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Privacy in sheep’s clothing: New bill would strip away privacy of legal gun owners
MSNBC.com ^ | 12/19/01 | Brock N. Meeks

Posted on 12/20/2001 7:08:10 AM PST by Jean S

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 — I want to meet the syntactical alchemist that turned the phrase “fear, uncertainty and doubt” into “mandated loss of privacy” and shove that person back through the rip in the time space continuum that was America in the good ol’ days of pre-9/11. It wouldn’t be gentle shove.

IT SEEMS EVERY other morning since the September attacks this lawmaker or that is shooting his or her mouth off, ranting about the immediate need for another piece of privacy-stripping legislation in the name of protecting America and fighting an undeclared war on terrorism.

The latest proposed legislative debacle comes from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and would create a de facto registration database of all legal gun owners. The bill flies in the face of current law. The only thing that could make Schumer’s bill more ludicrous would be if it contained a sub-section mandating the registration of serial numbers on all box cutters.

And here’s the really scary part: in opposing this bill I’m siding with the National Rifle Association. The NRA says the proposal is an attempt by “anti-gun extremists” to “create the mechanism to establish a registry of law-abiding gun purchasers.”

I’m not a gun owner, though I grew up with guns and hunted often with my father. My personnel preference is for stricter gun control laws and that’s me in the corner raising my hand when asked “who would like to see an end to sales at gun shows?”

That said, Schumer’s proposed bill, dubbed “Use NICS in Terrorist Investigations Act” (S. 1788) is bad on principle and despicable in its genesis: a hysterical atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt, better known in the cyber world as FUD.

FUD is a kind of mind-fog; it clutters the debate with scare tactics and hyperbolic scenarios. FUD is found daily on Capitol Hill and has been in abundant supply during any congressional hearing on computer crime.

The National Instant Check System (NCIS) is used to check the background of persons wanting to purchase a firearm. The names and information input into NCIS are supposed to be temporary, the law creating the NCIS says to “destroy all records… relating to the person or the transfer” as it relates to the sale of a gun by a licensed dealer.

But Schumer’s bill would mandate the permanent data warehousing of that information and make it available to every law enforcement official in the country, down to the local sheriff in some rural municipality.

When the NRA says such a proposal is a not so subtle attempt to create “gun owner registration, plain and simple” it’s right.

BLIND-SIDED BY FEAR

Schumer and co-sponsor Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., coughed up this hairball legislation in the aftermath of a hearing in which they grilled Attorney General John Ashcroft for having denied the FBI’s request to access NCIS data in the course of the bureau’s ever widening investigation into terrorism on the home front.

But the NCIS was never intended to be used by law enforcement as a means of tagging legal gun owners, yet Schumer’s bill allows just that, blatantly stripping away the privacy rights of any legal gun owner.

As a non-gun owner, I should care less, the law doesn’t affect me. But it does, if for no other reason than it is marching lock step with a rash of recent privacy crushing legislation and presidential directives. First, the bill runs roughshod over existing and well vetted law that includes privacy safeguards. Second, it turns a benign technology — a database — against the people.

And unlike a lot of other hysterical legislation being passed under the cloak of protecting the home front from the threat of terrorism, the language of this bill has no so-called “sundown” provision that requires it to be revisited and re-approved at a predetermined date or be stricken from the books.

And if you still need convincing that this proposal is just anti-privacy legislation sleeping in the tall grass, the word “terrorism” doesn’t appear anywhere in its language except for the title.

Indeed, the meat of Schumer’s bill reads: ”[A]llow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access NICS audit log records for the purpose of responding to an inquiry from any federal, state, or local law enforcement agency in connection with a civil or criminal law enforcement investigation.”

If the bill passes, law enforcement suddenly has an electronic rolodex of all law abiding gun owners. Guns today, box cutters and copies of the Qur’an tomorrow? It wouldn’t surprise me.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Editorial
KEYWORDS: banglist; constitutionlist
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To: B4Ranch;Blackie;stand watie;G'nad
Thanks B4Ranch for the ping!!
21 posted on 12/21/2001 9:59:49 PM PST by Snow Bunny
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To: Uncle Bill
Bill, You forgot to post the barf alert at the top of your post"
22 posted on 12/21/2001 10:17:56 PM PST by B4Ranch
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To: Snow Bunny
And the same to you, my dear!!!
23 posted on 12/21/2001 10:42:30 PM PST by Mercuria
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To: JeanS
This can be stopped if we all get serious and go to work.

LET"S ROLL!!

Seniors United Supporting the Second Amendment

24 posted on 12/21/2001 10:54:45 PM PST by SUSSA
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To: ratcat
California Republicans Aid Gun Control Wave

Republican Leaders Blast 'Extreme' NRA Statements

The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 1
The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 1.4
The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 1.5
The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 2
The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 3
The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 4

The Fruits of Gun Control

"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty."
Adolf Hitler, Edict of March 18, 1938, H.R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler's Table Talks 1941-1944 (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1953, p. 425-426).

