Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Normally I don’t like to lift prose out of articles at length because I like to send traffic to the original post.  That’s not necessarily true here.  I don’t give a crap about The Weekly Standard for more than a few reasons, not the least of which is that they are gun controllers.  Why else would you publish gun control advocacy like this wrapped in the patriotic blanket of state’s rights?

Nino would not approve.

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia never intended for guns to end up in schools—and he said so 10 years ago. When he wrote the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, Scalia declared that the “right to keep and bear arms” was an individual right. It was a watershed moment for gun rights advocates. Scalia, ever the careful textualist, was quite specific and forceful in his 2008 decision. And while he may not have imagined a president pushing for armed classrooms, his words are prescient a decade later.

In the years leading up to the Heller decision, gun regulations had varied dramatically: a handgun legally purchased in Arizona might get you a felony conviction in the nation’s capital. Enter Dick Anthony Heller. As a licensed special police officer for the District of Columbia, Heller could carry a gun while on duty, but not while at home. The D.C. handgun ban became the central issue in his lawsuit. In the end, Scalia and four fellow conservative justices agreed: the ban was unconstitutional, and the Second Amendment was an individual right.

That’s probably what most people know about Heller. You can keep your handguns. Neither the District of Columbia, nor other cities, can take away what is a natural right. But most people probably haven’t read Heller (and who could blame them, it’s 157 pages long). If you did read the decision, you might remember that Scalia and the majority specifically staked out what limitations on guns are still in place. (For instance, machine guns are off limits.)

But Scalia also talks about schools in the decision:

. . . nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings . . .

This unambiguous statement is even repeated in the syllabus of the decision. It’s clear Scalia wasn’t pushing to turn America into a gun bazaar—especially if the guns were near schoolchildren, felons, and “sickos” (as President Trump likes to say).

Some states do have armed teachers. Trump made sure to highlight that point when he called on the governors of Texas and Arkansas during a recent televised event. But here again, the court has an answer. Scalia makes it clear in Heller that much of gun regulation is a federalist issue: “States, we said, were free to restrict or protect the right under their police powers.”

So, if Gov. Greg Abbott wants to have armed schools in Texas but Gov. Jerry Brown prefers California’s restrictive guns laws, well, fine. If the state law doesn’t violate the Constitution, then it’s not an issue for Washington. It’s not clear that Trump was thinking about such federalist nuance when he declared “Gun free zones are dangerous. The bad guys love gun-free zones.”

When I first wrote about guns in schools last month I was primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of placing half a million guns close to hormonally-challenged teenagers. Today, I’m also worried about a president who seems to view America as more of a personal fiefdom than as a collection of states with different peoples, traditions, and priorities. What’s good for San Francisco is not always good for San Antonio.

Defense of the image of God in man is always good, regardless of where it is or who does it.  The fact that The Weekly Standard published this pabulum speaks volumes on just what kind of people run the place.

I always said that Heller was weak, as was McDonald, and I can go back in time and find numerous examples of said dislike for the Heller decision.  But the constitution is a covenant whose rights are applied to all people in every nook and cranny of America all of the time.  It’s not by mistake that the progressives see rights as limited, but constitutional allowances for wars of choice, federal taxation, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, the EPA, and on and on the list could go, from the department of education to SWAT teams and the war on drugs, to federally controlled and mandated health care, to subsidized housing and redistribution of wealth, and federal ownership of land.

The powers of the federal government (except to enforce the guaranteed right of RKBA) are unlimited, but your rights don’t even rate enough for any one to care if a state wants to violate them.

Or in other words, The Weekly Standard, like all progressives, has it ass backwards.

The Verge:

In the days after the Parkland shooting, users flocked to Wikipedia to learn about guns. When users searched for “AR-15” — the style of gun used during the shooting — they were directed to the page for the “Colt AR-15.” The page was viewed more than 200,000 times on the day after Parkland, a hundred times its usual traffic. But those users didn’t find much information about mass shootings or political efforts. In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun’s various parts.

That focus on hardware was by design. For months, the “Colt AR-15” page has been largely edited by a group of gun enthusiast editors. They joined together under the name “Wikipedia Project: Firearms,” or “WP:Firearms” for short. Expertise groups are common on Wikipedia, and in some ways, WP:Firearms fits the mold perfectly: a collection of users with detailed knowledge of a specific topic, keeping a close eye on all the pages where that knowledge might be relevant. But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.

