White House misfires on control
New rules should not punish all gun owners
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2013/01/white_house_misfires_control
The position of pro-Second Amendment Americans is that gun ownership is part of the fundamental human right to self-defense, explicitly stated in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers due to an overarching political philosophy regarding the balance of power between the individual and the state.
The position of the anti-gun activists in the Obama administration is “guns are icky.”
The media consider them the intellectuals in this debate.
<!--// Ad placed here using body_with_300x250_ad custom formatter //-->And so Fox News reports “White House In Gun Control Sprint.” President Obama wants to fast-track a stack of new gun laws before the lingering pain and horror of the Newtown, Conn., massacre fades.
According to the Washington Post, Obama’s task force has already blown past the return of the so-called “assault weapons” ban and a ban on high-capacity magazines. They’ve moved on to “regulations that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors.”
I thought the point of this White House task force was to “prevent more tragedies” like Newtown, as the president said when he announced it. If so, please re-read the last paragraph. Am I missing something?
“Universal background checks” — whatever that means — might or might not be a good thing. They certainly sound reasonable to me. But how would they have prevented Adam Lanza from shooting up that elementary school? He took a rifle that belonged to his mother.
The same with “tracking the sale and movement” of guns. I’m not sure about the constitutionality of forcing me to report to the government when I pass down my father’s shotgun to my son one day, but once again — this prevents another Newtown … how?
And sure, I’m all for “strengthening mental health checks,” but unless you’re going to make your local gun store owner a licensed therapist, how does he stop a guy like Lanza — with no diagnosis of mental illness — from buying a gun?
Most laughable (and this is no laughing matter, which makes the White House’s position even more angering) is the “stiffened penalties for carrying guns near schools.”
So Joe Biden’s telling me that Lanza, overcome by his mental condition to the point that he’s murdered his mother and is headed to an elementary school on a killing spree, is going to stop 1,000 yards from the playground and think, “Hey — I don’t want Obama to take away my student loan subsidy. I better keep these guns away from school!”
These are the thoughtful, well-reasoned ideas from the Obama brain trust?
And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that gun laws are utterly meaningless to criminals, anyway. Don’t believe me? Ask the families of the 506 people fatally shot in Obama’s “gun-controlled” hometown of Chicago last year.
I’m not one of the knee-jerk pro-gun types who oppose all laws. I don’t think of gun ownership as the highest form of patriotism. Show me a law on law-abiding gun owners that will have a meaningful impact on gun violence, and I’m all ears.
But that’s not what the White House is offering. In the face of undeniable evidence that, for 20 years, gun ownership rates have gone up while gun deaths have plunged (the lowest since at least 1981, according to FactCheck.org), Obama’s pushing for a large-scale “punish-all-gun-owners” approach.
So much so that some Senate Democrats are already backing away from the task force’s work.
If the White House would stop playing on emotions for the sake of far-left politics, we could actually get something done about gun crime in the U.S.