Thank God for That

From an article headlined "Harry Reid kills assault weapons ban":
Virtually the entire press corps frothed at the mouth when the president, grandstanding at the State of the Union speech, thundered that a list of gun violence victims “deserve” a vote on these sorts of measures... [but] the Senate leader decided he couldn’t prevail upon his members to cast a vote.

Cowardly? Maybe. Or maybe the votes aren’t there and to maximize his chances on other measures he took the assault weapons ban out. That is the nature of the legislative process. But at least we can dispense with the notion that Republicans are standing in the way of assault weapons ban legislation.
There's a huge difference in the 1994 law and a similar law proposed today. In 1994, so-called 'assault weapons' were a minor part of sales, even compiling all the weird things that the Clinton bill coupled together like pump-action shotguns with heat shields over the barrels. You'd go to a gun show, and there'd be like two tables selling anything like that. The rest sold long rifles with wooden stocks, hunting shotguns, or handguns.

A decade and a half since 9/11, the AR models are the most popular rifles in America. There are nine million of them in private hands. The US Army is barely a million all told, Reserve and National Guards added in. And 40+% of them are Southerners, since the all-volunteer military came to be. Close to seven in ten are Republicans. You'd be risking a mutiny to ask it, and you ought to be: you'd be running into the teeth of the most plain and obvious reading of the 2nd Amendment, to which all these soldiers took an oath.

I keep hearing that you can't deport 11 million people. Well, maybe, although people have to eat and that means they have to go out in public to find work and buy food. Guns don't have to do anything. If you grandfather 9 million ARs -- and all the other so-called 'assault weapons' -- you might as well not pass the law. But if you pass a law with confiscation, how are you going to find them? Who's going to come and get nine million rifles from families who don't want to give them up?

Thank God the votes aren't there.

3 comments:

Eric Blair said...

Both Connecticut and New York have both found out that their efforts to register "assault rifles" has basically produced mass civil-disobedience.

It's all grandstanding. or "virtue signalling" as I have read.

Ymar Sakar said...

Perhaps Reid will avoid another "accident" as a result.

I looked up his record and while he's a Mormon, he is against Church doctrine and his religious head, via Prop 8 and other Demoncrat evil antics. He even stated, via his wiki, that the Democrat is the natural party of the godly, because Republicans are evil. Then he had that "accident".

Grim said...

I don't think the mafia is super in favor of gun control. But I could be wrong -- could make another black market (albeit a particularly dangerous one to try to control, given who your customers would be).