“I don’t believe people should be able to own guns,” Barack Obama told John Lott, Jr. years ago when they worked at the University of Chicago.
Lott, an acknowledged expert on the Second Amendment, crime and guns, writes that “Barack Obama is the most anti-gun president ever.”
In his book, Lott goes on to cite just a few of Obama’s efforts to ban guns: In 1996, Obama supported a ban on handguns; In 1998, he supported a ban on the sale of all semi-automatic guns; In 2004, he advocated banning gun sales within five miles of a school or park, which would have shut down nearly all gun stores.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, Obama proposed sweeping gun control measures, detailed here. Among the most controversial proposals, collecting extensive data on all gun owners and all gun transactions. Legitimate concerns have been expressed over giving government that much power, power easily abused by a government already willing to use the IRS against political adversaries.
After all, why make it easy for government to diagnose citizens mentally ill, allowing for suspension of constitutional rights?
When Obama nominated a new Surgeon General who called gun violence a healthcare issue, more red flags popped up. Think of the government’s ability to commit people to “mental health facilities” when government controls health insurance, diagnostic procedures, allowable treatment, and detention centers.
Congress denied Obama’s gun control radicalism, and he complained about that again yesterday with the news of the Oregon college shooting. It is worth noting Obama’s speech was delivered yesterday before the shooter was identified, and before anyone knew details about casualties. It would appear Obama’s agenda takes precedence over comforting victims and their families.
Failing to persuade Congress on gun control, Obama has turned to other means to disarm Americans. Using regulations and bureaucracies, he is trying to classify Veterans and Seniors mentally defective so as to prevent their owning firearms.
Here we see government illegally confiscating guns across the country, based only on accusations!
For most Americans it is difficult, if not impossible to believe their President is actually engaged in ruthless efforts to destroy the 2nd Amendment resulting in a complete ban on citizens’ owning guns, all to pave the way for dictatorship radiating out from Washington. However, this is no average President. Historically, whenever government denies citizens the right to gun ownership and self-defense, horrible outcomes result, including mass murder, genocide, persecution and mass imprisonment.
Few in Germany believed gun confiscation was a precursor to tyranny, World War, and the Holocaust, resulting in 60 million people killed. Soviet gun control allowed for the extermination of 20 million dissidents from 1929-53. Unable to defend themselves after gun control was established in Turkey in 1911, about 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered. In 1935 Chinese gun control resulted in tens of millions of people’s being arrested and executed. From 1964 to 1981 in Guatemala, thanks to gun control, 100,000 Mayan Indian people were exterminated. In Uganda, from 1971-79, prevented from defending themselves via gun control, 300,000 Christians were murdered. And in Cambodia from 1975-77, more than one million people were obliterated by the Communists thanks to a 1956 gun control law, leaving average people defenseless.
Think of the consequence of a disarmed American population overrun by jihadists or criminal gangs or an invading force.
Consider these facts as well: every mass casualty event has occurred in a gun-free zone where unarmed people are sitting ducks; and in every country where gun control is established, violent crime increases substantially.
The American Founders took seriously a central truth about power and government. They knew that governments tend to grab and exercise more and more power. They also knew that power must be restrained if people were to live free. Part of the American mechanism of restraint is the 2nd Amendment, protecting our God-given right “to keep and bear arms.”
Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founders, our 3rd President, and the main author of the Declaration of Independence said it best:
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” [emphasis added]
Obama wants to remove that protection because he wants to exercise raw, unrestricted power. Will the American people allow him free reign, inexorably leading to death and destruction?
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Obama_Portrait_2006.jpg