Much of the alleged bias comes from how the articles are structured. For months before Parkland, information on generic AR-15 models was relegated to the Modern Sporting Rifles entry, which detailed various models and after-market additions, but made no mention of mass shootings or other gun control efforts. When some editors tried to include those topics, the backlash from WP:Firearms was immediate.

“Mass-shootings already have their own articles, all relevant info is, or should be, in that page and not needlessly duplicated on other articles,” one editor wrote. “If we start adding info about just one shooting incident to one tenuously-connected article, we’ll be opening a literal Pandora’s box (figuratively speaking).”

Fighting a similarly proposed edit on the Smith & Wesson page, user Trekphiler went further. “There are millions of weapons in civilian hands, including thousands of AR-15s,” he wrote, “and none of them have harmed anyone. This is the usual gun confiscator garbage.”

When users tried to detail the gun control concerns in the Colt AR-15 page, where most “AR-15” searches were still being directed, they ran into another technicality. “Sorry, this is an article about Colt’s AR-15 ™ rifle,” one WP:Firearms editor responded. “This is not the correct article for information that is about AR-15’s in general. That section of the article should be edited to remove the references to crimes that were not committed with Colt AR-15 rifles.”

The fight over gun nomenclature goes far beyond Wikipedia. Gun enthusiasts see terms like “assault weapon” as imprecise, while concrete terms like “semi-automatic” are overly broad. Even the term “AR-15” is difficult to pin down: what was a once-specific trademark has metastasized into a trans-corporate branding tool. “Modern sporting rifle,” the term preferred by WP:Firearms, is seen by many as a public relations gambit by the gun industry to downplay how deadly the weapons really are. There’s no perfect term, but as long as the two sides are fighting over nomenclature, any proposed measures will get lost in a maze of conflicting terms. And on crowdsourced and managed Wikipedia, that means heated, arcane, and tautological debates, often driven by political and cultural biases.

The title of The Verge article is “How gun buffs took over Wikipedia’s AR-15 page.”  Adam Weinstein also bitches about the throw-down he is witnessing over guns.

The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between the terms clip and magazine.

Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.

It can feel infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions between our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.

“Gunsplained and harangued.”  Ooo … if you think this is tough, just wait until you try to take them from us.  That’ll really be the bitchin’ day!

Just go cry me a river boys.  Grow a set, and stop griping over the fight you asked for on guns.  Uh oh, here comes a flock of wah wah’s.

PJM:

A bipartisan group of senators today unveiled legislation requiring federal authorities to notify state law enforcement officials when a person barred from purchasing a gun attempts to do so.

The NICS Denial Notification Act was introduced by Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). The senators argue that those who fail the background check and violate the law when trying to get a gun — such as convicted felons and domestic abusers — are rarely prosecuted.

Only 13 states currently run their own background checks using the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System system. The rest, including the District of Columbia, rely on the FBI to screen gun buyers, meaning they have to rely on federal reporting to know when someone prohibited from gun ownership pulls a “lie and try.”

Under the new legislation, the FBI would have 24 hours to notify state authorities. Coons calls the bill “one modest, commonsense way” for senators to work across the aisle on gun legislation.

“We can make progress on gun safety while respecting the Second Amendment rights of American citizens, including better enforcing existing gun laws and responding to warning signs that we get of criminal behavior,: said Toomey. “This bipartisan bill is a critical step forward in helping to ensure that our communities can be safe from criminals.”

The legislation comes with the endorsements of the Fraternal Order of Police, Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, National District Attorneys Association, National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and Everytown for Gun Safety.

Everytown likes it, and that’s all you need to know.  So are your surprised to see Graham, Toomey, Cornyn and Rubio on this list of quislings?  No, I’m not either.

So let’s make sure you’ve got this straight.  Let’s say that a former Soldier or Marine serves his country with honor, and comes home only to be diagnosed with PTSD, like most of them who saw combat and earned a Combat Action Ribbon (CAR, so-called in the USMC), with reporting done to the NICS.  Many if not most warriors who suffer PTSD recover, and they weren’t a danger to anyone anyway.

Let’s also say that they didn’t know that it is the policy of the VA that warriors with PTSD are reported to the NICS.  Let’s also say that said warrior tries to go buy a gun at his local gun shop, only to find out that unbeknownst to him, he is on a prohibited list.

He’s now a felon just for not knowing, and not only that, he will have to fill out any future form 4473s saying that he was once prohibited by the NICS from purchasing a firearm.

That’s what these quislings want to do.  Just so you know.

ISIS fighters were gun controllers, remember.

“ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’ ” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

This is no different than Adolf Hitler, who confiscated weapons and outlawed a lot of other firearms hardware from his enemies.

