Obama’s Attacks On Our Second Amendment Rights

In the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, Obama is once again on the warpath against our right to bear arms. Since he can’t get Congress or the people to do what he wants, he has decided to go it alone, resorting to executive action to get what he wants.

Along with his right-hand woman (who happens to be Iranian by birth), he’s drafting new orders to tighten the noose a little bit more on gun owners.

Rumor has it that this semi-secret action is focused on closing the supposed gun show loophole in the laws which require background checks for gun purchases.

This fictitious hole has been talked about by gun control advocates for quite a while. But anyone who has ever tried to buy a firearm at a gun show knows better. The sellers at gun shows are professional firearm dealers. As such, they are required by law to call the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) for a background check and they do.

So, what is this upcoming executive order actually going to do? It’s going to make it impossible for individuals to sell firearms privately, without a background check. That’s right, private gun transfers are going to require calling the NCIC, before any firearms can be sold or even given as a gift. That probably means that this background check will even be required for guns which are passed on as part of one’s inheritance.

So, what real difference is this going to make? None. The only way that the government can police background checks is to create a national database of gun ownership; in other words, establish gun registration. Of course, this action could be nothing more than a step towards making that happen.

Federal Firearm Registration

Currently, it’s illegal for the federal government to keep any records on firearm ownership, with the exception of Class III firearms, suppressors, short-barreled rifles and a few other rare categories of collectors firearms. But that doesn’t mean that the government is faithfully obeying that law, does it? They could be obeying the law just as well as felons obey the law about not buying firearms.

I have seen some evidence that makes me think that the government is actually tracking firearm purchases. It is not conclusive, but it is enough to make me suspicious. Allow me to explain.

All firearm transactions, other than private sales, must be carried out by a licensed firearm dealer. This includes shipping firearms across state lines, even if you are shipping it to yourself in another state. These dealers are all licensed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

The dealer uses a federal form to verify the buyer’s right to buy a firearm and to record their call to NCIC, verifying that the individual doesn’t have any history of crime or isn’t under an indictment. That form is kept in the dealer’s files, logged in a register and assigned a local tracking number, merely for reference. If the police want to find out who a firearm was sold to, they contact the dealer, asking for a copy of the applicable record.

So far, so good; no federal register. In order to ensure that the dealers are doing their paperwork and keeping their records, they are audited yearly by agents of ATF. That seems like a reasonable precaution. But nobody, including the dealer, is allowed to witness one of these audits. They are done behind closed doors, meaning that the ATF agents could do anything.

A friend of mine, who happens to be a firearm dealer, was sent a memo and spreadsheet from ATF some time back, asking for information about all their AR-15 sales over a specific period of time. The spreadsheet included the name and address of the various customers and the dealer was to put in their local tracking number for that record. There’s just one thing… the spreadsheet already had that number, in another column.

This raises some serious questions; specifically, how did ATF know who had bought AR-15 rifles from this dealer and how did they know the tracking numbers for those records? The only way they could have known was to have copied the store’s records during an audit. Nobody else had access to that information.

So, is there a federal gun register? Legally, I’d have to say no. But it appears that there is one that is being kept by ATF, it’s just being kept secret. That means that if the government wanted to confiscate guns, they’d at least have a starting place to look.

Then There’s Australia

Lately, liberal politicians have been holding up Australia as an example for the United States to emulate. In 1996, Australia passed sweeping firearms legislation, outlawing all semi-automatic and automatic firearms. People who owned these firearms were to turn them in through a massive nationwide firearms buyback program. About 60,000 weapons were confiscated and their owners paid the fair market value.

All this was in reaction to a mass shooting; you know, the type that Obama says doesn’t happen in other countries. This particular incident claimed the lives of 35 innocent people shocking the nation and setting up the opportunity to pass that law.

One would expect that such a law, being held up for emulation, would have had sweeping effects on murders and violent crime in Australia. After all, why hold it up as an example, if one can’t point to results? The problem is, to get the results, liberals have to be very careful about what figures they point to. Otherwise, it’s not so good.

Liberals state that Australia’s gun-related homicide rate and suicide rate have plummeted 30% since the enactment of that law. You know something, they’re right.

But what they don’t tell us is that the total homicide rate in the United States dropped by a similar amount, in the same period of time. Not only that, but the U.S. rate is total homicides and the Australian is just gun-related. If you add in homicide by other means, the Australian rate has dropped less than the U.S. one… oops.

The other thing one would expect is that the number of mass killings would have dropped. While it is true, the number of mass shootings has dropped to a total of five in the 19 years since the enactment of that law, the total number of mass killings has been 12.

It seems that the criminals just found other ways of killing, most specifically, arson. Oh, and, the total number of mass killings in Australia in the 19 years before enacting that law were… you guessed it, 12. Doesn’t look like it changed a thing.

Murder is murder and it will happen with or without guns. Liberals act as if outlawing guns will eliminate the guns themselves. If that’s the case, then why has France managed to confiscate 3,000 fully-automatic AR-15 rifles from three mosques in one week? Those are totally illegal in France, yet the Muslim community in France had enough to outfit a couple of battalions of infantry.

On the same day that the Sandy Hook massacre happened, a Chinese man entered into China’s equivalent of an elementary school and killed 32 children with a knife. He outdid Adam Lanza by a long shot, and did so with an inferior weapon.

The fact of the matter is that violence is part of the human condition. As much as any of us would like it to go away, it’s not going to. Eliminating violence would require changing human nature, eliminating our free will, curtailing emotions (especially anger) and controlling the thoughts of people. Perhaps that’s what Obama and his liberal cronies are really after.

The fact that 130 people were killed recently in France shows how fruitless gun control laws really are. The only way anyone can own a firearm in France is to apply for a permit to own each and every hunting rifle they want, individually. Along with the application, the individual must pass a psychological evaluation, which then must be repeated every year. Failure of the evaluation eliminates your right to own any firearms you own.

Yet, the criminals managed to get their hands on firearms, as criminals always do. Unless every firearm on the face of the earth were destroyed or the laws of physics changed, criminals will always get guns. It’s up to us, the honest law-abiding people of our country, to protect ourselves from them.

The New York Times recently published an article  about how killers obtained weapons illegally in countries that have strict gun laws. This appeared in a Page 1 editorial, something that the New York Times hasn’t done in 100 years. Little did they realize it, but they essentially said, “the gun control debate is over, and the gun owners won.”

The things they talk about as challenges are the reasons that the liberals will never get their way. Gun control doesn’t stop crime. There are constitutional challenges to regulating guns and determined killers still find weapons. Those reasons make it impossible to enact the kinds of gun control laws that liberals want.

Perhaps they will eventually realize this; but I doubt it. Liberals live in an ideal world, like college professors sitting around a table, debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. While they don’t believe in angels, they do believe in the debate. So, they’ll continue to argue, sure that they are right, simply because of who they are.

This article has been written by Bill White for Survivopedia.

References:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/opinion/end-the-gun-epidemic-in-america.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Jarrett

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Australia