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Feinstein: ‘I’ll pick the time and the place, no question about that’
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Veteran anti-gun Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who sponsored the ban on so-called "assault weapons" during the Clinton Administration -- costing her party control of Congress for a dozen years -- left no doubt in the minds of American gun owners that she fully intends to revive that ban. She's just biding her time.
Feinstein was speaking to CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl during a program that aired Sunday evening (April 12). For the record, Stahl's report on the gun buying frenzy in America over the past few months was far more balanced than was the ABC 20/20 hit piece on guns that aired Friday, April 10, with Diane Sawyer at the microphone. Stahl spent considerable time with Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and he certainly was given plenty of face time to tell his side of the story.
I wouldn’t bring it up now…I’ll pick the time and the place, no question about that.
Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who let slip the desire of her colleagues on Capitol Hill to register guns, Sen. Feinstein "made it official" about guns. She wants to take them away, and she's just waiting for the right moment, the right set of circumstances, the right exploitable tragedy, to launch that effort anew.
Odd, isn't it, that with the Speaker of the House and a powerful fellow Californian in the U.S. Senate, that gun rights activists are still being accused of paranoia on this issue. Stahl even pointed to the official Obama website notation that the new White House occupant would like to revive the ban.
The dialogue on 60 Minutes at times was interesting:
Stahl: "Why not make it uniform, have everybody go through a background check?"
Van Cleave: "How about making it uniform and have nobody go through the background check? The Second Amendment doesn't say 'you can get a gun if you go through a background check.'"
Monday morning, the NRA was conducting a membership drive on the Drudge Report page. Membership appears to be climbing rapidly for the organization, and there has also been an increase at the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. All three groups are preparing to sue Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels virtually the moment he officially announces his threatened gun ban on city property, a legal argument that Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna has already said Nickels will lose.
Speaking of losing battles, Mason County Sheriff Casey Salisbury continues to dig his hole deeper by once again suggesting, in a quote published by the Seattle Times, that State Sen. Tim Sheldon is promoting vigilantism by suggesting that Mason County residents are ready, and well armed, to fight back against crime if and when the sheriff's department budget is cut.
Sheldon never has suggested that citizens take the law into their own hands. He has merely stated that citizens in his home county have had it with crime, and that they can take care of themselves in the event Salisbury's budget takes a financial hit. It has never been clear why some sheriffs and police chiefs associate self-defense with vigilantism. It is as though they are looking down their noses at the public they serve, telling citizens that they cannot take care of themselves, that they need caretakers.
Sen. Sheldon is an outspoken maverick, and on this issue he is absolutely correct, rather than politically correct. If there isn't an "open season" on criminals, maybe there ought to be.
On a final note, Bravo to three Navy SEAL marksmen for superb timing and great shooting off the coast of Africa. Over the weekend, I pulled out an old video of The Wind and The Lion, with Sean Connery as a Barbary pirate named Raisuli and Brian Keith as a feisty Theodore Roosevelt. The film is based on an actual event during Roosevelt's presidency.
The dialogue in that film is, well, inspiring, and could not be more appropriate for recent events. In a scene with Keith and John Houston, the latter portraying Secretary of State John Hay, Keith (as Roosevelt) expresses outrage that Raisuli has kidnapped an American citizen named Eden Pedecaris and her children from their home in Morocco.
"You know as well as I do," declares Keith, while practicing archery, "we can't have Arab desperadoes running around kidnapping American citizens. If I had my way, I'd go in there with a couple of Winchesters, a battalion of Marines ... Threatening the lives and the property of American citizens, it's an insult in the eyes of the world; Arabian thief, holding me up like a common desperado. America wants Pedecaris alive, or Raisuli dead."
Didn't matter, of course, that Raisuli wasn't an Arab, but a Berber, just like it doesn't matter that the recently departed pirates were Somali. Every damn one of them was a criminal, and in a perfect world -- a Tim Sheldon kind of world -- not only would there be no bag limit, but there would also be no license required.
Rent the video or buy it. If one likes adventure, a great sound track, Connery at his best and Keith portraying Roosevelt as a blunt-talking, no-nonsense cowboy politician that Teddy might have enjoyed, you're going to love this 1975 film by John Milius.
Four hundred years ago, pirates on the high seas were summarily executed, frequently by hanging from the yard arm. We are hardly barbarians. Today, we should give them a trial ... and then hang them.
Unless we can shoot them first.
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