UPDATE: A furious response from gun owners has resulted in a quick reversal by DoD on the used brass decision. Apparently there are some people in this administration who can understand how stupid they look.
Since the election, there has been a huge increase in the purchase of guns and ammunition. Some attribute this to fear of Obama’s previously expressed antipathy to private ownership of firearms. His most recent actions seem to confirm this, as he has taken every step available to him without going through Congress to reduce gun ownership.
His history is not reassuring.
Chicago Defender December 13, 1999,
Obama unveils federal gun bill
Obama is proposing to make it a felony for a gun owner whose firearm was stolen from his residence which causes harm to another person if that weapon was not securely stored in that home.
He’s proposing restricting gun purchases to one weapon a month and banning the sale of firearms at gun shows except for “antique” weapons. Obama is also proposing increasing the licensing fee to obtain a federal firearms
And more when he was a Senator.
Associated Press, Sept. 11, 2004:
-Voted ‘No’ on letting people claim a self-defense protection in court for using a gun in their homes despite local weapons bans. (SB2165, 2004)
First came the new policy in which the Defense Department will no longer sell fired brass cartridges to private ammunition makers. This will cause job losses in the ammunition industry and hurt police departments that need cheap ammunition for target practice.
It will also cost the government money that it has made from selling the brass.
Haynie further pointed out this move is a stupendous waste of taxpayer money–reducing the worth of the brass some 80%–from casings, to shredded bulk brass.
Now pilots who have passed gun safety classes, will be disarmed.
Arming pilots after Sept. 11 was nothing new. Until the early 1960s, American commercial passenger pilots on any flight carrying U.S. mail were required to carry handguns. Indeed, U.S. pilots were still allowed to carry guns until as recently as 1987. There are no records that any of these pilots (either military or commercial) ever causing any significant problems.
Screening of airplane passengers is hardly perfect. While armed marshals are helpful, the program covers less than 3 percent of the flights out of Washington D.C.’s three airports and even fewer across the country. Sky marshals are costly and quit more often than other law-enforcement officers.
Armed pilots are a cost-effective backup layer of security. Terrorists can only enter the cockpit through one narrow entrance, and armed pilots have some time to prepare themselves as hijackers penetrate the strengthened cockpit doors. With pilots, we have people who are willing to take on the burden of protecting the planes for free. About 70 percent of the pilots at major American carriers have military backgrounds.
Obama’s hostility to private ownership of firearms will cost the Democrats at the polls unless Congress reverses some of his policy changes.
Tags: ammunition, guns, Obama, pilots, terrorism
I have never understood this. I live in a state that is very left of center, but has no trouble with concealed carry permits.
But for most leftists, private gun ownership is a horrific sin. Why? It’s not just the fear that the populace, when armed, can overthrow governments. I think it is more fundamental.
The Left wants to remove the possibility of “sin”—that is, if there were no guns at all, death by gunfire would be de facto impossible. But the world isn’t like that. All that restriction of gun ownership does is remove the guns (by definition) from the hands of law abiding citizens. Criminals will always have them.
The Left has always flirted dangerously with the “perfectibility of Man” issue. They want to make it impossible to “sin.”
I say punish the lawbreaker, sure. But let free men and women make their own choices to follow the law or not.
When I was at Dartmouth, we got into the concept of the noble savage. I wrote a paper on a subject that escapes me now but I included evidence of all the paleolithic and neolithic massacre sites. Even the Iceman has now been shown to be a crime or war victim. There was no noble savage and an armed society is a polite society. Obama, like the Clintons before him, is a communitarian and that ideology is opposed to self defense by an individual.
When it works, as in Japan, such a society may be peaceful within itself but quite ferocious toward others. The Japanese society was also historically structured into a ferocious samurai society and a peaceful society of peasants for everyone else. We have never been such a culture. Our ancestors left the communitarians behind when they emigrated. We are selected for individualism and I cannot understand why the leftists think otherwise. I suspect it is the blank slate concept at work.