During the Tuesday debate at Hofstra, the president managed to be honest about precious few things but one of them was his opinion on the right to own and carry weapons that is essential to keeping power-mad busybodies from micromanaging your life. Said the Lightbringer:
But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.
1) Examples of “weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters” could include bows, or the old Brown Bess musket, the M1 .308 semi-auto rifle or the M1 carbine in .30, the AR platforms, the AK platforms, the Colt Walker .44 black powder revolving pistol, etc. etc. It’s an idiotic statement. Weaponry is weaponry, whether used for war, hunting, peacetime plinking, or self-defense. Weaponry makes a weaker man or woman the equal of any aggressor (provided you can hit your target.)
2) As to a “conversation” on guns and violence…we’ve had that conversation for decades. You and folks of your mindset are losing, Mr. President, and for good reason: You are wrong. The intent of the person who wields the weapon is the issue, not the weapon. A Glock 17 is a lump of plastic and metal that is inert without human agency. If your intent is to protect, to defend — a gun is a safe and practical tool, like a hammer or a tire patch kit for your car. You hope you don’t have to use it, but when you need it, nothing else quite will do the trick. If your intent is to deprive or harm, it doesn’t matter if you have a club, knife, or gun (or a badge and a police car, for that matter) — any harm inflicted is due to the person. It is character and integrity — something the president and many meddlesome “experts” like him lack — that makes the difference between “good” and “bad” intentions. And to that…
3) The “assault weapons” ban is useless. It does not ban “assault weapons” — which are and were perfectly legal with a Class 3 license for the device. It bans “scary looking” guns that idiots who have no experience with a gun, or who have ulterior motives, believe capable of all manner of destructiveness. “It’s an .88 Magnum; it shoots through schools!”
The AKs that they are referring to are not AK-47 automatic rifles. They are semi-automatic rifles that are no more dangerous than any other rifle. The AK-47 is automatic – when you depress the trigger, it will continue firing until the magazine is depleted. These only fire a single round. Gun haters will find that a niggling point; for those of us who have had to relie on a firearm, it’s a tremendous difference. (And for the record, a fully automatic weapon does little but waste ammunition.)
4) In the end, the president got to his actual point: cheap handguns. This is the goal of anti-gun statists — to disarm poor folks, as they did with banning “Saturday Night Specials” in the 1970s and ’80s. It was and is stupid to ban a particular caliber or type of handgun, and it is immoral to ban cheap ones that the poor can use to defend themselves from privation.
Which plays into the president’s comments about Chicago, a city with the most stringent gun laws in the nation. There is a wealth of gun violence in the city, just as there is in most cities with heavy gun ownership restrictions. A person of bad intent (see point 2) can always get a weapon, and the 3D printing craze is about to make banning guns even more impractical.
The president, as with most statists, does not have the public good in mind when they attack the Second Amendment rights bestowed on the people not by government, but by our sentient nature; it is a right to defend ourself and our property by our very existence. They wish to disarm the public because it takes away the ability of the People to say “No!” to busybodies that would rule your life (for your own good, of course.) It is an absolute necessity to the police state that the people be deprive of their ability to fight back.
