Good day all. After every single incident involving firearms, the Progressives start demanding that we institute “Common Sense” gun control. The measures they come up with generally will have no impact on the crimes being committed with guns.
In many cases, the Progressives want to ban a class of firearms based on how it looks with no regards to how it actually functions. They also want to limit the amount of ammunition it may hold and other “common sense” measures.
What they deny wanting to do is flat out confiscation. Oh you will have a few outliers calling for it, but generally the Progressives don’t state what their end game is…until now. In a column printed in the Boston Globe November 10th, David Scharfenberg states flat out that the time has come to start confiscating firearms. Here is some of what this pinhead wrote:
In the AFTERMATH of the Texas church shooting last week, Democratic lawmakers did what they always do: They skewered their Republican colleagues for offering only “thoughts and prayers,” and demanded swift action on gun control.
“The time is now,” said Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, “for Congress to shed its cowardly cover and do something.”
Yep, that is the typical response of the hardcore leftists. Punish millions of people for the actions of a few. It’s collectivism at it’s best.
Trouble is, it’s not clear the “something” Democrats typically demand would make a real dent in the nation’s epidemic of gun violence. Congress can ban assault weapons, but they account for just a tiny sliver of the country’s 33,000 annual firearm deaths. And tighter background checks will do nothing to cut down on the 310 million guns already in circulation.
Let’s disassemble this shall we? To begin with, the so called “Assault weapons” aren’t. A true assault rifle is something like the United States M-16 series automatic rifles and the Kalashnikov series and their variants. They all have one thing in common. They are fully automatic weapons, and they are not that common at all in the United States.
The 33,000 killed with guns each year doesn’t break it down all that much. A large number are suicides, then there are those that are considered justified in the eyes of the law. Finally you have actual murders. Finally, the number of guns he lists is probably low. I’ve heard estimates of the number of firearms in private hands at between 600 million and 800 million. Still, he is a moonbat after all, and facts are something they just don’t do all that well.
In other words, the proposals aren’t just difficult to enact in the current political climate; their practical effects would also be quite limited.
“Quite limited” is another way of saying “Will have no effect at all on stopping the criminals.”
On occasion, though, leading Democrats will make oblique reference to a more sweeping policy change: seizing a huge number of weapons from law-abiding citizens.
Usually while surrounded with heavily armed security details. Hypocrisy is not something Democrats ever notice in themselves.
At a New Hampshire forum in the fall of 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke approvingly of an Australian gun buyback program that collected more than 650,000 weapons — a buyback that, she neglected to mention, was compulsory.
Funny that, how she neglected the part about it being compulsory. I guess she didn’t think that little detail bore mentioning.
And just a few months earlier, then-President Barack Obama offered coded support for the same confiscatory approach.
“When Australia had a mass killing — I think it was in Tasmania — about 25 years ago, it was just so shocking, the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did,” he said.
They also don’t have this pesky little thing called the 2nd Amendment. Der Fubar also neglected to mention that the crime rate in Australia is, per capita, a lot higher then ours.
Democrats have even let the word “confiscation” slip out, on occasion. After the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a radio interview that when it came to assault weapons “confiscation could be an option, mandatory sale to the state could be an option.”
Recently, New York rammed through a law called the “Safe Act.” It’s designed to make it much safer for criminals. It’s also noted for most of the people ignoring the parts where they had to turn in or otherwise get rid of guns that were no longer “legal” in New York.
The logic of gun control lies, at bottom, in substantially reducing the number of deadly weapons on the street — and confiscation is far and away the most effective approach.
Actually, it isn’t. The targets of confiscation will not be criminals, it will be people who aren’t criminals. The Criminals will ignore the confiscation orders since..they’re criminals.
Is there any conceivable turn of events in our politics that could make confiscation happen?
Only if the Progressive totalitarian elements gain control of the House, Senate, White House and the courts. This is assuming they aren’t going to bother with a constitutional amendment and just issue a decree.
And what would a mass seizure look like?
Do you recall Beirut, Lebanon in the 70’s and 80’s? It will be something like that, although Scharfenberg thinks it will go just the way it did in Australia. Ram through a new law before anyone can say anything and the sheep will comply.
Some feared resistance. Howard, at one point, wore a bulletproof vest during a speech to a group of gun rights supporters. But the buyback went forward peacefully, and it claimed an estimated one-fifth of Australia’s gun stock — one of the largest gun confiscations in modern history.
And again, Australia isn’t America. We literally have a different way of thinking. In Australia, and really most of the world, the people tend to think that the Government knows what’s best. That is dead opposite of the way most Americans think…unless they’re Proglodytes and Moonbats.
The seizure and the other gun control measures seem to have had a significant effect. Since passage of the law, the country hasn’t seen a single mass shooting — defined as a killing of five or more people, not including the gunman.
What you have seen is a major upsurge in other types of violent crimes. Oh wait, those don’t matter to you, do they?
