I have a feeling this is more of a sop to the racist contingent of the Democrat party that keep themselves up at night worrying about black people with guns, but you never really know with President Eisenheim.
Sales of AR-15s have been through the roof, and frankly if you ever thought about getting one, now is the time to get your order in.
From the White House web site.
Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.
Uproar about eavesdropping on terrorists, but not a peep about violating the second amendment rights of Americans.
The Tiahrt amendment protects the rights of legitimate gun owners from abuse by police and government officials.
In early 2003, the Supreme Court was on the verge of hearing a case involving the city of Chicago's attempt to obtain the name of every multiple handgun purchaser in the United States. After the case had been briefed, but before oral arguments, Congress passed an appropriation with a very specific prohibition on the release of purchaser names. In light of the appropriation language, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts. (For details on the law and the case, see my article in ABA Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases.)
Profiling? Yeah, I think it is. Even the attempt is fascist in the extreme, and I think you know who runs things in Chicago.
Types of firearms deaths of children and teens in 2005-->
Protecting children? That argument was used in Canada to mandate trigger locks, which essentially render a gun useless for personal defense. The disingenuousness of the "concern" for children's lives is reflected in the statistics. Note the pie chart at the right. 3,000 deaths? Of children? If you go to the CDC site and design a custom report (like I did), the picture comes out very differently. Children under the age of ten who were killed accidentally by firearm in the U.S, in 2005?
Thirty-eight.
How about from 10-14?
Thirty-seven.
Let's say we want to engage in the get-the-guns contingent's little game of calling nineteen year old men "children". Number of accidental deaths between 15 and 19?
Ninety-eight.
Yes, its terrible if even one child dies, but there were 1,187 accidental drownings in the same period--half of them children under the age of four. That's 16.4% of all deaths for children in this age cohort. More children die from falling down, than from firearm discharge accidents. (54) More than twice as many children died from poisoning (90).
Oh--that gunshow "loophole"? Doesn't exist and never did. Gun dealers have to do the background check no matter where they actually sell the gun. Private owners are exempt, and always have been. Of course if you call it the "Private Owners Loophole", it just doesn't have the same political resonance.
As I alluded to up front--I think this is a case of the Obama adminstration trying to have its cake and eat it to. Give a little hopenchange to the disarm-the-blacks crowd, but keep it obscure enough that fans of the constitution won't think you're serious. On the other hand, its politically tone-deaf. The huge surge in gun sales should have clued the apparachniks into what is a massive reservoir of paranoia and suspicion on the part of the public.
Like the demonization of marijuana, which had the ulterior motive of driving immigrant Mexican workers across the border, gun control has always been about eventual confiscation.
"It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today. Passing a law like the assault weapon ban is a symbolic--purely symbolic--move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation."--Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, April 5, 1996
Bill Clinton, who hoped to ride gun control to greatness, publicly acknowledged that support for the infamous "Crime Bill" had cost the Democrats 20-21 seats (first to Bob Novak, then to the Cleveland Plain Dealer...)
Public attitudes in 1994 were far more amenable to stricter gun laws than they are now. The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics reflects a number of survey of public attitudes from 1990 to present, and public opinion for stricter gun control in was in the mid-sixties. The current surveys reflect a very different picture--49% think we should have stricter gun control, 8% less strict and 41% kept as they are now. That erosion has been a steady trend over near twenty years.
If the Obama administration thinks this is a winner, by all means proceed, but it looks more like the political equivalent of the La Brea tar pits.