The Totalitarian Body Count

Jeff Cooper's Commentaries, Vol. 3, No. 11
September 1995 Jeff Cooper

The syndicated columnist, Walter Williams, who happens to be a college professor, has recently finished a study of governmental murder and has concluded that in the twentieth century far more people were killed by their own governments than died in war. Statistics are always questionable, but Williams' come out as follows:

Killed in Warfare: 39 million
Killed by Lenin and Stalin: 62 million
Killed by Mao Tse-tung: 35 million
Killed by Hitler: 21 million

These are the leaders, and the figures are beyond comprehension, but coming down to more comprehensible numbers we find that 2 million were killed in Turkey, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.5 million in Mexico, and 1 million by Tito in the Balkans. It should be noted that the time over which these atrocities were perpetrated has a bearing on the magnitude of their atrocity. Combined executions committed by Lenin and Stalin, for example, were spread over 70 years between 1917 and 1987. Mao's murders took place over about 37 years between 1949 and 1987, so his intensity could have been greater. Hitler's 21 million were murdered over a much shorter period, and so the intensity factor pretty well evens out, but the fact remains that vastly more homicide was perpetrated in this century of slaughter by governments against their own people than by armies against enemies. Man's inhumanity to man seems more virulent when it is domestic.

Posted by: noumenon () *
03/31/98 15:59:58 EST

A Problem With Guns?

A Holocaust Survivor's Feelings On Gun Ownership

25 posted on 12/21/2001 11:00:39 PM PST by Uncle Bill
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To: B4Ranch
"Bill, You forgot to post the barf alert at the top of your post"

Hehehehe. These people do make me puke. They are the ones that make the photo above come true. They have the arrogant gall to state that it's for the children. God bless. U.B.

26 posted on 12/21/2001 11:04:32 PM PST by Uncle Bill
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To: JeanS
And let us not forget this all time favoriate from Henry Waxass

"If someone is so fearful that they are going to start using their weapons to protect their rights,
it makes me very nervous that these people have weapons at all."
~~California Representative Henry Waxman

27 posted on 12/21/2001 11:04:49 PM PST by spartan68
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To: Uncle Bill; ratcat
*******************

To: ratcat
"We're going to have to give up some of our liberties"
-- Frank Keating
September 11, 2001 - CNN Radio
# 10 by Uncle Bill

************************

And our man in the Senate,
Trent Lott, said that as long as there was one man
willing to do violence, the War on Terror would be necessary.

28 posted on 12/21/2001 11:08:32 PM PST by exodus
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To: Uncle Bill; Inspector Harry Callahan
It's my fondest hope that you'll keep me on your flag/bump list for Christmas.

Be well.

Harry: You and I have big shoes to fill.

29 posted on 12/21/2001 11:14:47 PM PST by nunya bidness
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To: spartan68
"If someone is so fearful that they are going to start using their weapons to protect their rights,
it makes me very nervous that these people have weapons at all."
~~California Representative Henry Waxman

Oh course it makes him nervous. It makes all national socialists, and statists nervous. Those guns in the Warsaw ghetto made Hitler, and his national socialists, nervous. Now they make the national socialists in this country nervous. That's a good thing!!

30 posted on 12/21/2001 11:26:14 PM PST by SUSSA
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To: exodus
These will be the people who will work with the traitors in political confiscating suits, and, the media, to convince the American people to disarm. They will kill those who refuse, and label them evil "defenders of the Constitution" and terrorists. They already have nearly all of the children from K-12 to the universities. It's now just a matter of time.

"Scholars" Take Aim at Gun History

"The modern American university is the most totalitarian and elitist institution in the world. Students who show up on campus loving their country face a monolithic, repressive environment. Professors are undemocratically chosen by other, like-minded professors and tenure is distributed based solely on the willingness of the scholar to adopt the anti-American theology of the ruling elites. This authoritarian structure continues once the student enters the classroom, where America-hating professors can arbitrarily impose their anti-American morality on powerless students through grading.

The oppression continues when one looks at the curriculum where strenuous efforts by the anti-American leftists who brutally control college campuses have successfully marginalized and often eliminated course offerings which evince a sensitivity and acceptance of those who love their country."


source

I guess folks will just keep sending their kids and shoveling their income to these campus communists until the collapse of the Republic. These campus communists must truly be laughing.

Communists Should Not Teach In American Colleges - 1949

Institutions and Underworld Academics

Radical Son
"The situation in the universities was appalling. The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were now the tenured establishment of the academic world. Marxism had produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history -but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc."

