Posted on 02/09/2004 9:03:09 AM PST by Lazamataz
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:45:44 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Washington -- Gun control hasn't emerged as a leading issue in the 2004 presidential race, but that is likely to change as Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein intensifies her effort to win renewal of the decade-old assault weapons ban, which expires in September.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
*shrug* Your loss.
I am here to tell you that it will absolutely make it to his desk.
Then come 2005, it will no longer be his desk.
The Republicans want a line in the sand? They got it.
And if it gets there, bet the house that he'll sign it. Consider it a rerun of CFR. If the Second Amendment is abolished, it will happen in a Republican administration. This is what happens when the president stops being an American and starts being a globalist.
Mine too. The second amendment is the only thing we have to keep the traitors in check. As long as we're armed they will be afraid of us, and that's the way I like it. They're going to have one hell of a battle if they try to disarm us. They're NOT getting my guns. Period!!
This stuff would be trivially easy for Bush to defuse. He could make them look like raving idiots in thirty seconds, and walk away from the microphone smiling, with millions of supporters across the country cheering for him.
They don't care about you keeping your guns.
They care about you transferring your guns, they care about you maintaining your guns (i.e., parts availability), and they care about you feeding your guns (i.e., ammunition and components, and reloading tools).
They're patient, and they've got incrementalism down pat. They know that if they can continue slowly gaining compromise after compromise, your guns will, inside of a generation or so, be just so much worthless scrap metal.
As to passing them down to your children, well, once transfer is made illegal, with draconian penalties for those who cannot demonstrate legal provenance, then there'll be very few of the next generation who'll be willing to throw their lives away for an infraction.
What? You say your children won't be moved by those considerations? That doesn't matter. They're playing a numbers game. Plenty will be so moved. Most, in fact. That's what they're counting on.
The only thing that can stop this from happening is for "our" side to stop "compromising" away the farm. "Compromise" is inevitably a one-way street. You don't see the antis "compromising" anything they want. It's always the pro-2nd people who are called upon to "compromise" If you only lose ten percent a year, on average, it won't take long to lose virtually everything.
Sadly, I don't see "our" side doing much other than weak-kneed talk about holding the line, more or less, for a while. Nothing about turning back the tide. In fact, I hear proud talk about maintaining the current morass of legislation, as if it's a good thing.
Key words: "as he said he'd do."
Some in Congress may talk big about holding the line, but when Master Rove initiates the arm twisting, they'll cry uncle, and do as they're told. They always do. Remember, the AWB renewal is of the "no reasonable person could object" category.
And Bush is a very reasonable man.
The guns it covered had to meet a so-called two-characteristic test, meaning the weapon could be banned if it had two features from a long list that included items such as automatic ammunition clips [lie - there's no such thing.], a pistol grip, a barrel shroud or flash suppressor.To get around the ban, manufacturers simply changed the guns to remove one of the characteristics on the list and kept on producing them. [Another lie - they had to remove all the features except one from the list.] The Bushmaster XM15 used in the 2002 sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C., area, for instance, was one of these weapons, a clone of the banned AR-15 assault rifle. [And with a rate of fire of one shot every three days, any other weapon including muzzle loading cannon could have worked.]
This loophole [LIE!! It's not a loophole, it's a specific legal exemption that was explicitly created by law.] is one that would be closed in legislation introduced in the House and Senate that is even stricter than the Feinstein-Schumer legislation. Its co-sponsors include Feinstein's California Democratic colleague, Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is running for re-election this November. [She must be defeated.]
Keep in mind that in the early drafts of the current law, she tried to slip into the "Definitions" section a statement defining any "repeating" firearm as a "semiautomatic" firearm.
Cute, eh? First, demonize the terminology, and then get rid of everything you want to eliminate, by simply redefining it as that terminology.
And what exactly did you have in mind?
I called Dole's office when this thing first went through. I said I was against it. The phone-person took my information, and said the phones were ringing off the hook. Everyone was against it. As I recall, Dole himself said that the calls were coming in something like 2,000 to one against him voting for it.
He voted for it.
I started saving on my phone bill after that. I live in a fairly windy area. If I want to, it's no effort to step outside and aim into the wind before unzipping my fly. But, I don't want to -- so I don't step outside, and I don't do the equivalent with "my" people in Congress.
So tell me, how do we "make sure it dies in congress"? It's not like I can tell them I'll turn off the money valve, since I'm not currently "contributing" beaucoup thousands of dollars. So why should they listen to me, when there's no percentage in it? Short answer: they won't. They figure they own our votes, and they perform as directed for those who own them (the ones who "donate" the real money), and so it goes.
Doesn't matter. Rove knows that no matter what happens, he owns the gun owners vote (NWIH will NRA say NOT to vote for Bush), so, he knows he gets to have his cake and eat it too. He keeps the gun owners vote, because "where are they gonna go", and, he doesn't alienate the "reasonable people", because he signs the "reasonable law" back into effect.
The best of both worlds. That Rove's a genius, I tell ya.
Mixed feelings about Rove. Some of advice advice to GWB isn't worth a two-finger pince of three-day-old owl shit. His prolific $pending, immigration are but two examples. If he goes belly-up on the AW Ban? Back to USTP/CP for me...
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