Here in the United States, interest in large-scale gun buybacks — both voluntary and involuntary — has mounted with each mass shooting.
Only among the Moonbats, Proglodytes and Globalists in their ivory towers and gated communities.
Matt Miller, a journalist and onetime senior fellow with the left-leaning Center for American Progress, has proposed what he calls a “massive, debt-financed” buyback.
And it will be just as successful as all the others, which is, total flops. All that’s generally been turned in are really old guns, broken and rusted out junk and not a few that were used in the commission of a crime. One of the caveats on these buy backs is they don’t check the guns to see if there are any ballistic matches where a gun was used.
In Australia “many farmers resented being told to surrender weapons they had used safely all of their lives,” wrote Howard, the former prime minister, in The New York Times a few years ago. “Penalizing decent, law-abiding citizens because of the criminal behavior of others seemed unfair. Many of them had been lifelong supporters of my coalition and felt bewildered and betrayed by these new laws. I understood their misgivings. Yet I felt there was no alternative.”
Oh there was an alternative, it’s just that Australians weren’t prepared to go that route.
THE TROUBLE WITH all of this is that America is not Australia.
The Australian gun lobby, moreover, is not as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association. And the Aussies don’t have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! He has finally reached the major difference between Australia and the United States. It’s our Constitution. Still, Numbnuts isn’t about to let that slow him down.
While the Second Amendment isn’t absolute — no less than conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that it’s “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose”— it would undoubtedly serve as the basis for a robust legal challenge to any involuntary buyback program.
Scalia was wrong in this instance. Still, he was far better then former United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger. After he retired, he stated that contrary to views espoused by gun groups, the Second Amendment “doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all.”
And the courts would not be the only site of resistance.
I think he’s beginning to get an idea just what the response to an order by the government to “Turn them all in” might be.
Gun culture runs especially deep in a country born of violent rebellion. And over the last couple of decades, firearms have become one of the most important fault lines in American culture. It is hard to overstate the devotion — or if you prefer, the fanaticism — of the 3 percent of the population that owns half the guns in circulation.
Where did he get that number? 3 percent own most of the guns? Currently, about 50+ percent of the households own one or more guns. That number is considered to be on the low side.
Many of those hard-core gun owners see their weapons as a guard against government overreach. And sending government agents to claim them could end very, very badly.
No shit Sherlock. Allow me to give you an example. The Branch Dividians in Waco, Texas back in the 90’s. I’m not going to go over that whole mess, just the initial raid by the BATFE. The Davidians were not expecting the assault that came at them. If you watch the videos of the raid, you will notice something. The rate of fire from within the building ramped up during the gun battle.
The survivors reported that most of the guns and ammunition were locked away. When the assault started, there were very few guns ready for use. The Davidians broke out the guns that were put away and had to load them up. Towards the end of the battle, and that’s just what it was, you will see most of the BATFE agents firing with their service pistols. Their rifles, shotguns and sub-machine guns were on the ground. They had run out of ammunition. Shortly thereafter, the BATFE surrendered. (Yes, they said it was a truce, but look at the videos of the agents approaching the building with their hands up, recovering their casualties)
Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.
And you fail to understand that it would lead to an outright civil war. I think I see where your “3 percent” came from. In order for the United States government to fall, about 3% of the population would have to move against them. That works out to about 10 million people. There are, at all levels of government, about 800,000 law enforcement officers.
If Martial Law were to be declared, the constitution suspended and all those officers ordered to conduct house to house searches for guns, they will be outnumbered by at least 10 to 1. Law Enforcement officers could expect to take significant losses, including entire teams being wiped out. It would make the British retreat from Lexington and Concord look like a walk in the park.
By and large, the American people have spoken on the subject of Gun Control and have come to the conclusion that the 2nd Amendment means exactly what it says. Unless you loose your rights after being convicted in a court of law, you have the right to own and carry a gun. You have the right to use that gun to defend yourself, your family and your neighbors from attack.
You would also have a problem with a number of police and federal agents refusing to carry out that order. In many cases, they would resign. You could have upwards of half the law enforcement force walking off the job. That would mean you will need to bring in the military. They might just outright refuse the order.
No, the Progressive dream of crashing doors and confiscating guns from 150 million people is just that. A dream. People like Sharfenberg simply do not understand, and won’t learn, what would happen if they actually tried this. They would be killed. Flat out, no bones about it, killed. They wouldn’t be dealing with the lone nuts we’ve seen, but with thousands, probably tens of thousands of very competent people who know what they are doing.
You may want to take away the 4th box of liberty Mr. Sharfenberg, but many more will choose to open it instead. How about we just forget this and see why people go off the deep end and start shooting up places? Is it possible they are on some form of medication, prescribed or otherwise, and are having a reaction to it? That would be interesting to find out.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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Interesting that the moron admits that in Australia, without the American gun culture and constitutional guarantee of the right to arms, they only had 20% compliance with the confiscation order. And then says that’s success.