for a rule change that would essentially be a work-around of the filibuster rule.  Lindsey Graham has vowed to vote against new gun control measures, but since he is McCain’s lap dog, he may be looking for cover as he works silently behind the scenes to assist in Feinstein’s plans.  Joe Manchin has backed off of his public calls for new gun control measures, but he may be playing the same game as McCain and Graham.

Currently in the Senate, Rand Paul is the only immovable champion of second amendment rights.  If new laws pass the Senate, they must also pass the House before going to the President’s desk.  It isn’t clear what the House will do.  If history is any indication, they are in a weakened state, and lack any backbone anyway.

However, the Republicans stand warned.  If – controlling the House of Representatives – they allow new gun control measures to pass to the President’s desk, the GOP will cease to exists as a viable political party.  Voters are having difficulty finding differences between them and the Democrats anyway.  Caving on gun control would seal the fate of the GOP as a historical relic rather than a future possibility.

If new gun control measures don’t pass the Senate and House, the game is far from over.  The Obama administration is investigating the possibility of executive orders reclassifying semi-automatic firearms as title 2 weapons, thus doing by fiat what the legislative branch rejected.  The fight will continue, just in a different locale than the Senate and House.

Finally, if new gun control measures pass to the President’s desk (in which case he will surely sign the measures into law), it means more than just new background checks.  All semi-automatic firearms will be taxed, required to be submitted to the ATF for approval, controlled from crossing state lines, and prohibited from being bequeathed to your children or grandchildren in your wills.  Violation of any of these rules will turn you into an instant felon.  Of course, this would mean a resistance for which America isn’t prepared.

Karl Denninger writes:

It is time for We The People to take a stand, as did John Hancock, Richard Stockton, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Penn, Arthur Middleton and others.

Your right to life is not bestowed by government. Your right to liberty is not bestowed by government. Government never possessed those rights and you cannot bestow what you do not first lawfully possess.

You right to life and liberty were bestowed by your creator. Those rights inure to each and every one of us by virtue of being human. And here’s the point which many of you wish not to discuss:

A right without the ability and willingness to defend it is no right at all.”

Bob Owens writes:

“The Second Amendment of the United States was never written to protect hunting or target shooting. It was written by men who had just fought a successful armed revolution against the most advanced military of their day, and who wanted to ensure that future generations would be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility in order to stand against the day that once more, tyrants would attempt to consolidate power and lord over the people as their betters.

“Any attempt to take the contemporary arms of military utility our Founders wanted us to have, which includes the standard magazines and clips used in these firearms, is an act of tyranny that the Founders would recognize as an event justifying the use of force to retain our freedoms.”

“Tread carefully.”

Brandon Smith writes:

“There is no ambiguous or muddled separation between the citizenry and the government anymore. The separation is absolute. It is undeniable. It is vast. It is only a matter of time and momentum, and eventually there will be unbridled oppression, dissent, and conflict. All that is required is a trigger, and I believe that trigger has arrived…”

Mike Hendrix writes:

“This is a society preparing for war,” writes Bob Owens.

“Reluctantly, almost unwillingly, it should be noted. But the sad truth is, war is already being made upon it, and has been for a long time now. Said society has been more than patient, more than tolerant. But eventually, enough is enough. Everyone has their limit; freedom-loving Americans’ has very nearly been reached. A few more steps over the line, and the kettle is going to boil over.”

“Any liberal-fascists who think we’re all going to go gently into that good night really, really need to reconsider. We all have to hope they do. But we all have to be prepared for the possibility, the likelihood, that they mightn’t. “This far, no further” is more than just an empty slogan.”

“Gird your loins.”

Alan Halbert writes:

“We are in far more danger from these actions of our own government than from another Sandy Hook atrocity by a crazed killer.”

“The Second Amendment’s purpose is to provide for the citizens’ defense from all who would deny their natural God- given right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” against a criminal, a foreign or domestic enemy, or our own government. We will witness the end of the Republic if this proposed legislation is passed, since all of our rights flow from the citizen’s ability to defend them.”

“As for this citizen, I will never disarm or surrender my Second Amendment rights, much less willingly comply with such a traitorous act of Congress if enacted… it is actions like these that light revolutionary fervor in a nation and its citizens. It did so in 1776 and it will do so again.”