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

Do you want more?

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.   So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.”

How about Benito Mussolini.

“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. … They were elements of disorder and subversion.  On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind.  This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”

We could go on with Pol Pot, communist China, Stalin, the Christian Armenian genocide at the hands the Turkish Muslims, and so on.  Suffice it to say that dictators love gun control.

What about today?

Khamenei’s “hard line” on guns is nothing new. One of the Ayatollah’s first orders of business, when he came to power, was to disarm his own citizens – a technique regularly used by “supreme leaders” to extend their tenures.

Ultimately, Khamenei makes a unique case that the Second Amendment is, in fact, an insurance policy against tyranny.

Now, of course, the left, despite being vocal on gun control for the last several weeks, embracing nearly every unqualified expert in agreement with them, up to and including members of the Kardashian family, has been silent on the Ayatollah’s expressed agreement with their agenda. But there is an undercurrent of support – as recently as early January, the Huffington Post wrote glowingly of some of the Ayatollah’s ideas.

Gun control is tyranny, and tyrants love gun control.  It’s in their blood.  It’s who they are.  Any time you hear talk of gun control, remember this and equate the advocate of gun control with Stalin, Mussolini, Turkish Muslims, Khamenei, and ISIS.

This includes any gun control measures, like advocating a ban on bump stocks.  Hey, didn’t the NRA do this?

NRA:

Even as the nation was grieving the terrible loss of life in Parkland, Fla., gun control activists were doing what they do best: exploiting tragedy to advance their political agenda.  Gun control activists are pushing a message that you are to blame for the criminal violence that took place last month. They’re attempting to capitalize on this tragedy to convince members of Congress to vote for their gun control wish list. 

Proposals to ban the most popular rifles in America, arbitrarily limit magazine capacity, require a waiting period on all firearm sales, and restrict the right of law-abiding young adults to acquire rifles and shotguns have been suggested as “solutions” by those who wish to curtail the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Legislation encompassing these proposals could be voted on in the U.S. Congress in the coming weeks. That’s why it’s imperative that you contact your members of Congress and state lawmakers today and ask them to oppose all gun control schemes that would only impact law-abiding gun owners.

Hey, wasn’t it the NRA who went on record saying that bump stocks should be banned, or at least an NFA item?  Yea, it sure was.

It’s almost like the NRA is stirring up trouble in Congress trying to get them to do things against the wishes of the gun community in order to get the gun community to donate dollars to try to fight what they’ve stirred up.  If you can get it, that’s a sweet gig.

David Codrea:

The latest citizen disarmament plot currently being hatched will raise the minimum age for rifle purchases to 21. While some are specifically calling out semi-automatic rifles, others want it all. Such plans are  gaining traction at the state and federal level by no shortage of Democrat opportunists and “bipartisan” Republican panderers, including Sen. Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump.

An interesting article over at Firearms News notes Audie Murphy would have been deemed “too young” to be trusted with a rifle at the time his legendary heroics earned him recognition as the most decorated combat soldier of WWII.

But wait, the emperor-god Trump wants it, so it must be good, or he must be lying, or he must be playing 4-D chess while everyone else is playing checkers, or something else, it can’t really be that Trump didn’t keep his promises to be pro-gun, can it?

Yea, sign me up for opposition to said stupidity, but you knew that already.

On a different subject entirely, David has a great idea for a new gun law.  I support this one.  Don’t look for it in the bills on the House or Senate web site though.

Time:

Dick’s Sporting Goods announced on Wednesday that it would stop selling assault-style rifles in all of its stores, a direct reaction to the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead.

“When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” CEO Edward Stack said.

The move leaves just one major retailer standing alone in continuing to sell the semi-automatic assault-style rifles commonly used in mass shootings: Bass Pro Shops, which now includes Cabela’s, a competitor it purchased last year. Bass Pro Shops was named by Forbes as one of America’s largest privately-owned companies. There are a total of over 160 Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops retail stores in the U.S. and Canada. Both stores also sell high-capacity magazines, which allow shooters to fire a higher number of rounds without needing to reload.

Many large companies have changed their policies around guns lately, as protesters push for tougher regulations. Some have cut ties with the National Rifle Assocation, ending discount programs for NRA members. Dick’s announced that all of its stores would immediately stop selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, and that it would no longer sell any guns whatsoever to customers who are under the age of 21.

While stating that “we support and respect the Second Amendment,” Dick’s also urged Congress to take action and called for a national ban on assault-style firearms, a ban on high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, and a minimum age of 21 for all firearms sales. “Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough,” a Dick’s press release said.

