Posted on 07/14/2012 5:34:20 AM PDT by marktwain
Back door gun control is the phenomena where an entity will enact a law that indirectly affects your right to keep and bear arms. It’s easier to pass legislation that harms Second Amendment rights when it does not directly require the citizen to surrender a gun.
Examples of back door gun control are:
Define ammo components as an unhealthy threat.
Environmental laws designed to outlaw the use of ingredients that comprise components of arms related materials. The easiest example to point to is lead. Lead has long been the primary ingredient of bullets. Designating lead as an environmental hazard means that its use can be tightly controlled, and therefore restricted. Restrict lead and you restrict bullet production. Restrict bullet production and you dilute the ability to purchase ammo through increased materials cost.
Tax it if it shoots.
In 1993 New York Senate Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, proposed that taxes on handgun ammunition be raised to 50 percent on most handgun ammunition and 10,000 percent on 9mm hollow points. Taxes are the quick and dirty way to legislate something out of existence. Currently there is an 11 percent tax on ammo.
Engineer the practicality out of it.
Force manufacturers to have a biometric mechanism that prohibits anyone but the owner to operate the firearm. Effectively you need a computer chip somewhere enclosed in the firearm that is smart enough to recognize one user from the other and will enable the gun to fire by the proper finger. I hope the gun is forgiving enough so that when your wife grabs your gun to stop a bad guy that just broke in the house it fires.
Excessive tracking measures for guns and ammo.
The most frequently discussed measure is micro-stamping components and mandatory ballistics sampling for tracing purposes. Micro-stamping is a unique identifier on the bullet and the case so that the bullet can be matched up to the case which can be matched up to the gun. This method will make ammo more expensive and put onerous responsibility to track every round manufactured and sold. It also will be one giant leap toward outlawing hand-loading. Getting a fired round from every gun so ballistics matching can be done sounds like a reasonable action but as soon as a bad guy gets his hands on a gun he will take a file to the bore and ruin the ballistic fingerprint.
Shut down guns shows to kill private sales.
Let’s face it; closing down gun shows is about curtailing private gun sales. The “gun show loophole” is a wonderful catch phrase to demonize private sales but it’s about me not being able to sell my .22 to you. On the next level it is about someone not being able to give a gun as a gift and worse, it means that when Grandpa passes on he can’t leave you his rifle.
Call in the lawyers and bankrupt a gun owner. I once read that there are more lawyers in Washington DC, than in all of Japan. Yes, we live in a litigious country and most of us are certainly not capable of self-representation in court. I recently talked to a former private investigator and claims investigator on the subject of defensive shootings and he said “I won a lot of cases I should have lost and I lost a lot of cases I should have one.” What? Losing cases you should have one just doesn’t seem right.
Sad, but true, justice often goes to the best legal team and the best legal team does not come cheaply.
Consider this true scenario: You’ve legally checked your firearm at the airport of the state where you’re permitted to carry concealed. After flying into New York City, you’re greeted by two cops. They tell you to put your hands behind you back and throw the cuffs on you. You have just been arrested. After sitting in jail for 18 hours you have just found out you are there on felony charges. Yes, you are in big trouble and it is going to be expensive. It doesn’t matter if you are in the right, you now need legal help.
Call in the United Nations to grab small arms.
On July 2, 2012 the foreign affairs ministers for France, Great Britain, Germany and Sweden called for the ratification of the UN Small Arms Treaty saying “We have studied and discussed the issue in all its aspects. The overwhelming majority of UN member states have shown a true desire to address the problems posed by unregulated trade in conventional arms. This month, we are faced with the responsibility of fulfilling this commitment by crafting and agreeing a robust, effective and legally binding arms trade treaty. Now is the time for us to deliver.”
It takes a two-thirds majority in the United States Senate to ratify this treaty. The likelihood of the Senate passing this treaty is low, but stranger things have happened. If the citizens of foreign nations want to be disarmed that is fine. The UN needs to stay out of the gun lockers of the 80,000,000 US gun owners.
Back door gun control takes place in every level of government from townships to counties and states all the way to the United Nations. Don’t fall for terms like “common sense gun control.” We already have 14,000 gun laws on the books in the United States. Try enforcing the existing laws against criminals before trying to make criminals of law abiding citizens in order to disarm them.
Another is to define guns as a medical problem, a "disease vector".
With all that’s gone on since the days of Clinton, if one can lift all the ammunition one own, one is either naive or belongs on the Olympic weightlifting team.