John Jay writes:

“…when it is done, and the regime defeated, no one will talk about what he did in the war. It shall have been terrible, and brutal. Executions, murders, assassinations and the inevitable collateral damage shall be the issue of the day. This is the price that those who attempt to impose a totalitarian regime in the America’s shall face. Many of us will die, and some shall become iconic photos hanging from lamp posts, stripped naked and hoisted by their ankles, as final witness and testimony to their arrogance.”

“Those who seek to take our weapons trifle with history, heritage and firmly held belief. It should be remembered, those of us who believe this way are god fearing, and shall invoke and beseech our God for support. We have a religious underpinning and faith that shall carry us through this, as opposed to those who seek to suppress us. They have nothing but naked ambition to sustain them.”

“Do Obama, Pelosi, and Feinstein have the stomach for this sort of conflict? Are they willing to initiate, in order to try and gain the rule they aspire to? We shall find out.”

Western Rifle Shooter’s Association writes:

“Understand that once the ball opens, there will be no stopping the righteous fury of viciously-indignant Americans, especially once the 2013 versions of Waco and Ruby Ridge are re-enacted by Regime loyalists across the nation.”

“No one associated with the Federal government or its mutant-twin ruling parties will be safe.”

“Especially once the guys with the scoped hunting rifles come in.”

Mike Vanderboegh writes that there would be a revolution if the government confiscates weapons, and Herschel Smith warns that there will be resistance and writes that the resistance won’t be “the peaceful kind.”  If it goes to the point of forcible implementation of the proposed legislation, it will be awful, bloody, violent and extreme.  Right now we don’t know for certain what will happen in Washington.  But depending upon that outcome, what will happen all across America has been written.  1.6 billion rounds of handgun ammunition won’t be nearly enough for the government.

You’ve been warned.

UPDATE: “Class II” has been changed to “Title II.”  I appreciate Glenn’s attention to this article.  Also, David Codrea gives a link.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to John Richardson for the attention.

UPDATE #3: Thanks to Mike Vanderboegh for the attention.

Around America, people are voting on gun control with their bank accounts.

MECKLENBURG COUNTY, N.C. — Requests for gun permits soared in Mecklenburg and surrounding counties last month, mirroring a nationwide buying spree fueled by fears of tougher gun laws after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

In all, 1,971 people applied for handgun purchase permits in Mecklenburg in December, compared with 860 who applied in December 2011, according to data from the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office.

Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Julia Rush said the department has a backlog of applications and has used overtime to deal with what she called a “deluge of requests.” North Carolina law requires that handgun purchasers get a permit from their local sheriff’s office. The permit must be presented to the gun shop before the purchase can be made.

Such permits are not required for shotguns and rifles, including the Bushmaster AR-15 assault-style rifle used in the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 schoolchildren and six faculty and staff members dead. Federal law does prevent felons, certain types of domestic abusers and people with a history of mental illness from possessing the firearms.

Local gun stores have had lines of would-be purchasers stretching out the front door in some cases. Larry Hyatt said the crush of sales at his gun store on Wilkinson Boulevard in December was remarkable.

When The Observer visited the shop Dec. 21, a wall that had held assault-style long guns was nearly empty. Before the Newtown shooting, it had been full.

“It was just overwhelming,” Hyatt said. “We couldn’t even (get) people in the store. It’s like going to the grocery store when it snows. We started running out of some things.”

Hyatt Gun Shop saw a jump in customers the day after the president made his remarks, Larry Hyatt said. December became the single busiest month Hyatt has had since his gun store opened on Wilkinson Boulevard in 1959.

Hyatt typically has 12 or 13 staff members working the counter. During December, he had 30 coming in early and leaving late. His gunsmiths – the people who repair guns, or add accessories – were drafted as salesmen. Still, there were times when the store was full and the shelves emptied quickly.

And in a single day of sales before Christmas, Hyatt Gun Shop did more than one million dollars in business.  The people who purchased these firearms aren’t planning on Dianne Feinstein telling them that they cannot bequeath their wealth – including their firearms – to their children or grandchildren.  If she attempts to do so, she (and any jackbooted thugs whom she sends to enforce the laws) will meet resistance.  Not the peaceful kind.