Despite Major Pro-Gun Wins, The Anti-Gunners Will Persist
November 10, 2005

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The anti-gunners have been on a losing streak for a couple of years now, but nobody is feeling sorry for them.

Like the old saying about the man who sells insurance, nobody has endurance like the anti-gunners.

If you throw them out the door, they come in the window. If you flush them down the drain, they back up on you. They are like the residue of hurricanes; you haven’t cleared any of their slop before there’s a new batch to deal with.

Given the changed public attitude about personal safety since 9-11 and the devastating hurricanes this year, and a long recent string of losses, you’d think the anti-gunners might cool it. Heck, even the Democratic Party treats them like relatives that have overstayed their welcome and offended the neighbors.

But people like Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and the New Jersey gun-control twins, Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg, keep coming back again and again. These dynamic headline grabbers and their confreres at the state and federal level keep trying to resuscitate two of their favorite gimmicks: background checks/registration for private sales linked to gun shows, and bans on some kind of gun du jour—currently .50-caliber rifles.

Recent Anti Defeats
The antis have taken a licking especially this year, but they keep on ticking.

Most of the previously mentioned anti-gunners in the Senate, their colleagues in the House, and the anti-gun organizations like to claim that they are really for the Second Amendment, but you have to watch those claims carefully.

They are for the Second Amendment, but they are also for every kind of new gun restriction that anyone can dream up. Some of them have been supporting the big oil companies and other corporations in their fight to keep guns—even for people legally licensed to carry concealed—out of company parking lots. However, it’s not surprising that the antis back the big corporations; after all, their funding comes primarily from foundations that were born in such corporate wealth.

You’d think that the antis would be more concerned with backing the average citizen and worker, but money is also the reason they cozy up to the big corporations. The anti-gun groups really have no grassroots base. Their support comes from big foundations, while the pro-gun groups get their contributions in mostly $15 and $25 donations and memberships.

The other problem they have with grassroots is that the millions of gunowners who are concerned about their right to keep and bear arms are activists.

The members of the pro-gun organizations actually vote, work for candidates of their choice, and speak out wherever they can. That grassroots intensity from Mr. and Mrs. Average American is apparent at public hearings and it pays dividends in shaping public policy and winning elections.

Intensity
Almost every public hearing or meeting I have ever attended or read about is almost identical in make-up. When the doors open for the public meeting or hearing on some gun-related proposal, particularly at the town or county level, there is a record turnout and the majority of the people who show up and speak their minds are pro-gun. They are articulate and passionate about their cause.

The anti-gunners, on the other hand, are usually in a pitiful minority at public gatherings and their arguments, even with local anecdotes, come out of the cookie-cutter prompts Xeroxed by the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, the Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, Americans for Gun Safety, and the new American Shooting and Hunting Association.

By the way, have you noticed that most of these groups have changed their names in recent years? They’ve dropped words like “ban” and “control” in favor of “safety” and “prevention.” That’s because they have finally learned that the uncommitted public isn’t too keen on words like “control,” which sounds like somebody else is always in charge, or “ban” which sounds even more totalitarian.

But name changes and switches in rhetoric don’t seem to be helping the anti-gunners. But that’s not so surprising. What do you expect from groups that not only backs a big corporation’s right to dictate what employees may do when they are not on the clock, but also back gun grabs for hurricane victims, gun ban by government fiat for people in a refugee status because of natural or man-made disasters?

But that’s exactly what the anti-gunners have been doing.

When the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the National Rifle Association (NRA) sued New Orleans and adjacent counties to stop the gun confiscations and get the guns returned to their lawful owners, the anti-gunners not only sided with the confiscators, they chided the pro-gun groups on their websites and news releases for meddling.

When surprising FEMA rules prevented people displaced from their homes by natural causes and moved to FEMA trailer parks from possessing firearms for protection, the anti-gun groups applauded while SAF and NRA again went to bat for the little guys and gals.

When SAF and NRA won a temporary restraining order from a federal judge blocking the post-hurricane gun confiscations, the average citizen applauded while the anti-gunners booed.

The reason they booed is that they want to get rid of all guns. If they can’t get them away from law-abiding citizens by gun locks, insurance, oppressive and intrusive paperwork, buy-ups, amnesties and other schemes, they’ll gladly go for confiscations. Not that they want to be the ones going house to house collecting guns from the people on the government databases; they’ll leave that to the poor cop on the beat.

‘Special Circumstances’
In the absence of the total confiscation of all legal guns owned by Americans, they’ll settle for special confiscations because of “special circumstances.” That’s what’s so important about the lawsuit against the New Orleans gun grab. If it had been allowed to stand, the anti-gun politicians and their friends in the anti-gun groups and media would justify one more confiscation after another—all because of “special circumstances”—until they disarmed Americans piecemeal.

The FEMA rules for trailer housing tenants have since been reversed as reported elsewhere in this issue. However, if they had been allowed to stand, in violation of both the federal and Louisiana state constitutions, you could bet that it would be another gun grab blueprint every time federal money was involved.

Those are two of the smaller setbacks the anti-gunners faced in recent months, but there are others—even bigger.

The passage of S-397, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Firearms Act, and its signing on Oct. 26 by President Bush was a major defeat for the anti-gunners and their supporters in the liability lawyers’ lobby. The antis had been masking their campaign against S-397 with claims that it stripped away “victims rights.” The truth is that they may have suffered a major strategic defeat because S-397 undercuts their attempts to achieve by litigation what they failed to get by legislation.

Of course, they haven’t given up yet; they plan to go to court. After all, I did say they keep coming back.

But they suffered an even bigger defeat in Brazil on Oct. 23, also as reported in this issue.

For the first time, the average citizens of a whole nation were asked to approve an almost total ban on all firearms and ammunition—the anti-gunners dream—and the voters of Brazil turned it down by almost a two-to-one margin.

Of course, they will blame everyone they can for the defeat, but it is one which will be felt around the world. The government of Brazil was very active in fostering global gun control through the United Nations, and the people of Brazil have repudiated their leftist government’s disarmament policy.

Defeated or not. You can expect the anti-gunners to keep trying in this country and around the world.
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