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Exploding the ‘SB 2099’ Internet myth
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If Al Gore really did invent the Internet as the jokes claim, a pox on his house for unleashing a monster the capabilities of which Josef Goebbels would have been proud.
When it comes to spreading outright myths and disinformation, nothing beats e-mail, for its speed, its ability to turn lies and half-truths into gospel, and its remarkable success in fomenting hysteria.
Which brings us around to SB 2099, a piece of legislation that rises from the dead more frequently than Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing killer of the Friday the 13th movie series. Starting sometime earlier this summer, and really building momentum in August, the latest version of the SB 2099 myth has been joined at the hip with a warning about HB 45, the notorious Bobby Rush legislation introduced earlier this year that would require registration of handguns, and other repugnant measures.
I've been bombarded by telephone calls and e-mails from sincerely misled people for the past few weeks about this.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. - Josef Goebbels
There is just one small fly in the ointment. SB 2099 is a dead issue and has been for nine years. It was originally introduced in the year 2000, and it died in committee, without ever having come to a vote. But its specter continues to rise every year or so, apparently just to keep some people on edge.
Called the Handgun Safety and Registration Act of 2000, it was sponsored by vehemently anti-gun Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed. Even he acknowledged at the time – when Congress was under control of the Republicans in the waning days of the Clinton administration – that the bill really didn’t have a prayer. That bill would have required registration of all handguns and a $50 tax on all handguns manufactured.
Now let us depart from reality. According to the current version of this myth – which has been thoroughly debunked by Snopes.com – the original legislation never would have required handgun owners to list the serial numbers of all their guns on their federal income tax forms. That part of the myth came later, and the current version screams in big letters, “SB-2099 will require us to put on our 2009 1040 federal tax form all guns that you have or own. It will require fingerprints and a tax of $50 per gun.”
SB 2099…is not currently before Congress – it was introduced to the Senate back in February 2000 (not 2009), and it was referred to the Committee on Finance, where it languished without ever coming to a vote. – Snopes.com
And then comes this whopper: “This bill was introduced on Feb. 24, 2009 by the Obama staff. BUT…this bill will only become public knowledge 30 days after the new law becomes effective! This is an amendment to the Internal Revenue Act of 1986. This means that the Finance Committee has passed this without the Senate voting on it at all. Trust Obama?...you must be kidding!”
Rush’s HR 45 is gathering dust, and barring some incredible turn of events, that’s how it will properly die at the end of the current Congress. As for SB 2099, its continued resurrection with new, alarmist modifications, proves that some people will believe anything without checking.
But there is more at stake to the spreading of such horse puckey than just making a bunch of easily-duped gun owners look like fools. It distracts their attention as citizens from things that should seriously alarm them.
The other day, the Nashville Tennessean generously allowed me to submit an Op-Ed piece that took them apart for having published a rather alarming story about how a handful of apparent miscreants had been able to obtain, and keep, concealed carry permits. The newspaper specifically identified two men, one of whom is currently in prison, who had permits when they probably should not. In total, just over a dozen cases were identified out of 200 to 500 permits that had been questionably issued, in a state where 237,000 law-abiding citizens are licensed to carry.
According to the detailed report in The Tennessean, the state Department of Safety has identified a mere 14 people who had apparently obtained permits illegally. Of those, six have been revoked, six others have been suspended, and the agency has "sent letters to the remaining two seeking more information about the disposition of their charges."
This is hardly a crisis when stacked against the number of permits that have been issued to law-abiding citizens.
My advice to Tennessean readers was to “do a little math” before declaring an emergency. Why the Tennessean gave the story such prominence is open to speculation. Sensationalism sells, but it borders on media disinformation, a subject about which the conservative Washington Times editorialized about disparagingly.
The story was perhaps aimed at jarring the Legislature to take some kind of action and perhaps drastically tighten up on the state concealed carry law, a wholly unnecessary thing to do. Unlike the case of SB 2099, pushing to change an existing gun law based on a minute percentage of abuses or bureaucratic foul-ups really is cause for alarm.
And finally, WorldNetDaily just published a story about legislation in Massachusetts that has ugly police state implications. Stacked against the urban myth of SB 2099, the Massachusetts bill is a genuine threat to civil liberties, if the WND story is accurate.
If citizens refuse to comply with isolation or quarantine orders in the event of a health emergency, they may be imprisoned for up to 30 days and fined $1,000 per day that the violation continues. - WorldNetDaily
Under this bill, the “authorities” would be able to “forcefully quarantine citizens in the event of a health emergency,” among other things.
No citizen should be comfortable with government having that kind of emergency authority because it is so open to easy abuse. I need only remind people of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 about the police state mentality that can erupt; when citizens are forced at gunpoint to surrender their firearms for no good reason, and to submit to other civil liberties abuses.
That amounts to tyranny, and is the sort of thing that – according to many gun rights activists – led the Founding Fathers to include the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights as a preventive measure.
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