The Second Amendment and the gun control crowd.
We're not going to see the fight that they really want, are we? That's the end result they desire, but it takes work and political risk that they're not going to attempt.
Instead we see them attempt to define the 2nd Amendment as protecting the rights of "hunters and sportsmen" with the firearms the state deems them privileged to obtain. [I don't remember any sportsmen during the Colonial and Revolutionary period....] That's OK, we can play that game too....most AR variants are called sporting rifles. There, problem solved.
We see politicians explicitly proclaim that "the state should have a monopoly on legitimate violence" [Nadler, D-NY]
We see politicians proclaim that certain cosmetic, ergonomic and mechanical features define a firearm as an "assault weapon"....yet are utterly incapable of specifying why those features add lethality to the firearm...and in the one case that could be made, the detachable magazine, they ignore the feature in the other weapons that kill far more people every year. By her definition, every semi-automatic is an "assault weapon".
They do this, because they think they can demonize the firearm, because it's scary looking to people who think guns are icky. It's the intellectually lazy tact, and it has many followers and enablers.
They point to a 100 round magazine used in the Aurora shooting, and call it a "high capacity magazine". They point to 20 and 30 round magazines and label them exactly the same, yet not the magazines closer in capacity that they claim they would allow. Semantic word games that are a joke to rational people.
They point to precedent of banning fully automatic firearms [for most Americans], and use it to bolster their argument to ban more firearms [again, based largely on cosmetic features]. Yet they are uniformly blind to the precedent we've seen in other Western nations who followed this same road to it's logical conclusion.
No, they won't attempt what they really want, which is to overturn the 2nd Amendment. They'll play the games that the sheep will cheer.
I won't assume to know what every gun control advocate is thinking, but I agree that there are many who secretly harbor dreams of an outright ban.
ReplyDeleteThere is no other way their fantasies will work. They ignore the fact that James Holmes, if denied guns, would have used another even more lethal method. I say this based upon how he had his apartment rigged up.