Democrats And Gun Lust

Not surprisingly, on the heels of the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook school, the newspapers are awash with articles and commentary from all the Usual Suspects that the time has come to control access to guns.  OffHisMeds is more bemused than amused by the reaction, since gun-related violence of a particular magnitude predictably results in such a "call to action".  Why this is so is not clear.  It's as if Liberals suffer some mass amnesia mere weeks after the most recently publicized shooting, whether it's Columbine or Gabby Giffords, acting like their tragic countenances and rendered loin clothes are something new that we have never seen before.  Why exactly do they need a fresh instance of gun violence to make their point?  Is it that they think we as a nation have forgotten the prior instances?

 

OffHisMeds has not.  In fact, he can cite you rote statistics on such events that happened even before he was conscious of the phenomenon, such as Charles Whitman slaughtering dozens from the tower at the University of Texas in 1966.  And it is not that OHM obsesses on such things, it is rather that these crimes are so enormous that right-minded people should have them on their minds, never to forget.

 

Not Democrats, though.  My entire life, they have used the Incident Du Jour - regardless of its nature - to start banging their drums, dusting off their milk crates, working themselves into a high dudgeon and demanding that SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING.  Gays harassed = hate crime.  Check.  Kids picked on in school = Bullying.  Check.  Failing schools = Inadequate funding.  Check.  Mass shooting = Gun control.  Check.

Crank up the Policy Machine boys; there's regulations to enact, people to control, and money to be spent.  Oh yes, and let's not forget: blame the Republicans.

And such it was with dozens of articles, opinion pieces and talk show appearances across the nation.  In virtually every case, Democrat gun control advocates predictably call for a ban on "assault weapons", as they do after every mass shooting, but as in the past, their rhetoric on the matter is driven either by ignorance or a desire to confuse the public. To cite but a few examples:

 

- They routinely overstate the danger of features such as a folding stock, pistol grip or a threaded barrel that can mount a bayonet. While I will grant you that these features have little use for most gun owners, they are cosmetic, not lethal.   It has, however, allowed Democrats, through sheer repetition, to misrepresent these types of features as constituting an "assault weapon".  That's a gross misnomer based on the simple facts available.  For instance, there's not a single instance of a mass shooting - or any crime for that matter - where these features enabled the death of more people.  And I'll go so far as to submit that there was not a single bayonet death in America last year.

 

- They predictably call for limiting the size of the magazine that holds the bullets, but this is a bogus argument as well. A motivated serial killer can swap an endless number of ten round clips, and it takes less than two seconds to do so. Also, larger capacity clips and drums are cumbersome and  notorious for jamming, and in fact this has happened repeatedly in recent mass killings, arguably saving lives.  

 

- For years they have conflated automatic weapons with semi-automatic weapons, incorrectly referring to the latter as "machine guns".  They've also conflated the term "assault weapons" with semi-automatics.  Neither is correct.  Semi-automatics are simply guns that cause another round to be chambered by the kinetic energy of the previous round. The desire of Democrats  to confuse this point is no accident. For but one example, virtually ALL modern handguns are semi-automatic. If they can successfully control semi-automatics by mis-defining them as "assault weapons", they will control virtually 90% of all arms owned or sold in America.

 

There's little doubt that the intention of the Liberal gun control lobby is to deprive citizens of the capacity to control their own destinies. They look at Europe and see what they hope is our future, a thoroughly emasculated public, powerless because they have no guns, and completely dependent on government for their economic security as well. It's no coincidence that President Obama and the Democrats pursue policies designed to promote both.

 

It is also no coincidence that they prefer not to have a conversation about the real meaning, the  constitutional meaning, of an armed public: As George Mason, Co-author of the Second Amendment so eloquently put it: "To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."  The Founding Fathers understood that an armed populace was a check against not just the King of England, but any like him who came later, including King Barack, Prince Harry and Princess Nancy.

Meanwhile, I wait in vain for a conversation on the real cause of the Sandy Hook killings: a young man deranged by some combination of upbringing, surroundings and culture.  Days after the incident we learn that Adam Lanza was the product of a broken home whose father was not part of the kid's life and a mother who was a barfly.  The mother was also a profligate and irresponsible owner of guns and related paraphernalia, leaving all the weapons and ammo accessible to her son, whom she knew to be a nutjob. 

As a student Lanza was a loner and so anti-social as to attract the attention of school authorities at the time.  It will inevitably come to light that he was dosed with Adderall, Ritalin or even a nefarious cocktail of mood-altering drugs to deal with so-called Attention Deficit Disorder or something similar, as an alarming number of the nation's boys are so treated.  

 

In conclusion, the Liberal tendency to exploit national tragedies will never go away.  They react as they do to these things, not because they have forgotten prior and similar instances, but because they have intuited that all such incidents provide an opening of an essentially political nature that can be freshly exploited.  If there is a victim, any victim, there must be a pathology that can be identified with which to flog an evermore weary citizenry, and earnest Democrats must use each and every such event to milk the taxpayer, form commissions, expand the bureaucracy and yet further control the movements of the public.

It is also worth noting that Democrats - or at least the people that speak for them - don't even have the decency to wait until the bodies are in the graves before they start assigning blame.  The real irony is that most of the pathologies that plague society were authored by Liberalism, putting them in the enviable position of profiting not only from the efforts to control these pathologies, but from their proliferation.  But expanding on that theme will have to be the subject of a future post.