That depends on the game being hunted, Senator Muñoz

Yesterday, we talked about the bizarre lengths to which anti-gun politicians in Illinois are willing to go in indulging their hatred of America's armed citizenry. Anti-gun senators took bills, passed with broad bipartisan majorities in the House, to improve nuclear power plant safety, and to protect children from sexual predators, and gutted them, turning them into nearly unprecedentedly oppressive gun bans. One of the primary characters in these attacks is Senator Antonio Muñoz (a Chicago Democrat, of course).

During debate in the Senate Public Health Committee (in which every Democrat voted for these bans) Wednesday, Muñoz apparently thought he had just the rejoinder to put NRA lobbyist Todd Vandermyde in his place. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

"You don't hunt with a 50-caliber weapon, my friend," Munoz derisively told NRA lobbyist Todd Vandermyde before the panel voted for the weapons ban by a 6-4 vote.

First, Muñoz is dead wrong. Second, no serious Second Amendment scholarship argues that the Founding Fathers devoted 10% of the Bill of Rights to the sport of hunting (although with some creativity in defining "sport," there might be a case to be made).

The third response to Muñoz's little quip is to point out that when the game one is "hunting" is an oath-breaking aspiring tyrant, perhaps riding in an armored limousine, rifles chambered for the .50 BMG cartridge can be just the ticket. Anti-gun United States Senator Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA, in both cases) are well aware of this, and frightened by it--and America is better off for their fear. As observed previously:

The common theme here is that Feinstein, Waxman and others seem to have identified .50 caliber rifles as a personal threat to their own lives.

This is a good thing. Those who take it upon themselves to write the laws by which the rest of us must live should fear the wrath of the people they seek to govern. For the nation to be truly free, those who seek to exceed the limits on their power imposed by the Constitution must be made to live in mortal terror of the consequences.

Elmer Fudd is the kind of hunter Senator Muñoz apparently believes is the only class of hunter he has to (barely) accommodate. He needs to realize that with only a slight paraphrase of Elmer's signature line, a prime "hunting" application of these rifles becomes obvious:

Be vewy, vewy quiet--we're hunting oath-breakers.

See also:

• So what if they are 'weapons of war'?
• The right to keep and bear arms is not based on 'sporting purposes'
• AR-15s have a 'sporting purpose'--but don't need one
• 'Sporting purposes' requirement must go
• Some politicians fear citizens with .50 caliber rifles--and that's a good thing
• Gun rights: Of rights, needs and 'sporting purposes'
• Please welcome to the arms room: The .50 BMG magazine-fed AR-15 'pistol'
• If ammo needs a 'sporting purpose,' slaying aspiring tyrants must be a 'sport'
• Illinois lawmakers pondering gun ban in defiance of voters' will
• IL Dems think 11-round magazines more dangerous than outdated nuclear plants