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Gun Rights 101: What exactly is an ‘illegal gun’ that 400 mayors are against?
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In May 2006, a small group of mayors, including ousted Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, were invited to a “summit” in New York by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to found Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
The purported idea was to get so-called “illegal guns” off the streets; a lofty goal for sure, but might it not be a better idea to get criminals off the streets instead?
Of course, removing a criminal element from society has never been the MAIG goal. This group, which now boasts more than 400 members claiming to represent 56 million American citizens – legions of whom are undoubtedly law-abiding gun owners who are steadfastly opposed to more gun control measures – is only focused on removing what it calls “illegal guns” from society.
At the time, the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms correctly categorized this group as one more gun prohibitionist lobby. If this group was truly interested in solving crime without bothering law-abiding gun owners, its members would already be sitting down with gun rights organizations.
We're offering to take guns I guess off the street or from people who don't want them anymore. I'm calling it unwanted guns. And we're recycling them back into the community." Barry Bauer, Herb Bauer Sporting Goods
If Nickels had traveled across Lake Washington to visit with the CCRKBA and its sister organization, the Second Amendment Foundation, instead of rubbing elbows with the extremists at Washington CeaseFire and lobbying on behalf of their agenda, he might not have lost his job in last month’s mayoral primary. It may have even been a public relations coup. Instead, his rants against legally-carried firearms on public property and his threat to ban them by executive order despite state statute and state constitutional provisions against such a ban lost every critical vote from gun owners in his city. Instead of cooperating with the mayor on some truly beneficial enterprise, SAF and CCRKBA have been poised to sue Nickels the moment he inked such an order.
All of that said, nobody has ever clearly defined what constitutes an “illegal gun.” Perhaps it is because there really is no such thing, and the MAIG ringleaders know it.
A firearm may be illegally possessed by some criminal.
It may have been illegally altered for some criminal enterprise.
It may have been illegally purchased by someone who could legally buy a gun, on behalf of some scumbag who could not.
But when that gun left the factory, it was a legally-manufactured, highly-regulated and carefully inspected product that worked exactly as it was designed to work. The firearm does not determine its own destiny. It is an inanimate object as incapable of breaking the law as a hammer used to bludgeon someone.
MAIG has made a big deal out of partnering with Wal-Mart to prevent illegal gun sales, but the National Shooting Sports Foundation beat them to the draw with its highly acclaimed “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” program.
It claims to support “gun safety” measures, but the National Rifle Association already wrote the book on that subject, and has a nationwide network of firearms safety instructors whose services have never been enlisted by anti-gun metropolitan mayors.
Firearms will be taken with no questions asked, Chief Nick Kaiser said. The person turning in the weapon will receive a $150 gift certificate to Crossgates Mall.
MAIG supports so-called “gun buyback” programs, which are essentially fraudulent in that they subliminally suggest that the guns being collected by police departments were once owned by them or the government at large. Furthermore, these programs give the false impression that somehow violent crime will be reduced because people turn in a bunch of junk guns for money or gift certificates, “no questions asked.”
Recently in Fresno, CA an enterprising gun store, Herb Bauer Sporting Goods, started its own gun buyback with one clever difference. Instead of destroying the guns, this shop “recycles” them back into the community by selling them to law-abiding citizens.
MAIG says it does not want people illegally carrying guns. By the most phenomenal of coincidences, neither do the millions of law-abiding American gun owners. Trouble arises, however, with MAIG members like Nickels, who simply cannot acknowledge that citizens can legally carry guns every day, not only concealed, but openly, depending upon the jurisdiction.
A gun carried legally is not an “illegal gun.”
Bloomberg and his cohorts would like very broad latitude to determine who can and cannot own or carry a gun. Gun rights activists submit this authority is not really theirs; they cannot simply disarm citizens by fiat.
They are mayors, not monarchs. That the leaders of this bunch would happily outlaw all guns does not make it so.
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