A 2nd Amendment lobbyist told Fox News Sunday this morning that he doesn’t see “much likelihood that the Congress is going to move on making gun control laws worse than they are.”
“I think it’s a false security to think that somehow we’re going to spot problems when there’s really no way to spot these problems. Some of the most horrendous of the mass murders that have occurred recently, including the one in Newtown would not have been stopped by a background check. The gun is stolen. The person has no prior criminal record,” said Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America.
“We are wasting our time and going in that direction when we should be talking about doing away with the gun-free zones which have been so convenient, such a magnet to those who would come and slaughter lots of people, knowing that there’s nobody that’s going to be legally able to defend themselves in these zones,” he added. “That’s where we’re really making a big mistake.”
Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress said progressives would rally together to defeat the gun lobby, since “there is something tragically wrong when there is mass slaughter.”
“We need the leadership of the president and I expect the president to play a strong leadership role, but progressive organizations will be working to — working with the states to show that we have the voice and really have the American people,” Tanden said. “And even gun owners who support these proposals, their voices at the table as well.”
“I think the issue here is really not, you know, one extreme versus another. It’s the broad middle, rising up and saying, you know what? We can do something about it,” she added.
Tanden hopes the Biden proposal to be delivered to the president this week includes “ensuring that the federal government, people within the federal government, turn over their records, also, through the background check system. So, you know, the Defense Department needs to do that.”
Pratt called the specter of executive action “just avoiding the reality that we have been moving in the direction that somehow self-defense is not valid.”
“That we can somehow protect ourselves by this background check idea. And, in fact, background checks wouldn’t have stopped most of the last of these mass murders that have occurred,” he said. “The gun gets stolen, the person has no background, that would have popped up, so, we have got to face the reality that we have got to empower average people, including teachers, and other people in schools, to be able to defend themselves.”
There is, indeed, something horrifyingly wrong when criminals are free to commit mass murder in so-called “gun-free zones” with little or no fear of being stopped.
The real tragedy is millions of people are naive enough to believe so-called “gun control” laws can in any way affect the behavior of criminals. Laws affect the behavior only of the law-abiding, not criminals. Laws don’t prevent destructive behavior: they merely authorize the state to punish people who behave destructively.
Law-abiding citizens who keep and bear arms on a daily basis have consistently done more to halt criminal predation than all the laws and law enforcement officers in the nation combined. Why is that? Because we’re criminals’ intended victims. Criminals encounter us long before they encounter cops. Law enforcement officers rarely prevent crimes: they solve them.
Better to prevent crimes than solve them, I say.
Every time a criminal is allowed to get away with a crime, he’s merely permitted or even encouraged to commit another; every time he’s prevented from getting away with a crime, not only is that crime halted, but all the additional crimes he’d have committed are prevented as long as he’s locked up.
If the Soros-funded Center for American Progress were even 1% serious about wanting to prevent more mass slaughters, it would advocate arming rather than disarming millions more law-abiding American citizens. It would join the NRA and its 4,000,000 members in calling for an end to so-called “gun-free zones” and push Congress for cross-state recognition of concealed carry permits.
Soros wants more mass slaughter. It all plays into his hands.
I daresay that a lot of the organizations on THIS LIST are against the private ownership of firearms specifically because their wealth and influence depend on high crime rates.
The thing I worry about with making mental health records more accessible to the background check system is that it will almost certainly have a chilling effect on people going to seek help. What threshold are they going to use to legally bar someone from owning a weapon? ADD? Depression? Aspergers? Anxiety disorder? Social phobia? Substance abuse? And when someone is barred because of a mental issue, when and how to they show that they are once again competent to own a weapon and get their rights reinstated? If the whole focus on mental health thing gets taken too far, to the point where anybody who has ever gone in for any kind of mental health treatment at all gets permanently barred from owning a weapon, then I could easily see that it is going to strongly discourage people who need help and might otherwise seek it from mentioning it. It’s going to encourage people to hide any minor mental health problems during the stage when they might actually be more easily treatable for fear of losing their rights.
Absolutely my concern as well. This will add to the still considerable stigma of seeking help for psychological problems, although I will say that in my personal experience those people are significantly detached from reality don’t realize they need help anyway. That fairly large group of people who still are cognizant of their issues will think twice about seeking help if it puts them on a list of “unstable” people. This will have exactly the opposite effect intended but I don’t see a workable solution to identify those few people who are mentally unfit to own guns (and clearly they do exist.) Besides, as far as I can tell, there is very little “science” in the evaluation of mental health issues; it’s EXTREMELY subjective and highly dependent on the eye (and training) of the mental health professional, so their personal ideologies will be used to constrain other people’s rights. I doubt you will find many conservative psychologists or psychiatrists. But then a law like this just might put them out of business. That might be a net gain for society, in the end. We have had more than a hundred years of psychiatry and things aren’t getting any better, as far as I can tell. I think a strong religious belief and a caring pastor is more effective than most psychiatrists.
How about at least starting with barring gun ownership for mental health issue for which the military bars military service? How about barring gun ownership to those for social and criminal behaviors for which would bar one from military service?
Since so many want to claim their right of gun ownership based on malitia service between the ages of 18 to 45, such would only seem an appropriate screening regulation.
For those who otherwise are in the class of gun owners serving to the extent of self protection then regulate the types of guns appropriate for self defense.
