Obama’s anti-gun sideshow

So Obama trotted out some kids yesterday to tell the world that he “respects” the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution but doesn’t really believe in it.

Rick Perry encapsulated this sideshow perfectly:

“In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president.”

Obama hiding behind those kids was utterly despicable, and a tactic used by others in history. Equally disgusting was when then this “Constitutional scholar” described the 2nd Amendment:

Like most Americans, I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. I respect our strong tradition of gun ownership and the rights of hunters and sportsmen. There are millions of responsible, law-abiding gun owners in America who cherish their right to bear arms for hunting or sport or protection or collection.

I’ll show you why the 2nd Amendment was written:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/nUmKT43j4Tc[/youtube]

Most of his executive orders are in the order of strengthen this, strengthen that, but in the end it will do nothing to prevent a criminal or a nutcase from obtaining any weapon they want. The black market of stolen/smuggled guns is alive and well and getting a large capacity magazine or “assault weapon” will be as hard as getting rock cocaine from your local friendly drug pusher.

Ace:

Obama is now calling for 10 round limit on magazines. No word if he’s calling for outlawing “reloading”.

And of course he wants to go after “assault weapons” even though he has no idea what an “assault weapon” is.

Larry Correia broke this kind of ban down the best:

We need to ban automatic weapons.

Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a cop.

Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective government bans are.

When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.

Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!

Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.

Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.

They cannot ban semi-auto weapons unless they violate our Constitution. They can try to ban weapons based on flash-suppressors and threaded barrels or how scary they look but this will do NOTHING to stop guns from getting into the hands of criminals. And trying to ban these weapons on the federal level is questionable.

Constitutional law expert Adam Freedman:

The president on Wednesday announced his push for a new assault weapons ban. A bill from Sen. Dianne Feinstein would basically outlaw semiautomatic guns with magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.

Asked if this would infringe upon the Second Amendment as gun proponents say, Freedman tells Newsmax: “It’s not clear from the White House’s statement that what they’re doing is going to back the Feinstein bill. But if that’s what the president means, because he says he wants to reenact and strengthen the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004, if he means the Feinstein bill, then yes, I think we probably do have a Second Amendment problem here.

“The Second Amendment really prohibits in practice government at state or federal level prohibiting entire classes of weapons. Most weapons today are semiautomatic, which means that you don’t have to reload or re-cock the trigger in between each squeeze of the trigger. So the Feinstein bill gets closer and closer to a bill that really defines assault weapons in terms of virtually all semiautomatic weapons. They simply have to be capable of having the attachable clip and have just one other characteristic which Congress deems to be military in style.

“When you get to that point you’re really sweeping in the vast majority of weapons that law-abiding citizens use for their own self-protection.”

New York State on Tuesday passed sweeping limits on guns that include a ban on assault weapons.

“We can expect legal challenges” to parts of the law, says Freedman.

“There’s an obvious challenge to the way that the New York Assembly drafted the ammunition clip prohibition, because they set a maximum size of ammunition clips at seven rounds. The fact is such clips are almost unheard of. Ten rounds is the standard sort of minimum size for detachable clips, according to what I read.

“Even Sen. Feinstein’s proposed legislation, as I understand it, would preserve the ability to have 10-round clips. But New York by mandating a seven-round clip, which is a creature that basically doesn’t exist, is arguably just trying to outlaw semiautomatic weapons and there they’re on really shaky Second Amendment grounds.”

As for the rest of his executive orders it’s all window dressing. Strengthen background checks? Sure…but the Newtown shooter was already blocked from buying weapons. But surprise surprise, he got them anyway. “Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime”….okay, I guess we should start with Eric Holder.

Hire school resource officers?

Hmmmmm….I seem to recall the NRA calling for that.

This was all a sideshow, and he used kids to do it

Exit quote:

Now, the 23 executive orders Barack Obama signed that are aimed at “reducing gun violence” could be considered, at worst, cynically political or, at best, completely useless. But the way Obama treats the process, children, the debate, the Constitution and the American people is another story. Sen. Rand Paul recently remarked that “someone who wants to bypass the Constitution, bypass Congress — that’s someone who wants to act like a king or a monarch.” That may be a bit hyperbolic, but it is also a bit true.

“There are millions of responsible, law-abiding gun owners in America,” lectured Obama, “who cherish their right to bear arms for hunting or sport or protection or collection.” (Or — as it must have slipped the president’s mind — the right to put a gun in a case labeled “open in case of tyranny.”) The president went on to profess that he believes that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms. If this were true for Obama, who was once a constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago, why would he attempt to restrict a right that is explicitly laid out in the Bill of Rights (even if it were eminently sensible) without putting it through the republican wringer — the deliberation, the checks and balances, all of it?

Curt

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