Hey Obama, your term can't last forever.
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Posted on 04/29/2013 11:18:11 AM PDT by neverdem
Unintended consequences: Many states are passing laws to loosen rules on guns.
We’ve all seen the cartoons on television. Our hapless protagonist, caught up in the heat of the moment, fails to notice that the barrel of his gun is bent backward toward his face. When he pulls the trigger, he hits himself, blowing his Stetson hat off — or worse.
Long before Barack Obama came fully out of the gun-control closet and dressed himself in the gaudy attire of the crusader, he held a solid claim to the title of Best Inadvertent Gun Salesman in History. His credentials are impeccable: Not only did Obama record for posterity his endorsement of “a ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns” on a 1996 political questionnaire, but, while running for president in 2008, he also discourteously characterized Americans who weren’t from New York City or San Francisco as “bitter” people who “cling” to guns and religion — summing up what progressives have long thought about gun owners and their recalcitrant accomplices in the “flyover states.”
Our beliefs determine our behavior. Since the president kicked off his post-Newtown tour, the citizens of the United States have been on what The Atlantic termed “an unprecedented gun-buying binge.” Here are the ten busiest weeks for the NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Checks System) in its 15-year history:
As The Atlantic noted, “in the intervening 746 weeks since November 1998, the ten weeks with the most checks have all happened since the Newtown shooting.” These are but the high points of a remarkable trend. Since Obama took office in January of 2009, more than 66 million guns have been sold in the United States.
Bill Clinton, burned badly in 1994 on the issue of gun control, warned President Obama earlier this year that he was setting himself up for a fall. But Obama did not listen. “A lot of these people live in a world very different from the world lived in by the people proposing these things,” Clinton counseled Democratic donors in January. “I know because I come from this world.” The current president most definitely does not.
In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, tedious Cousin Jasper comes to Charles Ryder’s Oxford rooms and, taking aim at Charles’s hedonistic lifestyle, of which he evidently disapproves, gives his charge a severe ticking off. “Jasper,” as Charles recalls, “would not sit down.” Instead, “he stood with his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me ‘like an uncle.’” The characterization will be familiar to gun owners, many of whom have felt as if they have been on the receiving end of such a general rebuke for the better part of four months.
The president has done more than spur gun sales. As he ramped up his effort last December, precincts across the country reported a record number of applications for concealed-carry permits; shelves emptied of ammunition; AR-15s, a favored bogeyman of the gun-illiterate Left, became almost impossible to obtain; the National Rifle Association added half a million members in six weeks; and, most important, the states took up the cause. Much hay has been made of the reactionary new laws in Connecticut, Colorado, New York, and Maryland. New York’s in particular has been singled out as a perfect example of the follies of haste. But what of the 15 states that have loosened their rules?
This year, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, South Dakota, Kentucky, Texas, Idaho, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Michigan, Maine, and Arizona have all enacted bills that weaken gun restrictions. Arkansas, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Maine have expanded the list of places where citizens may keep and carry weapons; Virginia, Montana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Maine have made concealed-carry permit records confidential or limited public access to them; and the legislatures in Oklahoma and Kansas have sent bills to the governor that would provide “automatic reciprocity for all out-of-state concealed weapon permits.”
In South Dakota, residents with a concealed-carry permit may now carry a pistol while riding a snowmobile; Kentucky has not only removed its six-month-residency requirement for a concealed-carry permit but also instructed state police that they have 30 — not 90 — days to approve applications; Idaho has banned local jurisdictions from refusing to recognize concealed-carry rights; Utah has made it illegal for the state and for local jurisdictions to compel concealed-carry holders to disclose that they are carrying; and Mississippi has clarified the meaning of “concealed,” so that one cannot be prosecuted if a concealed gun becomes temporarily and accidentally visible.
These moves are certainly in keeping with a general 20-year-old movement toward expanding gun rights at the state level. But the speed with which such bills made it through the political process should worry the gun-control movement. Twenty-five measures have been passed in the four months since Newtown. More are awaiting gubernatorial signatures or are subject to further debate. Gun controllers seem to face a genuine, perhaps intractable, quandary: In order to have a shot at changing the rules, they must speak in urgent and emotional terms, and they must try to rush legislation through before reason can intrude on the debate. But it is this very emotional urgency that scares people into buying guns, turning the restrictionist into the salesman.