>>Try enforcing the existing laws against criminals before trying to make criminals of law abiding citizens in order to disarm them.
Criminals are a means of controlling the population. The government cultivates them like a pack of hunting dogs. The catch and release prison system combined with welfare and bad schools is a breeding program.
This government, regardless of who is in charge, is the mortal enemy of the free man and we need to start coming to that realization.
A perfect example of “backdoor gun control” is that which exists in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
There, no gun may be sold unless it conforms with “the Attorney General’s Guidelines” with respect to safe firearms design.
What that means in practice is that no firearms company may sell their products in Massachusetts unless they’ve jumped through an endless series of legalistic hoops laid out by the Attorney General’s Office.
There’s no need for any legislation, and no legislator has so far sought to challenge the legality of this mandate by individual fiat.
What happened is, in effect, one man - the Massachusetts State Attorney General - outlawed most handguns simply by deciding it would be so.
No need to conform to the constitution, and no need to bother with any legislators or state assembly of any kind.
And, by the way, Mitt Romney never did a thing about it while he was governor.
Who wrote this?
bfl
The author is listed as Mike Piccione.
It is also vital to keep a simple strategic concept in mind.
“You cannot win just by playing defense.”
A lot of such oppressive laws are passed gradually, keeping up continual pressure. The only proper response is not only to prevent such gradualism, but to push in the opposite direction, putting the advocates of oppressive laws on the defense.
Look at the current anti-gun schemes, with an idea of not just blocking them, but of reversing them.
1) Define ammo components as an unhealthy threat. This is being pushed through by government agencies, mostly EPA and Interior, so the only possible response is the threat of reducing the power and scope of these agencies.
2) Tax it if it shoots. In this case, taxation, directly or indirectly, of a Civil Right, such as newspapers, is very questionable, and in past has been left up to the states. However, there can be push back here with the idea that the federal courts should disallow taxation of Civil Rights, to include the purchase, ownership or use of guns.
3) Engineer the practicality out of it. This again goes to federal agencies who must be reduced in size and authority. In this case the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Center for Disease Control. However a lot of this is also taking place at the state level, so it needs to be fought there as well, likely through the federal courts again.
4) Excessive tracking measures for guns and ammo. This is probably the most tangible threat, and is just the tip of the iceberg to the massive federal push for personal dossiers and surveillance of all persons. Data mining of such information is a powerful tool to get control over the Civil Rights of the citizenry.
Unfortunately, there is yet to arise potent opposition to this monumental encroachment of freedom, liberty and privacy.
5) Shut down guns shows to kill private sales. Efforts to control gun transactions is backdoor registration, by forcing the association of individuals to guns. Government is already pretty blatant about forcing gun dealers to retain records for government use, to evade restrictions on their directly keeping records. The best way to fight back about this would be to require “sunset laws” on keeping information about gun sales by private and corporate dealers.
6) Call in the lawyers and bankrupt a gun owner. Not just gun owners, but gun dealers, and even gun manufacturers are a target for barratry by unscrupulous anti-gun lawyers working for anti-gun organizations. This is a tough nut to crack, as for many years the courts have been amenable to litigious scoundrels. But it needs to be done.
7) Call in the United Nations to grab small arms. The UN is a festering boil. Even with numerous PhDs representing western nations, the average education among delegates in the general assembly is 5th grade. The best way to take it down, or at least to reduce its mischief, would be to not directly call for its dissolution, or that the US should leave it, but that its headquarters should be moved to some place more *entertaining*, like Beijing.
Suggest that such a movement should be every 50 years in future. This would solve so many problems.
Thanks.
http://www.humanevents.com/author/mike-piccione/
Mike Piccione is founding editor of Guns & Patriots and is now an executive at U.S. Concealed Carry. A long time shooter, hunter and writer, Piccione is a Marine veteran, a NRA Marketing Manager and a member of the Fairfax County, VA, Community Emergency Response Team.
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Sounds like he is one of the good guys. I am not the best at composing posts here without gramatical errors. Without looking I concluded in error that he was a “typical” news man. hee hee hee
Margaret Thatcher called that the "wratchet effect". The government slides to the left with the lefties are in power (Obamacare, for instance) and when the righties get power they do not reverse what was done but simply stop, but usually slow down, the slide to the left.
So, there is a real fear that Obamacare and Dodd-Frank will only be repealed in part, or heaven forbid, not at all.
I suspect a lot of courts and bureacracies are going to use this as a means to barring a lot of folks from accessing firearms.
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