When Vice President Joe Biden gathered Friday morning in Virginia with other officials and “experts who worked on gun safety following the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech,” this had far less to do with safety than it did with regulation, and pushing the Obama administration’s gun control scheme.
Even the Seattle Times confuses the two terms, perhaps deliberately, in an editorial earlier this week calling for the passage of “rigorous gun safety laws.” However, a look at what the newspaper advocates is not related to “safety” but to control firearms and who can have them.
The Times contends that requiring background checks and closing the mythical “gun show loophole” is a “gun safety” measure. The newspaper argues that banning an entire class of firearms and extended capacity magazines is related to firearms safety.
That’s gun control, not gun safety and to argue the latter is to perpetuate a fraud. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s gun ban legislation introduced Thursday might be pandered by anti-gun liberals as a “gun safety” measure, but banning guns is gun control in its most extreme form: Prohibition.
If this were truly a “safety” measure, it would not exempt active duty and retired police officers and other government officials. Cops have gun accidents and negligent discharges, too.
The press has fully swallowed the identity shift of the gun prohibition lobby which has re-packaged itself as a “gun safety” lobby. Frequently alluded to as “gun safety” groups are such organizations as the Brady Campaign, Violence Policy Center and even Washington Ceasefire.
If one seriously needs to identify a true “gun safety” group, there is but one: The National Rifle Association. Only the NRA has a network of certified volunteer firearms instructors and training counselors. They teach gun safety, from muzzle control and sight alignment to safe storage options and personal protection. Any organization that doesn’t offer that kind of instruction is not a “safety’ group but a “control” group, and they know it.
Feinstein and other gun prohibitionists are fond of asking “Who needs an assault weapon to hunt deer?”
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, notes that the Second Amendment isn’t about deer hunting. And he offered this sage observation:
“I don’t need an AR-15 any more than Rosa Parks needed to sit in the front of that bus.”—Alan Gottlieb, CCRKBA
Anyone who believes Feinstein’s ban on so-called “assault weapons” will be effective suffers from the same delusions that advocates of alcohol or drug prohibition evidently had. Nobody stopped drinking, and the “War on Drugs” has been something of a train wreck.
Seattle liberals promoting Saturday’s much-ballyhooed “gun buyback” (a misnomer, since the city never owned those guns to begin with, and a questionably legal enterprise since it does not appear the participants have a federal firearms license) consider it a “gun safety” effort. No, it’s a publicity stunt that demonizes guns and allows possible thieves to turn in stolen firearms without fear of punishment because it’s a no-questions-asked enterprise.
Nobody in the firearms community has tried to stop the buyback. Indeed, some enterprising folks have promised to be nearby offering real money for any valuable firearms that show up. It’s also likely that a camera crew and individuals with cameras will be filming the event, which is legal since it is being conducted in an open air parking lot – a public place – under the freeway from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
It is the kind of creepy scenario often used by gun banners to illustrate how they believe illegal gun transactions are conducted: In a parking lot under a bridge with no questions asked. This column discussed the hypocrisy involved, but has never discouraged anyone to participate.
Vice President Biden, in an on-line YouTube discussion with several people this week, may have partly discredited the efforts of his boss and Sen. Feinstein to ban so-called “assault weapons” when he acknowledged late in the discussion, that the guns they want to ban “count for a small percentage of the gun crimes in America.”
“More people out there get shot with a Glock that has cartridges in a magazine that you can put two, 12, 8, 10, 15, 30 cartridges in it…than from any assault weapon you see,” Biden commented. “I’m much less concerned, quite frankly, about what you call an assault weapon, than I am about magazines and the number of rounds that can be held in a magazine.”
Actually, the gun community doesn’t call these firearms “assault weapons,” the gun prohibition lobby manufactured that term years ago, and the vice president knows it. To firearms owners, these guns are “modern sporting rifles.”
But that misidentification, along with calling prohibitionists “gun safety experts” is part of the fraud.
The time has come to expose this for what it is: Gun banners duping the press and the public while eroding a fundamental, constitutionally protected civil right.
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