Fast and Furious
This from the National Review Online:
And gun dealers who cooperated with the ATF report a shift in policy that coincided with Fast and Furious — from stopping sales and questioning customers, to telling store owners to just go ahead and sell the guns. While Fortune reports that the ATF had no chance to interdict the guns that might have killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry — the shop that sold the guns informed the ATF that the transaction was suspicious, but it was a holiday weekend and the fax wasn’t seen for days — the gun store’s owner has said he was told in advance to go ahead and sell guns to people he normally wouldn’t. The entire Fortune piece seems to neglect the distinctions between probable cause for an arrest, the act of at least questioning people who are trying to buy guns illegally, and the ATF’s advice to store owners that they refuse to make any sale that they “doubt” is legal. A big part of Fast and Furious is that store owners were told to make illegal sales when the ATF couldn’t follow up on them or chose not to.
It occurs to me that there is a hypocrisy here much more significant than the fact that the general policy of “gunwalking” now called a horrific scandal and “Obama’s Watergate” started under the Bush administration (named “Operation Wide Receiver” in 2006).
The hypocrisy lies in the fact that, were conservatives allowed their way, no gun sales would be under any scrutiny at all. They are the ones who object to background checks or other federal restrictions–but now, apparently, seem to be on the gun control side?
Interesting.
I am not aware of any gun rights organization that supports doing away with ALL gun control laws. Nor would any but the tiniest fraction of the gun rights partisans on the gun related forums.
The standard refrain from ALL the major groups has been ‘no new gun control laws, but better enforcement of existing laws’ for at least 15 years now. Given the current momentum this has expanded to cleaning up the uglier parts of existing laws so that it is not so easy to accidentally commit a federal felony.
I am not aware of any significant movement to do away with background checks or to roll back the SUBSTANTIVE parts of current gun control laws outside of the de-facto bans in some cities.
I do not think you understand our goals.
>I do not think you understand our goals.
Lotsa guns for us — whatever we want and how many we want — no guns for them.
yeah, we know your goals.
oops, that was a stupid thing to say and I would retract it if I could.
While plenty of gun nuts feel that way, it’s unfair to the bulk of the population who just want to have their guns and be let alone.
The NRA has, in the past, opposed virtually every gun control measure put forward.
The list goes on and on. Now, you could argue that the NRA has supported some gun control legislation–but a closer look at any such case would almost inevitably show it to be a dodge or a compromise. Maybe they demanded instant background checks instead of ones that could take days, for example–but the demand would turn out to be something that would sink the proposal, fill it with holes, or be something they opposed in the past and would quickly oppose in the future were the political opportunity to arise. The NRA generally takes a punish-the-offender stance on controlling gun violence, with their preventative measures being largely voluntary and relatively tame.
You could argue that the NRA does not always represent the wishes of gun rights advocates in general or even its individual members, and you would be right–but that is not contrary to my point, that being the fact that conservative politicians, who act in lockstep with the NRA and organizations like it, pass their laws according to the lobbyists’ goals, and not yours.
And most importantly, even if you discount the craziest things the NRA has opposed, the mainstream gun control legislation thoroughly opposed by the NRA and most gun owners would make it amazingly easy for criminals such as the ones in the F&F program to buy weapons–hell, they can pretty much do it right now.
Your list of the new gun control measures opposed by the NRA is largely, although not entirely, correct. As I stated before, ‘no new gun control laws, but better enforcement of existing laws’ has been the mantra for a long time now.
Opposing additional laws is not the same thing as opposing ALL laws. The general consensus among gun owners is that the laws that will hinder crime without overly compromising the legal rights of the citizenry are already in place. All of the additions you listed may sound good to you in theory, but by accident or design yield results we are not willing to accept in the execution.
However reasonable a proposal may sound to you, understand that the law will be written by a partisan who will intentionally design it to be as onerous as possible.
To point out two simple examples:
1. There is already a law on the books banning armor piercing handgun ammunition. It is carefully written to do exactly that and no more, and it has been 100% effective while at the same time effectively invisible to gun owners. The new law they wish to replace it with would give the US Attorney General the power to ban any and all hunting rifle ammunition at will. Do you think that sounds acceptable?
