The “Gun Grabbers” in America Are Restless
If you are a gun owner, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do to try to prevent the gun grabbers from winning the day? And they may. Their fearless leader, Barack Obama, through his gun control mouthpiece, Joe Biden, has said, “The president is going to act. There are executive orders, executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet, but we’re compiling it all.”
We already have numerous examples of the lengths Obama will go to circumvent Congress, whether through recess appointments, the contraception mandate, the granting of Obamacare waivers, the non-enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act and the non-enforcement of immigration laws. Based on what he has already done, there is no reason to believe he won’t bypass Congress with executive orders when it comes to gun control.
With his penchant for governing by executive fiat, he behaves more like a dictator than an elected representative of “we the people.” He does not appear to care much for the U.S. Constitution. With Obamacare, he has already violated the First Amendment by compelling religious organizations who oppose abortion to provide for them through insurance coverage. That violates the “Exercise Clause” of the First Amendment. The federal government is being sued for that and will, hopefully, lose in court.
Now, he has his sights set on the Second Amendment which guarantees our right to “keep and bear arms.” As is his pattern, he never lets a tragedy go to waste. The massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, provided the opening for him. His ultimate goal is to grab guns and this is his chance. He knows, in the wake of the horror that was Sandy Hook, he must strike while the iron is hot.
Why didn’t he and his team launch a gun grabbing campaign during the summer, after the massacre in a movie theater at Aurora, Colorado? Politics, pure and simple. He chose not to make a move then because it would have been a political hot potato and would have hurt him and the Democrats heading into the election on November 6th. Now, presumably, he won’t ever have to stand for re-election so he knows he can push gun control to his heart’s content.
The killings in Aurora and Newtown were horrible and unthinkable. No question. But they are not things that happen often. Even once is too much, but the fact is, they happen randomly. That’s why they are called “random acts of violence.” In spite of their randomness, the policy makers want to focus on mass shooters and not every day shooters who use illegal guns to do illegal things at a staggering rate. Gun grabbers can’t see the forest for the trees.
So far, Obama seems to want to focus on so-called “assault rifles” and high-capacity magazines, not on handguns. So far. But, he may use the next “random act of violence” to go after handguns. He knows grabbing handguns will be a tougher nut to crack, but perhaps he figures America will be more willing to give up her Second Amendment rights after another massacre.
More than handguns need to be discussed when the conversation is about gun violence. This gets to why we cannot have a meaningful conversation in this country about guns and probably never will. Simply reciting the pertinent statistics will result in you being called a racist.
According to a United States Department of Justice report released by the Obama administration in 2011, “Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).
The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).”
These are telling statistics. In urban areas, where gun violence takes place much more than anywhere else, young black men, often the product of broken families, are joining gangs and committing acts of violence against each other. In many cases, the violence is perpetrated with an illegal gun.
The profile of the typical murderer with a gun is a black male in a city under the age of 25. Does that mean we should profile young black men? It most certainly does not. But, if we really want to curb gun violence in the United States, the conversation should center around this phenomenon of young black men from broken homes who use illegal guns to perpetrate violence against one another.
Yet, this has, so far, not been an integral part of the national discussion. The mayors of some of the cities where these atrocities are taking place—Chicago and New York, for example—are not talking about black on black crime. Instead, they are talking about taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, not about enforcing their already-stringent gun control laws.
Banning guns tomorrow will not stop the black on black crime that permeates our urban areas. The illegal guns are already there and they are being used to murder people. Focusing on handguns instead of rifles will not stop this. A renewed assault weapon ban will not stop this. Until we figure out how to fix the family instability within the inner cities, any solution proposed by the gun grabbers will be an exercise in futility. The person holding the gun is the problem, not the gun.
Because the gun issue, to some extent, involves race and is often viewed as lacking a solution, policy makers and the mainstream media don’t want to grapple with the core problems. You can bet you will not hear Barack Obama, Joe Biden, NBC, ABC or CBS talking about black on black crime.
So, as a gun owner, what are you going to do?
First, you need to vote. A significant number of gun owners failed to vote in the last election. Are you kidding me? Gun owner, if you are a non-voter, you have skin in the game, so you better get involved and stay involved.
Second, you need to speak up. Make your views about guns known. Be clear. Be loud. Be relentless. E-mail, call and fax your U.S. representatives and your senators. Do the very same thing with your state legislators. Contact every single one of them!
Third, you need to support those who are fighting for your Second Amendment rights, both policy makers and organizations. Join and support the National Rifle Association or the Gun Owners of America, whichever you prefer, or both.
As gun owners, in the alleged words of Ben Franklin, “We must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately.”
Ed Baswell is the host of “Crossfire Radio,” Monday through Friday, 7-9 am, on The Promise, 90.7 FM. The show is streamed live at promisetalkradio.org.
