President Obama’s speech at the National Urban League Convention on July 26th had a series of tells on his true position regarding gun control.
The President stated “But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals — that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.” The Avtomat Kalashnikova (AK-47) was developed in Russia in 1949 and is still currently used by communist and third world countries. There are more AK-47’s than any other gun in the world, but most notably, it is the preferred weapon of America’s enemies. More Americans have died from AK fire than any other gun but the triggers were not pulled by American citizens.
AK-47’s are sold in America but they are not the AK-47’s of the battlefield. A soldier’s AK is a fully automatic weapon that is designed to fire continuously with one pull of the trigger. The AK’s sold in the United States are restricted to firing one round per one trigger pull, much like a deer rifle or shotgun used for skeet or trap shooting. Fully-automatic AK-47’s are highly regulated and not accessible to citizens for whom buying a gun is otherwise legal.
The AK statement the President made is akin to saying “We must stop companies from putting cyanide in baby formula.” The statement relies on the ignorance of the recipient not knowing the regulations surrounding automatic weapons already in place and makes the presupposition that these guns are bad, they are easily accessible, they must be removed from society and opposing these actions is extreme. AK47 battle rifles are not on our streets. However they are on the streets of Middle Eastern countries that are uprising against their dictatorial leaders with the support of the United States.
President Obama then went on to say “I believe the majority of gun owners would agree that we should do everything possible to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons; that we should check someone’s criminal record before they can check out a gun seller; that a mentally unbalanced individual should not be able to get his hands on a gun so easily. These steps shouldn’t be controversial. They should be common sense. “Indeed this is common sense and again the President uses the audiences’ lack of understanding to promote additional restrictions on gun ownership. To purchase a gun from a dealer everyone undergoes a background check. The President is setting up the argument to ban private sales and transfers of firearms between citizens. That means Gramps can no longer give his .22 squirrel rifle to his grandson without involving the Federal Government.
Understanding the President’s statement means that each time a gun is transferred it would be assigned to an individual through the Federal Government. If the Feds cannot track 2,400 guns intentionally provided to Mexican drug cartels then they certainly won’t be able to track 300,000,000 guns in the United States. Imagine this scenario: You are travelling and your wife is at home. A violent home invasion takes place and your wife grabs the gun she has bedside and shoots the intruder. The gun is not registered to her, it’s registered to you, and she is now charged with illegal use and possession of a gun. President Obama’s statement positions him to take future actions to put an unrealistic administrative burden on American citizens that all too easily make them criminals for possessing a gun.
How would the President enforce mental suitability for purchasing a gun beyond existing controls? It is already illegal for a mentally compromised person to purchase a gun. Without a note from a psychiatrist confirming mental viability for each and every gun purchase there is no way to confirm there has not been any change in the mental status of the purchaser.
Then the President said, “Even as we debate government’s role, we have to understand that when a child opens fire on another child, there’s a hole in that child’s heart that government alone can’t fill. It’s up to us, as parents and as neighbors and as teachers and as mentors, to make sure our young people don’t have that void inside them.” The President deftly inserts that there is a debate to be had about additional gun control followed by recognizing that we should teach children not to shoot each other. Yes, we should teach children not to shoot each other but he is not the person to craft the message.
Chicago, the adopted hometown of the President, where he made his claim to fame as a “community organizer” and where his former Chief-of-Staff presides as Mayor is among the most violent cities in the United States. School shootings, shootings that actually took place inside the walls of the institution, were so high that metal detectors were installed at Chicago school entrances. Chicago has more shootings in a typical day than gun crazy Arlington, VA has had in the past three years. You stand a better chance of being shot in Chicago than in a theater of war in the Middle East. The President is in no position to lecture the American people on curbing violence based on the results he and his ilk have had in the areas they have worked, lived and legislated.
The past two Second Amendment decisions from the Supreme Court were decided by one vote. The next president will likely have two SCOTUS nominees and the current Obama appointees have been ardently anti-gun. Obama’s tells in his speech to the National Urban League are a clear message to gun owners that he will take any and all measures to institute the controls on the American people that he favors in his crime-ridden home town. If given a second term he may be able to amass the power to execute those measures. After all, who can disagree with “Common sense gun control?”
