By David Codrea, GUNS Magazine
“We cannot slip into a comfortable silence while horrific acts of gun violence become the new normal,” an e-mail from Organizing for Action (formerly Organizing for Obama) asserted. “Add your name now to show your support for reform.”
The solicitation was part of a choreographed blood dance in the wake of an evil loser murdering unarmed Bible study participants at a black church in Charleston, S.C. Naturally, pointing out that the killings occurred in a place where guns were not “allowed” resulted in angry condemnation. It’s not like those calling for “a national conversation on guns” mean for you to do anything but listen—and then obey.
The email linked to a “Take a Stand against Gun Violence” page where followers could enter their names to (in reality) take a stand against gun ownership.
“Gun violence tragedies have become far too commonplace,” the sign-up page declared, offering platitudes but no specifics. “It’s up to us to make sure there is a path forward. We can’t give up. Add your name to fight to make progress on gun violence prevention.”
How?
It doesn’t matter. In typical “progressive” Opposite Day fashion, the immediate goal was and is to manipulate those for whom emotions trump knowledge. That regressing to a state monopoly of violence and limiting freedom represents a giant step backward from the true egalitarian power sharing of an armed citizenry never enters the mind of someone who would fall for such a scam. That’s why a mere inconvenience like the truth doesn’t matter to those with an agenda to advance.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama flat-out lied. “And it is in our power to do something about it.”
To paraphrase another anti-gun president, Bill Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word “advanced” is. Those who would drag America into a global disarmament norm have been playing fast and loose with the term, along with its companion benchmark, “developed,” since they first figured out it worked like a charm on those who don’t know any better.
It especially helps if the claims are dressed up in the trappings of academic authority, as was the case when Kimberly Yonkers, MD, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, wrote an editorial in The New York Times claiming “Gun violence is 20 times more prevalent in the United States than in other highly developed countries.”
To prove her case, Yonkers cited a chart developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, essentially a coalition of control-grasping collectivists from 34 member nations. But the chart, titled “Gun-related murder rates in the developed world,” makes some interesting exclusions.
Most obvious is its “excluding Mexico” footnote disclaimer.
The only apparent answer to “Why would they do that?” is because including Mexico would undermine a premise they’re trying promulgate. After all, draconian Mexican “gun control” has not slowed down the cartels one bit.
As for being “developed,” Mexico has a larger GDP than many of the nations that weren’t excluded from the OECD chart. Also rated above some of those countries in term of “economic complexity,” Mexico includes cars, computers, video displays and delivery trucks among its top exports. It boasts a literacy rate of 93.4 percent.
Also inexplicably left off the chart, evidently meaning it is not considered “developed” by OECD, is Russia, with both restrictive gun laws and more homicides than the US. Somebody had better tell those primitives they have no business exporting rocket engines to this country and advanced weapons systems to China.
Still, it’s safe to assume the people Barack Obama counts on to blindly sign onto his nebulous pleas against “gun violence” won’t even be aware of such details, let alone persuaded. For them, it’s all about “feeling safe,” and blaming we who believe in the right to keep and bear arms for their mistrust and hysteria. Never mind that the millions of members of major national and state gun rights groups are simultaneously the most armed-to-the-teeth and the most peaceable population on the planet. And never mind that, per a Breitbart report on the president’s lie, “even the left-wing PolitiFact couldn’t find a way to turn it into anything but a ‘Mostly False.’”
But that feelings ploy is one the antis dust off from time to time, and following Charleston, they pulled out all the stops to bring it to the fore. And that translates into what E. J. Dionne, again of The New York Times (naturally!) called “the right to be free from gun violence.”
“What’s needed is a long-term national effort to change popular attitudes toward handgun ownership,” he wrote a week after the church shootings. “And we need to insist on protecting the rights of Americans who do not want to be anywhere near guns.”
How would “we” do that?
Dionne started out talking background checks, leaving out that the Charleston shooter passed one, and then moved on to his grand plan of “build[ing] a social movement devoted to the simple proposition that owning handguns makes us less safe, not more … We need a public health campaign on the dangers of gun ownership, similar to the successful efforts against smoking and drunk driving.”
Taxpayer-funded, of course.
That old argument is further bolstered by resurrecting a Violence Policy Center “study” concluding defensive gun uses are vastly outweighed by “gun deaths,” and having that repeated in the media ad nauseam as if it were the truth. Like another notoriously inadequate “study” from decades earlier, that contention totally ignores violence incidents prevented when simply displaying a gun stopped attackers cold. Perversely, the antis demand blood, and reject incidents when their prejudices against “violent” gun owners aren’t realized.
So it shouldn’t surprise us when it’s peaceable gun owners who are targeted for further controls in the quest for the end game goal: Government getting guns out of private hands.
“People across the country are stepping up, and OFA supporters and volunteers are working to prevent gun violence state by state and city by city,” Obama proclaimed in the OFA email. “Because of organizers like you, states like Washington and Oregon have introduced successful restrictions on gun purchases, like common-sense background checks.”
Actually, it’s because of money from billionaires like Michael Bloomberg setting up professional campaigns, and Obama’s definition of “success” doesn’t account for fed-up gun owners joining a fast-growing “I will not comply” movement (see September, 2015 “Rights Watch”).
No less a source than the National Institute of Justice admitted in a 2013 report that background check “Effectiveness depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration,” and a critical mass of gun owners aren’t about to put their heads in that noose. Numbers forced out of the New York by a public records demand show why the state was reluctant to produce them: Fewer than 45,000 “assault rifles” out of an estimated 1 million have been registered in compliance with the misnamed SAFE Act.
“No single reform will eliminate violence,” Obama conceded in the OFA email, setting the stage for more demands after the first ones have been met. That’s not the goal anyway, and never has been, but it does provide fake cover for conning the ignorant into surrendering their rights and believing it’s for their own good.
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