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« on: December 19, 2012, 04:07:44 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Chronicle 12-19-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
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They're Coming for Your Guns
December 19, 2012
The Foundation
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants." --Cesare Beccaria, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book
Editorial Exegesis
"What happened in Newtown is not an occasion for a national political 'conversation.' It is an occasion to reflect on why we have political conversations at all. ... It is easy, and in moments of despair such as Friday quite understandable, to scream 'more' to gun control, 'more' to the morass of airport-style security that is spreading its way across our institutions, 'more' to the diagnosis and institutionalization of the mentally ill. But it is much harder to write the laws that would have guaranteed Adam Lanza could never find a gun, or enter a school by force, or go without what diagnosis, treatment, and supervision he might have needed. And hardest of all to write them in such a way that the republic we'd be left with would still look like America in the ways we value most. This is not so say such laws cannot or should not be written -- in the field of mental health, in particular, we think there are commonsense reforms that might make tragedies such as Newtown less likely -- but merely to caution humility and care in their crafting. The need for humility is especially acute in the case of gun control. The irreducible challenge the Second Amendment poses to gun restrictionists is that it does not bestow upon the people a right they previously lacked. It proscribes the government from infringing upon a right the people already have. It is not that the people are allowed to arm. It is that the government is disallowed to disarm them. The practical consequence of living for nearly two-and-a-half centuries under the almost universally benevolent protection of the Second Amendment is a society in which there are hundreds of millions of guns, in which 47 percent of families and nearly as many Democrats as Republicans own guns, and in which the dissent over the sacrosanctity of gun rights is heard largely because of the overrepresentation in the media of the coastal, urban Left. Those upset with the order of things are welcome to try, and doomed to fail, to repeal the Second Amendment via the constitutional process. But the guns of America aren't going anywhere any time soon, and generic calls to 'do something' -- even insofar as doing something is desirable -- must reckon with this fact." --National Review1
Upright
"The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available. If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive. ... Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals. In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. ... Guns are not the problem. People are the problem -- including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts. There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates." --economist Thomas Sowell
"The rifle that Lanza used, a .223-caliber Bushmaster M4 carbine, is legal under Connecticut's 'assault weapon' ban, and the federal law used the same criteria. ... Any gun that can be used for self-defense or other legitimate purposes also can be used to murder people. Guns like Lanza's, modeled after the Colt AR-15, are among the most popular rifles in America, with an estimated 3.5 million sold since 1986. Only a tiny fraction of them are ever used in crimes. ... FBI numbers indicate that rifles of any kind (not just 'assault weapons') are used in less than 3 percent of murders. Even killers with multiple victims are much more likely to use ordinary handguns than 'assault weapons.' I use those scare quotes because the very term 'assault weapon' was invented by the anti-gun lobby as a way of blurring the distinction between semi-automatic firearms, which fire once per trigger pull, and machine guns such as the selective-fire assault rifles carried by soldiers." --columnist Jacob Sullum
"An industry devoted to serving the public's right to know gives twisted and evil men the means of becoming known. This problem is not obviously amenable to a solution, and it certainly is not amenable to a legal one. A regime of media regulation that would be both effective at preventing mass shootings and consistent with the American Constitution is no easier to imagine than a regime of gun regulation that would meet the same criteria." --Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto
Demo-gogues
Gun grabbers unite: "On the first day of the new Congress, I intend to introduce a bill stopping the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of assault weapons as well as large ammunition magazines, strips and drums that hold more than 10 rounds." --Sen. Dianne Feinstein on plans for a renewed ban on rifles that look scary
"How does something like [Newtown] happen? Because a person with impaired judgment had access to firepower that should be outlawed. There is no reason why these assault magazines -- and that's what they are. We've got to call them what they are." --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
"I was just giving the White House a heads up that the gloves are off on my side, and I was going to do everything I possibly could. If that meant embarrassing everybody, that's what I would do. ... We owe it to those families, and to our own children, to do something about our nation's problem with gun violence." --Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY)
"We need people, just ordinary Americans, to come together, and speak out, and to sit down and calmly reflect on how far we go. I'm going to be holding a hearing after the first of the year, in about two weeks or so, on this constitutional question [of guns]. That's the starting point." --Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
That was then: "If you are a law-abiding gun owner you have nothing to fear from an Obama administration." --Barack Obama in 2008
Belly laugh of the week: "The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican." --Barack Obama |