[ … ]

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has also been scaling back gun sales at its stores. In 2006, Walmart stopped selling guns at roughly one-third of its stores, citing “diminished customer relevancy.” In 2015, all Walmart stores stopped selling semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, the weapon of choice in mass shootings such as those in Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, and most recently in Parkland, Florida.

Ridiculous.  So someone tell me the last time you were in a Dick’s or Walmart and saw anyone buy a gun?  Anyone?  I didn’t think so.

Gun buyers don’t go to Walmart or Dick’s.  You have to call someone over to the counter just to ask about that ammunition behind the counter that you can’t pick up.  Otherwise, the gun counter is the most unmanned part of the store.  No one is buying anything, save a little ammunition or cleaning supplies from time to time.

Walmart will still continue to struggle competing with Amazon, and Dick’s will continue to sell pansy-ass golf gear and clothes and wonder why they’re struggling compared to Bass Pro Shop and Cabela’s – where you can get literally anything you want.

And nothing else will change.  And time will continue to write breathless, hyperventilating fake news about big wins for the gun control lobby.

The Hill:

“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

No, you didn’t go to sleep and imagine Trump being elected, only to wake and find out that you’re still in the Obama era.  Obama didn’t say that.  Trump did.

Wasn’t this the guy that was going to save the second amendment and root out the deep state, drain the swamp and make America great again?  Or was he just a temporary stop on the way to dystopia, a delay for getting ready for what we all know is coming?

See, the whole idea behind “due process” is that it happens first, not second.  It’s not due process if it happens out of sequence.  But he didn’t think very deeply about this before he said it.  It may be what he believes and feels, but it sounds so stupid that if he thought about it, he wouldn’t have actually said it.

And if he was more of a thinking man, he might have pondered the fact that no progressive is going to vote for him in the next election for being a gun controller, but he might just have alienated the very base that put him in office to begin with.  But remember his words during the debates: “Everything is negotiable.”  That apparently includes your  God-given rights.

You don’t have enough ammunition yet.  Neither do I.

Michael Gerson at The Washington Post:

It is one of the dirty habits of our political discourse that so many people use thermonuclear rhetorical weapons as a first resort. It is not enough for defenders of gun rights to be wrong; they must be complicit in murder. It is not enough for gun-control advocates to be mistaken; they must be jackbooted thugs laying the groundwork for tyranny.

These competing apocalypses, paradoxically, make politics appear smaller — the realm of unbalanced partisans and professional hyperventilators. But more destructively, this type of argument makes incremental change — the kind that our system of government encourages — more difficult.

This is a particular shame on the issue of gun violence. The maximal solutions — broad restrictions on gun ownership or fixing the mental-health system — are so difficult or unlikely that they have become obstacles to action. They are something like, on the issue of global warming, recommending that the Earth be moved farther from the sun.

[ … ]

When it comes to mass killings, we know what the perpetrators generally look like: disappointed loners, motivated by grudges, seeking fame and planning their violence carefully. So here is an answerable public-policy question: What can we do to identify these dangerous malcontents and keep ­military-grade weaponry out of their hands? We should be considering: special police task forces that actively identify and track prospective killers instead of ­passively responding to warnings. ­Higher age restrictions on gun access. Broader application of gun­ violence protective orders that forbid gun ownership to people exhibiting warning signs. Better education on those warning signs among adults who deal with young men. Media norms against using the names of mass killers, which only encourages their deadly performance art.

[ … ]

When it comes to American gun culture, the issue of motivation matters a great deal. If you defend access to guns for sport and self-defense, there is no logical reason to reject reasonable ­restrictions on firepower and access. Some compromise — focused on keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous and unstable people — is within the realm of possibility. But if you view the ultimate purpose of gun ownership as resistance to a future (or present) tyrannical government, then restrictions on firepower and access are exactly the things a tyrannical government would want. Because the goal of an oppressive state is to have a monopoly on sophisticated weaponry, any incremental movement toward that goal is unacceptable.

This argument — summarized by David French as “the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny” — is perhaps understandable in a country born of revolutionary violence. But more than two centuries removed from the ­revolution, the concept seems, well, frightening.

When I look at many of the people holding the guns, I don’t really view them as legitimate protectors of my rights, or as qualified to make choices about the employment of violence in politics. I don’t view America as halfway to tyranny. And I am grateful that Americans such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — who suffered actual oppression by government — made a principled commitment to nonviolent political change.

It is one thing when Thomas Jefferson said “the tree of liberty must be ­refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It is another thing entirely when your well-armed neighbor says the same.