2. Banning guns specifically to avoid detection at security check points. The first point to make is that these guns DO NOT EXIST. They are PURE FANTASY. The physics of how guns function simply doesn’t work that way. But, as a sop to people who couldn’t learn this, there is already an existing law on the books that requires any polymer guns to be visible on standard x-ray equipment. The NRA supported it, because who cares about make believe guns anyways? What they opposed was a ban on polymer frame guns, which are in NO WAY difficult to detect by standard measures, and extremely popular. This was an attempt to ban some of the most popular guns made by PRETENDING they were something they were not.
Do you understand why we are not willing to go along with these things?
No matter what you believe they are doing, ALL gun control bills are either attempts to drive down gun ownership through harassment, or an attempt to ban whatever guns they think they can trick people into believing are ‘evil’.
It does not have to be that way, but it IS that way.
No matter what you believe they are doing, ALL gun control bills are either attempts to drive down gun ownership through harassment, or an attempt to ban whatever guns they think they can trick people into believing are ‘evil’.
http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/highway-shooter-targeted-tides-foundation-aclu/nK56r/
The only reason the CHP was able to outgun this right-wing clown in Oakland (on his way to take out the TIDES Center) was thanks to our gun laws.
I used to think gun laws should be on a county-by-county basis, but now I think we should have 2nd Amendment Zones — gun ranges — where people are free to keep and bear (drill) any military-grade arms they wish to own. And only there.
the new law they wish to replace it with would give the US Attorney General the power to ban any and all hunting rifle ammunition at will. Do you think that sounds acceptable?
Sure. Why not? Last I checked deer don’t wear ballistic armor.
Actually, checking up on this bullshit I see you are apparently refering to Kennedy’s amendment:
(iv) a projectile for a center-fire rifle, designed or marketed as having armor piercing capability, that the Attorney General determines, under section 926(d), to be more likely to penetrate body armor than standard ammunition of the same caliber.”.
(bolding mine)
google cache link
So you need to get better information on this apparently because your above assertion is not what the 2005 legislation stated.
Gun rights are in conflict with public order and safety. This is something the current Supreme Court has dodged in their recent rulings but the gun-grabbers do have a case here.
Now, we can probably agree that Lopez was correctly decided. And we can agree that we all enjoy a 9th Amendment right to have easy access to guns for self-defense and hunting. And 2nd Amendment rights to “keep and bear” military-grade arms.
And we should not be under any illusions that just trying to outlaw guns actually solves anything or will get us much closer to the much lower murder and armed assault countries like the UK and Japan.
And we should be very respectful of a minority — gun owners — rights to live their lives without undue government interference.
I’m not going to ask that you try understand where the gun-grabbers are coming from, since I am le tired of all the bullshit. You’ll either figure it out or you won’t, and at any rate you’re not arguing here in good faith so why bother.
If true, that just evades my point, it does not refute it. First, the NRA (there are many other groups, but let’s stick with them now) has historically fought just about every major new piece of gun legislation as it is introduced. If they lose the battle and figure it would be hard to, say, continue their fight against background checks now that they have proven to be so valuable, that does not change the fact that they opposed it earlier–and, if it were possible, would strike it down if they had the chance.
And, your claim seems to not be true. You assert that the NRA is about “better enforcement of existing laws.” The NRA is and has been fighting standing legislation in the states, one example being “one-gun-a-month” laws, like the one recently repealed in Virginia, on the books since 1993. The NRA not only backed the bill, but from what I can see, they actually drafted it. Somehow, striking down existing laws does not sound consistent with “better enforcement of existing laws.”
No, but the NRA, as a matter of fact, HAS opposed just about all new gun control laws. That they stopped opposing some of them after they passed or failed is beside the point, and, frankly, a tad disingenuous.
Re: your two examples:
As Troy pointed out, it’s not “any and all hunting rifle ammunition,” but any and all armor piercing ammunition.
OK, I don’t feel like researching it in depth right now, or arguing a minor side point ad infinitum, but I will take your word for it. Retract that and you still have a very long list of legislation that the NRA has opposed.
That’s an extremist statement, patently untrue. If there is a law to require safety training, how is that “harassment”? Is the law to require licensing and registration of automobiles an attempt to harass people who want to drive a car, intended to culminate in a ban on automobile ownership?
There’s fighting for one’s rights, and then there’s paranoia that defeats attempts to make society safer without actually depriving people of their rights.
If you want to further discuss gun rights, go ahead, you have an open forum here. I’ll discuss comments relevant to the post, but have no free time to get sucked back into the general debate.