PA Bill Number: SR77
Title: A Concurrent Resolution petitioning the Congress of the United States to call a Convention for proposing amendments pursuant to Article V of the ...
Description: A Concurrent Resolution petitioning the Congress of the United States to call a Convention for proposing amendments pursuant to Article V of the ...
Last Action: Reported as committed
Last Action Date: Apr 30, 2024
Perhaps the time has come to put gun control out of our misery :: 06/23/2015
Yesterday’s comment by White House spokesman Josh Earnest to The Blaze that it is “difficult to say whether one piece of legislation or one rule if changed” might have prevented the Charleston church shooting was a text book dodge of the obvious answer.
That answer would have been a simple “No,” and he knows it. President Barack Obama, quoted over the weekend by the Daily Mail, “acknowledged on Friday that a 2013 bill he heralded and polls showed nine in 10 Americans supported that would have expanded background checks to gun shows 'wouldn't have prevented every act of violence, or even most.'”
Yet the president and his fellow anti-gunners in Congress and the gun prohibition lobby continue to insist that more gun control is necessary. The Daily Mail noted, “The White House said today that Obama would do his part by continuing to 'forcefully make the case as he has done in recent days' and insisted that expanding restrictions on gun purchases remains 'a priority' for him.”
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Correction: Earlier today this column asked, Isn’t Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?” Well, it may be somebody's definition, but apparently not Einstein's. A sharp-eyed reader tipped us off to the often mis-attributed quote and we found this tidbit with some searching. Apologies to Einstein, and the readers, for the error!
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The aftermath of Charleston, like the aftermath of Sandy Hook, and the aftermath of the Colorado theater massacre, just might suggest that the shooters in those cases may not be the only apparently crazy people on the landscape.
Even Pope Francis got in on the act Sunday, according to Reuters, when he reportedly said gun manufacturers are hypocrites to call themselves Christians. He may want to discuss that with the Beretta family, whose company is the oldest existing firearms manufacturer in the world. They’re just up the road from Rome, in Brescia, Italy. The company also owns Benelli, located in Urbino, Italy.
Second Amendment activists contend that it should be obvious by now that the gun control agenda pushed for so many years has failed. Perhaps it was never supposed to succeed in the first place, but was only designed to build layer upon layer of bureaucracy by exploiting each new tragedy, in order to incrementally destroy the right to keep and bear arms.
Maybe it is time to try an entirely different tack, one that has already worked on American criminals. Punish the bad guys and leave the good guys alone. When the James-Younger gang tried to rob the bank in Northfield and were shot to pieces by lawmen and gun-toting citizens, the Minnesota legislature didn’t rush to disarm the public. They buried the dead bandits, put the live ones in prison and carried on.
When the Dalton gang tried the first simultaneous double bank robbery in U.S. history in Coffeyville, but the Kansas Legislature didn’t push laws to disarm the citizens who killed Bob and Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers. Instead, the citizens lined up the bodies and took photographs.
This isn’t about barbarism; it is about punishing the right people without penalizing the wrong ones. Fortunately, many in Congress and various state legislatures have figured this out and refuse to be gulled into passing “feel-good” statutes that make temporary headlines and create the impression something has been done.
The best that the president and his spokesman have been able to muster is that they “don’t know” whether their proposed laws might have prevented the tragedies they lament and exploit. Among Second Amendment activists, that seems pretty lame.
Take a look at the mass shootings in recent history. The shooters either bought their guns at retail – passing background checks in the process – or stole them from someone who did. What has the administration and gun prohibition lobby sought? Close the so-called “gun show loophole,” despite the fact that gun shows had no connection to the crimes, and broaden background checks to include private sales, temporary loans and gifts.
They want to ban so-called “assault rifles,” despite the fact that long guns of any kind are used in a fraction of homicides annually. More people are beaten or stabbed to death annually than are killed with rifles and shotguns combined, according to FBI uniform crime data.
Business Insider yesterday reported that “in the wake of the murder of nine innocents in an historically black church in Charleston, SC last week, President Obama has given up on the possibility of any sort of gun control legislation getting through Congress.” That doesn’t mean he’s given up on adopting further restrictions on gun owners.
The Blaze reported yesterday that “Earnest said the point of more laws is not to address any specific incident, but to prevent future killings.” Yet there is ample evidence, including the doubts indicated by Earnest and his boss, that none of what they have proposed would prevent anything.
As noted above, the administration’s continued insistence upon spreading its agenda, which hasn’t worked so far, seems pretty lame. In the Old West, where they occasionally dealt rather suddenly with outlaws, when a horse broke its leg and could not be healed, they put the animal out of its misery. Many Second Amendment proponents think it is time to put the broken agenda of gun control out of our misery.
http://www.examiner.com/article/perhaps-the-time-has-come-to-put-gun-control-out-of-our-misery