"The American Historical Association was run by Marxists, as was the professional literature association, whose field had been transformed into a kind of pseudosociology of race-gender-class oppression. When Peter [Collier] and I were undergraduates in the Fifties, the mission of the university had been described by its guardians as 'the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.' It was now officially recast in radical terms as that of 'social transformation.' "

"With no trace of embarrassment, Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent figures in academic philosophy, even boasted that 'the power base of the Left in America is in the universities,' by which he meant not the students (who were generally apathetic if not conservative), but the faculties, administrations, and departments, who tried to recruit students to their political agendas."
[end of partial transcript]

"86 percent of those Americans who were interviewed said high school graduates should go on to college..."
Public Agenda for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. - 1998.

Little Johnny can get a good Marxist education and a good job. The two are synonymous don't you know. Lurkers of the World Unite!

Get them when they're young. For the children of course.

"Every Child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural Being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future."
Taken from an address given at a childhood education seminar in 1973 by professor Chester M. Pierce of educational psychiatry at Harvard University speaking for the Association for Childhood Education International.

"The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. ....The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of Christianity and the new faith of Humanism."
"A Religion for a New Age," The Humanist - January/February 1983, p. 26.

"Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state."
Vladimir Lenin

Get the news from CBS to facilitate totalitarianism.

.

They have their heroes.

The American people need just a little more grass, and then,.....


A sheep has four stomachs(Rumen, Reticulum,Omasum,Abomasum), so it takes them a little while to digest the grass of ignorance handed to them by the media. But be patient, they will gather for the sake of the communists cause towards the NWO. Slavery and death, power and control.

The Fall of the Republic

31 posted on 12/21/2001 11:43:58 PM PST by Uncle Bill
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To: SUSSA
That's a good thing!!

Ssssure is! (As he reaches to turn up the heat another notch or two)

32 posted on 12/21/2001 11:47:00 PM PST by spartan68
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To: Mercuria
"A gun-control columnist who isn't willing to drink THAT deeply of the Kool-Aid??"

That's what it looks like, eh?
After dealing with Liberals & Liberal journalists for 10 miserable years?
I've learned just one thing; there's what they say, & there's what they do.

...if it's all the same to you; I'll reserve my applause & just watch the quisling's hands.

33 posted on 12/22/2001 12:14:39 AM PST by Landru
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To: Landru
...because a lie-beral's left hand never knows WHO his right hand is doing...
34 posted on 12/22/2001 12:24:20 AM PST by Mercuria
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To: Mercuria
Something like that.

(go to sleep; ya goofball.)

35 posted on 12/22/2001 12:32:23 AM PST by Landru
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To: William Tell;Mercuria
Can't he see the coming refrain "well, nobody's privacy has been invaded in Kalifornia, so what have YOU got to hide?"

I know exactly where you are coming from and what you are saying. The government would love to re-write the 4th Amendment to read - "what have YOU got to hide". We don't need no steenkin' search warrant!!

Bet me gambler!!

36 posted on 12/22/2001 1:31:12 AM PST by Brownie74
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To: ratcat
Bttt^ for the morning crew.... lurkers & newbies, better pay attention to all this "stuff...."
37 posted on 12/22/2001 2:44:19 AM PST by backhoe
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To: Uncle Bill
I guess folks will just keep sending their kids and shoveling their income to these campus communists until the collapse of the Republic.

I was thinking of starting a thread on this subject, but I think I'll just post/reply for now.

I am seriously considering NOT encouraging my daughter to attend college. I have become convinced that university training is not needed to earn a living and may in some cases prevent some folks from taking the risks of starting their own business. This is because of the ridgid thinking that colledge serves up.

I'm thinking I would rather my kids grow up to be Americans instead of upper-middle class.

38 posted on 12/22/2001 3:06:16 AM PST by M.K. Borders
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To: ratcat
In a way it's good that the mask is coming off these NWO/UN gun-grabbers.

Sad to say, they quieted many "conservatives", when they employed a strategy of incrementalism in their war to do away with the second-amendment. You know the tactics: "It's only the assault weapons and Saturday Night Specials" we want.

Well, it worked and would have continued to work until they have banned everything except maybe BB guns(with strict registration and ownership requirements).

Gun owners and even non-gun owners who are patriots and concerned about liberty must use every legal method available to defeat Feinstein, Schumer and the other NWO/UN shock troops.

I used to think that types like Feinstein and Schumer were just naive and ignorant.

After a long-overdue political awakening I now know they are evil.

39 posted on 12/22/2001 3:21:33 AM PST by bulldog905
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To: Mercuria
My personnel preference is for stricter gun control laws

The author still hasn't connected all the dots. Sound like he just caught a glimpse of the face in his window, though.

Nice to see the fog lifting a little, but this guy needs a full-blown epiphany. Still, every journey begins with the first step, we'll see...

40 posted on 12/22/2001 3:47:55 AM PST by Madame Dufarge
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