As the old song goes:
They say that in the army
The guns are mighty fine.
But when you pull the trigger,
The bullets fly behind!
— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.
There is truth in this article. Those who seek to restore the Constitution have been activated as never before. The question is: will it be enough to overcome the power of the MSM and the fanatical Obama administration... but I repeat myself.
Mississippi is open carry 7/1.
The U.S Constitution weighs 1,775 pounds because the Second Amendment is written in lead.
Well said
Whenever I hear this claim, I point out that, as industries go, the small arms industry in the US isn't all that much. The entire industry makes in a typical year about what Apple made last quarter. So it's not industry power that's driving the NRA. In fact, a piece on NPR a few weeks ago seemed to puzzle over the fact that the political position of most of the gun industry is much more moderate than that of the NRA.
What's driving the NRA, I tell my liberal friends and acquaintances, is its individual members. It's a true grassroots organization. The NRA is powerful because it is backed by millions of Americans. Politicians can ignore or misunderstand that at their peril.
Importantly to all conservatives: right now the left is doing something that military tacticians always warn against, called “reinforcing defeat”. It is one of the most important military truisms, that you should *never* reinforce defeat, thinking that you can turn the situation around.
But the left is doing it with gun control. Which means that the time is ripe for conservatives to hit the left, hard, from an unexpected direction, that they are not prepared to defend.
Specifically, the best attack the conservatives can launch right now is to “streamline” the death penalty for violent criminals, by limiting how federal judges can interfere with the process.
Say that, instead of it taking 20 years to execute a horrific mass murderer after sentencing, it should take no more than 5 years. This is a reasonable goal, and one that can be accomplished with just three changes to the federal law.
1) Declare that the individual states are *competent* to carry out a death penalty as they see fit, without interference. They may continue to use lethal injection, or use electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, or even hanging if they choose to do so, without a federal judge being able to intercede because of the means or technique of the execution.
2) Move all federal death penalty appeals to the front of the federal docket, the appeal to be heard within six months; and the defense, prosecution and judge are limited to a single, one month delay each in the course of the appeal, which must be concluded within one year from when it was first made.
3) Limit the ability of federal judges to overturn a state death penalty decision, *or* to issue a “directed acquittal” to the trial court. Instead, if they see a constitutional problem, they can order the original court to reevaluate the case in light of that or those problems. And if the trial court still affirms the sentence, the appeal is over.
In South Dakota, residents with a concealed-carry permit may now carry a pistol while riding a snowmobile; Kentucky has not only removed its six-month-residency requirement for a concealed-carry permit but also instructed state police that they have 30 — not 90 — days to approve applications; Idaho has banned local jurisdictions from refusing to recognize concealed-carry rights; Utah has made it illegal for the state and for local jurisdictions to compel concealed-carry holders to disclose that they are carrying; and Mississippi has clarified the meaning of “concealed,” so that one cannot be prosecuted if a concealed gun becomes temporarily and accidentally visible.
BANG! Ladies & Gentlemen Congratulations!
I think they are understating the case for the reforms to incrementally restore Second Amendment rights. For example, in Mississippi, what was passed was the right to open carry without a permit, not simply a modification of the concealed carry rules:
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/03/concealed-and-open-carry-in-mississippi.html
Good news. But not enough!
This just demonstrates a further polarization of this country. While these states were furthering 2nd Amendment rights, others were severely restricting them.
Thanks for the link.
I'm waiting to see what happens in Colorado next Election Day and in the Supreme Court after their Heller and McDonald decisions.
Related: Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia now allows students to carry concealed weapons on campus.
Bet you that’s one school that won’t get shot up by a lunatic. Or, if it happens, it’ll be a short-lived episode.
Not mentioned in the article was the huge reaction to the PA Eastern Sports show. Not a new law, but reaction was massive and unified against anti-2A forces.
That is a good idea. Federal judges need to be limited in a lot of other areas, too.
The MSM spiked it. Nothing to see. Except, the story got out on the new media. Nowhere near as much coverage, of course, but in the gun culture, it had decent coverage, and people noticed.
Tagline verified.
Thanks for the good news ping!
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