I have no idea how much this attitude infects the right. But the fever can be measured in talk of a “deep state” coup against the president, in sympathy for Cliven Bundy in his armed standoff with federal agents, in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) when he ordered the State Guard to monitor the Navy SEAL/Green Beret joint training exercise Jade Helm 15. All destructive madness.

So let me assist you a bit, Michael.  First of all, I would do nothing to protect you against tyranny.  You’re the enemy, or at least you’re in bed with the enemy.  You love tyranny.  You love high taxes, government control, government-run health care, redistribution of wealth, and a police state.

You’ve traded liberty for a semblance of security, but that security is only as the state deems right and fitting.  You could wake up tonight to a SWAT team busting your door in and shooting your loved ones, all in the name of a war on drugs, with no apologies, no recompense, and no explanation.  Wrong home?  Who cares – certainly not the police.  You feed from the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.  And you’re happy with that.

There are a lot of us.  We’re the dirt people.  You get your power from us, and your lights come on only because we allow it.  We feed you.  We drive the trucks that deliver your supplies.  We make the lines of logistics.  We grow your crops and worry about heavy equipment breakage and droughts and the price of goods and paying our employees.

And we have guns.  We have pistols, shotguns, bolt action rifles, and AR-15s.  You’re not getting any of them.  One of my commenters observed something that may be enlightening to you.  Listen closely.

The gun-banners aren’t too well-educated and haven’t thought things through. They really haven’t. They have not studied the history of the Prohibition Era enough in depth to realize that the federal government can’t really outlaw anything – all the government can do is force buyers and sellers of goods/services out of the above-board, legal market and into the underground economy and black market. That’s it.

It’s basic economics. As long as a market for a particular good or service exists, and producers/sellers of that particular good or service exist, they will find a way to do business – whether the government likes it or not. Not only the prohibition of alcohol, either, but the so-called “war on drugs” proves this fact.

All the Eighteenth Amendment really did was to turn tens of millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into instant felons overnight by making illegal what had previously been legal – the production, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

At the stroke of a pen, millions of gainfully-employed people were rendered unemployed, and businesses large and small immediately felt the ripple effects of the new laws. Not only the tavern down the street, but the liquor distributor across town and the bottling plant the next state over and the largest firms involved in the business of slaking their customer’s thirst.

Alcohol prohibition also – nearly single-handedly – created and enabled the explosive growth of the mafia – the outfit, the mob, La Cosa Nostra, whatever you wish to term them. The biggest syndicates moved huge amounts of liquor, beer and spirits smuggled into the U.S. from outside; reaping giant profits in the process.

It took the FBI (back when that agency still had a shred or two of honor to its name) decades to finally beat back and take down the mob, so powerful had they gotten in the 1920s and 1930s.

Alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs will fade into insignificance in comparison to the massive underground economy sure to be created in the wake of any national ban on the ownership of firearms. Such a ban would surely create the largest and most-profitable black market in history.

And bear in mind that such a vast underworld enterprise will likely not restrict itself to the sales of deer rifles and five-shot revolvers; it will deal in the latest military-grade hardware – including fully-automatic weapons. After all, if the mere fact of owning a firearm is already a crime, there is no additional harm done going “all in” and getting the mil-spec hardware.

Very quickly, this country will move from resembling the U.S.A. we have known and loved to something like Mogadishu, Somalia, where even a poor man can afford to buy an AK47 and an RPG down at the local market and arms bazaar.

We don’t like government interference and government intervention.  You see, when the Scriptures teach us that “The good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,” we take that seriously.  That means government theft is immoral, and if the government has become an impediment to us providing for our children’s children, then the government has become a stumbling block and worker of evil.

We do not look to the state to provide, protect and give us cradle to grave security like you do Michael.  It might be “scary” to you that we’re armed the way we are.  That’s by intent, for our armaments are not only for our own personal protection, but amelioration of tyranny.  We aren’t “legitimate protectors of your rights,” we are legitimate protectors of our rights.  People like us believe that the Mr. David French you cite is too progressive and we pay little attention to him.  You mustn’t forget the history of gun control, with the Armenian genocide, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hitler and The Third Reich, and Stalin, all of whose regimes were preceded by gun confiscations and gun control laws.  Deaths at the hands of tyrants in the last century approached 200 million souls.

So the best and quickest way to ensure the war you apparently fear is to keep pushing government control and disarmament.  Do it at your own peril, Michael.  Your secure home and lifestyle inside the beltway may not be as secure as you think if you can’t control that controller impulse in yourself.