For those who qualify under an unorganized malitia clause (18-45), include a severe liability clause for the safe keeping and control of such authorized weapons.
I don’t mind banning ownership for certain mental cases, I really don’t. But we need to recognize that gun ownership in this country is a civil right and the constitution is very clear on not being able to deprive a person of their rights without due process of law. There is a legal process that provides for the limitation of someone’s rights due to them posing a serious threat to themselves or others despite not having committed a crime yet, for example there is a legal process for getting someone institutionalized.
What worries me is that they go overboard and create some automated “mental health registry” where everybody who ever got prescribed an anti-depressant or ADD medication or received counseling gets automatically placed on there. This is very bad because:
a) It discourages people from seeking help at the earliest opportunity
b) It lowers the overall bar for stripping someone of their rights. The involvement of an actual legal hearing with the ability to prevent a defense is critical.
Sorry, that should be “present” not “prevent” an defense.
I’m sure there would be lots of wrinkles to work out, but the issue should be a matter of ‘pre-empting’ who is mentally stable enough to have the right of gun ownership. I have previously suggested a pre-purchase short form psychological personality test which could potentially ‘slow’ a purchase based in the scoring results. I also think that in addition to existing barrments, ALL persons arrested for ALL levels of assaults, drug abuse, and alcohol related crimes and prosecuted to include plea bargining dismissals, should result in loss of gun ownership rights. I also believe that anybody who is in simple illegal possesion of a firarm should have a mandatory 15 year sentence. Anybody in possession of an illegal firearm used in the commission of a crime, should have a mandatory 25 year sentence on top of the base crime sentence.
Theres prudent ways to fix such problems but the radical extremists get in the way of their own benefit. I have to really wonder what their fear is when regulating abuse of a right is. I have some thoughts but……
Also, what do you mean by “liability clause”? I hope your not talking about prosecuting someone for what a thief does with weapons stolen from them. That would be bad for a whole host of reasons.
Precisely! If one is granted an instrument of death then they should be held liable for the secure protection of such instrument and right. There are NO excuses for unattended weapons to be stored in such a manner that it/they can be stolen or used by an unauthorized person. If a person can reasonably prove that he/she was overpowered while carrying (physical unsecured possession) a weapon for defense or other purposes, then that would be a different situation.
You got that right.
It’d be a lot better to scrap the background checks and instead rely on the fact that the overwhelming majority of the public is NOT dangerously crazy and CAN be trusted with firearms. That way, the tiny handful of genuine crazies will know that they won’t be able to use a gun to commit mass murder, because somebody will be sure to stop them after the first death or so.
Soros and the Center for American Progress WANT a high crime rate with frequent high-profile crimes, because they can use that to play on people’s fears and use that to set up a socialist police state. Armed citizens deter the sickos that they rely on to manipulate us.
Larry Correia refutes every imaginable gun-grabber argument.
Add to your quite valid concern the unfortunate tendency of many in the psychiatric community the view mental illness from a political perspective. They’re no different from their counterparts in the old Soviet Union who put political dissidents into mental hospitals because they believed opposing communism was a form of mental illness. Here, they’d try to declare that people who are politically conservative must be mentally ill and use that as a means to deny them legal firearms ownership.
Exactly, if mandated mental health tests ever became required for ownership like some are suggesting it would not be at all difficult for the left to slowly make it more and more challenging to pass it, especially if they made it something like getting rejected by one psychiatrist once bars you for life or some period of years or something. It may also make it more vulnerable to various future executive order shenaniganry. Ultimately anything that makes it more inconvenient for the average person to own a gun is a bad thing because the second amendment’s survival depends on having a very large fraction of the population being versed in firearms and willing to defend it, politically or with force if needed. Creating more hoops for someone to jump through before buying a gun is the same idea as taxing ammunition, the real goal is to gradually eat away at the base of shooting sports and inter-generational transfer of knowledge that sustains the support for the second amendment over time.
Neera Tanden needs to crack a history book. Mass slaughter isn’t a sign that something is terribly wrong, it’s the natural condition of our species. We are highly violent apes. For most of our history that was a good thing. It allowed us to eat calorie dense meat and kept foreign tribes away. Now it’s a hindrance, so we’ve developed social overlays to control that natural tendency. The problem is those overlays aren’t perfect, and they never will be. From time to time someone is simply going to set out to kill a bunch of people. We cannot stop that. The only thing we can do is stop him as soon as possible after he goes of the rails, and that requires “a good guy with a gun.”
“No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” –Mark Twain
If americans were to act responsibly towards their granted liberty, the congress would have little to do domestically.
Agreed, so let’s start talking about sexual morality and the lack of it. Time for sex control and imposition of virtue.
People do not have liberty by grant of government, they have liberty by natural right.
Ever looked at all the sex related statues in America? I know you think you were being cute in your remark but you actually stumbbled into an area in which is a natural right just as some claim gun ownership — though gun ownerships is not even remotely inferred in the bible or laws of nature.
Actually Americans as a whole are extremely responsible with our rights. The gun murders per firearm in the US are orders of magnitude lower than they are in other countries. Having a couple deviants out of 300+ million go off the rails is not indicative of Americans being irresponsible with their rights, rather the current drama over the actions of these deviants and the statistically insignificant number of deaths they cause is proof that when congress has little reason to do what it wants to it makes up a reason. (amplified by the media of course)
America has way too many underutilized lamp posts.