For us Second Amendment activists, especially those of us who’ve been at it for a while, there’ve been a few constants.
One of them: the rank hypocrisy of the leadership of the gun control movement; then, now, and always.
For almost two decades, exhibit #1 has been Diane Feinstein, who has made gun control a creepy fetish for over two decades now.
And yet…:
Opponents of the Assault Weapons Ban point to Feinstein’s hypocrisy on the issue, as the Senator herself said she obtained a concealed carry permit in California when she felt her life was threatened.
You find this, over and over, with gun control leaders; you, the hoi-polloi, should be content to call the cops; as elites, they’re different; their lives are worth defending.
In 1995, Feinstein described this experience:
“Less than 20 years ago, I was the target of a terrorist group. It was the New World Liberation Front. They blew up power stations and put a bomb at my home when my husband was dying of cancer and the bomb was set to detonate around 2 ‘o clock in the morning, but it was a construction explosive that doesn’t detonate when it drops below freezing. It doesn’t usually freeze in San Francisco, but on this night it dropped below freezing and the bomb didn’t detonate.
“I was very lucky, but I thought of what might have happened. Later the same group shot out all the windows of my home and I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself, because that’s what I did. I was trained in firearms. When I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick, I carried a concealed weapon. I made the determination that if somebody was going to try to take me out I was going to take them with me. Now having said all of that, that was period of time ago and I’ve watched through these 20 years as terrorism has increased both on the far extremist left and the far extremist right in this country.”.
And throughout that time, her line has been the same: her life is vital and worth protecting; yours is mundane and can wait your turn. When she was mayor of Sant Francisco, she revoked all civilian carry permits – but got her converted to a “police” permit.
Her “training” was no more involved that what all of us carry permit holders get.
You find this level of hypocrisy throughout the gun control movement; the lists of prominent gun-grabbers who’ve gotten themselves carry permits, or wangled permits for their bodyguards, or who’ve been busted with illegal guns, is legendary among 2nd Amendment Rights activists…
…and unknown among anyone that depends on the media – frequently among the biggest hypocrites – for news on the subject.
To be fair, do we really want to write laws based on shooting rampages that a) don’t represent how most guns are used, b) don’t represent how most children die, and c) don’t represent how most mentally ill people act? The death of 20 children in Newtown is tragic, and remarkable, but in the absence of any changes to the nation’s laws, how often would you expect this rather singular event to be repeated? Even if we include events in Aurora, Columbine, that mall in Oregon and a few other places, this doesn’t qualify as a public health issue. It only makes a major change to society if we react to it with changes whose costs are disproportionate to their benefit. So while the media reaction and your reaction have nothing to do with the general crime rate, shouldn’t lawmaking be more about the general crime rate?
Yes, I am a parent, I am deeply troubled by what happened, and I shed tears over the tragedy. But I don’t want my legislature to react with “something must be done” legislation every time something emotionally charged happens on the news.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/todays-question/archive/2012/12/what-do-you-think-of-allowing-teachers-to-carry-guns-in-school.shtml#disqus_thread
A guy at work just bought a revolver last night at Fleet Farm. He said the whole department looked like a big going out of business sales the shelves were so empty. Ammo, pistols, long guns, just cleaned out.
Gov Andrew Cuomo has voiced the anit-gun objectives ( DGs goal btw) very clearly today:
“Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun but permit it,” the governor said.”
http://www.infowars.com/new-york-gov-mandatory-gun-sale-to-state-and-confiscation-are-options/
Make no mistake – they do not intend to let you keep any of your guns
Here’s what I commented on a FB post about Cuomo earlier:
That will go straight to SCOTUS. Please, Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas, I implore you: Live healthy lifestyles so that you don’t have a heart attack or something and die before the Marxist-in-chief is gone. If we get 1 or 2 more Justices from Obama, I firmly believe they will have NO compunction to reversing precedent and undoing their Heller and McDonald rulings.
BillC, if that happens, I really do think that we will see a second Civil War. It is estimated that 97% of veterans and active duty military would side with the citizens if that were to occur.
Sales so brisk the: “Ammo, pistols, long guns, just cleaned out.”
Semiautomatic weapons have become an important moneymaker for the gun industry, selling these to civilians, and that this is compensating for declines in other forms of gun sales. There are a couple of factors that are driving the declines. One of them is there’s a marked decline in hunting, which was the market for what I think probably most folks, when they think about guns, they think of shotguns and hunting rifles.
There has been and continues to be a decline in hunting. Young people are much more interested in electronic games than going out and shooting. There have been changes in the law enforcement market. There are just other entertainment opportunities.
So the gun industry has really – even though every now and then their sales go up and down, they’ve actually been in a long-term decline. What they’ve done to rejuvenate their markets and to basically stay in business is emphasize designing and heavily marketing not just semiautomatic guns but military-derived semiautomatic guns.
So we’re talking specifically about the semiautomatic assault rifles; semiautomatic pistols, which are capable of taking high-capacity magazines; and finally, and perhaps most surprising, at least to my mind, is that it is possible to buy a variety of 50-caliber anti-armor sniper rifles capable of penetrating an inch of steel at 1,000 yards.
What the gun industry has done is sort of appeal to the inner soldier, the insurrectionist feelings and high-tech desires to market these military-style guns. They don’t call them assault rifles. They call them tactical rifles and modern sporting rifles. In truth, they are basically assault rifles,
Emery is right about the societal shift in attitude. The focus on tactical rifles would be n no problem in an earlier generation as everybody understood military weapons. The second amendment was intended to ensure citizens could always have military grade weapons to oppose our own government but that history is irrelevant in an age when more people live on welfare than work … They don’t want to oppose the government, they want to grow it to get more free stuff.