What President Obama Says He'll Do To Your Gun Rights

During the second presidential debate a participant, Nina Gonzalez, asked President Barack Obama, “President Obama, during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?”

Now, most of the firearms deliberately sold to straw purchasers in Operation Fast and Furious, while ATF officials watched on closed-circuit TV via surveillance cameras in gun stores, were AK-47s. These guns mostly went to Mexican drug cartels. They have since been used to kill a lot of people in Mexico. One of the AK-47s was recovered at a murder scene in Arizona after a drug runner used it to gun down a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

But rather than dig into the Obama’s administration’s cover-up of Operation Fast and Furious or its other anti-Second Amendment overtures, let’s just listen to President Obama and ponder what he says he would do to your gun rights if given a second term.

Obama said, “…I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves.” Then, after talking about the shooting in Aurora, Colo., Obama said, “…I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets.”

Yikes, let’s pause a moment.

The muskets used in the American Revolution were designed for soldiers in war theaters. Lever-action rifles were used in Indian wars and in the American Civil War; meanwhile, lever-action rifles have always been hunting guns. (My first deer rifle was a Marlin lever-action Model 336.) The bolt-action Springfield 1903 rifle was used by the U.S. military through the first half of the 20^th century. Many deer hunters today use bolt-action rifles and many have “sporterized” 1903s. The same can be said about every other type of long gun.

What about handguns? John Browning’s Model 1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, recoil-operated handgun originally chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge. The Model 1911 served as a standard-issue sidearm in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Many civilians today own Model 1911s; also, since 1911, many other versions of semi-automatic, magazine-fed handguns have been developed and are commonly used for self-defense, hunting, and target shooting.

Actually, most firearms used by American civilians today are related to firearms that were, or are still being used, on battlefields. This includes the so-called “assault weapons” that President Bill Clinton banned from 1994-2004. Today many American manufacturers produce what anti-gun groups call “assault rifles.” The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade group for firearms manufacturers, calls these same firearms “modern sporting rifles.” These semi-automatic rifles have been among the hottest sellers to civilians for the last decade and more.

So okay, the president is in over his head here. He doesn’t understand American history or very much at all about the firearms 80 million Americans own.

Let’s hear what else he had to say.

Obama continued, “And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.”

Oh boy, we have to pause again.

The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban prohibited the sale of certain models from certain manufacturers and it outlawed the sale of other firearms that had certain features. Basically it banned guns that had a certain number of cosmetic features, such as a folding stock, pistol grip, bayonet mount, and so on. Now, even if such a gun ban could lower crime rates—and FBI crime statistics prove gun bans don’t reduce crime—when the ban was in effect a person could still buy a firearm with the same semi-automatic action but without the cosmetic enhancements. So the so-called “assault-weapons” ban was a bit like trying to ban sports cars by banning tail fins.

Obama might not know that, but he seems aware that such a ban wouldn’t work. He went on to say, “…frankly, in my hometown of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap handguns.”

So okay, Obama seems to know that stopping law-abiding Americans from buying firearms that look a certain way isn’t going to stop criminals, but he wants to curb Second Amendment freedoms anyway.

Obama attempts to explain his contradictions by saying, “And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control. And so what I want is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.”

First of all, he says we need to get “automatic weapons” out of the hands of criminals. The thing is, unless someone has a Class 3 Federal Firearms License (these are very difficult to get), they can’t own automatic weapons. Semi-automatic firearms—every time you pull the trigger the gun goes bang once—are legal. So again, Obama doesn’t know what he’s talking about, which makes people wonder if he wants to ban all semi-automatic firearms.

The answer to whether he would like to do that isn’t clear, but he mentions Chicago, so let’s take a quick look at what’s going on in the Windy City

Chicago is on pace to be the murder capital of 2012. Between January 1 and June 27, 2012 a staggering 250 people were killed in Chicago—that’s almost enough to fill 10 regular-size buses. That’s 36 more deaths than occurred in the same period in 2011, a 38 percent rise at a time when most cities have declining murder rates. As of late September there had been 400 murders in Chicago. (There are a lot of real faces and stories behind these horrific statistics. To see a map of locations complete with details about the people killed, see here.)
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy haven’t been able to stop the violence. Emanuel was formerly White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama. He served as senior advisor to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998 and as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2003 until his resignation in 2009 to take his position in the Obama administration. He won the mayoral election in Chicago on February 22, 2011.
Last spring Emanuel tried and failed to create a statewide registry of gun owners. Though Illinois remains the only state in the nation that does not allow residents to carry concealed firearms, that’s not enough gun control for Emanuel. In fact, last June, after U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan called a section of Chicago’s gun laws “unconstitutionally void for vagueness,” Emanuel said at a news conference: “The reason we have gun laws—the reason I’m trying to also pass tougher gun laws down in Springfield—is because it’s an essential complement to your overall crime strategy.”

  

McCarthy, meanwhile, came from Newark, N.J. He was police director. Before working in Newark, McCarthy was a beat officer in New York City. That’s a tough resume, but McCarthy might have gotten the appointment because of his politics. McCarthy expressed his views on gun rights in a church. He went to St. Sabina’s Church in Chicago and told parishioners that the “black codes,” “Jim Crow laws” and “segregation” that occurred in the South were “government-sponsored racism.” That’s true. But then he said today’s federal gun laws are also “government-sponsored racism.” He said, “I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of African-American history in this country, and tell me if I’m crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms into our urban centers … are killing black and brown children.” McCarthy thinks he can reduce the violent crime rate by using the government to take away an individual right—the Second Amendment of our Bill of Rights—from law-abiding citizens everywhere, yet he doesn’t see the parallel between this statist position and the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws he called “government-sponsored racism”? Black Codes and Jim Crow laws once disarmed and disenfranchised people on the basis of race. These were government sponsored just as the restrictions preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms for their protection are government sponsored.
Neither Emanuel nor McCarthy—or Obama—will look into the facts that, as John Lott showed in More Guns, Less Crime, indicate violent crime rates tend to go down when gun ownership goes up. This is intellectually lazy of them, as they have a lot of examples to choose from.
In the 2008 Heller decision, for example, the Supreme Court struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban and gun lock requirements. When the Heller case was decided, Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned, “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence.” Knowing that Chicago’s gun laws would soon face a similar legal challenge, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley said he was “outraged.” He said people “are going to take a gun and they are going to end their lives in a family dispute.”
The bloodbath never arrived.
Murders in Washington plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140—Washington’s lowest murder rate since 1967.
In 1982 Chicago’s murder rate also rose after the 7th Circuit Appeals court upheld its ban on new handguns. Over the proceeding 19 years there were only three years where the murder rate was as low as it was in 1982. As shown in Lott’s third-edition of More Guns, Less Crime, before the ban, Chicago’s murder rate was falling relative to the nine other largest cities, but after the ban Chicago’s murder rate rose relative to other cities.
Meanwhile, Lott’s findings that shall-issue laws (A “shall-issue” jurisdiction is one where a person must obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun, but where the granting of such permits is subject only to meeting certain established criteria.) tend to reduce crime rates has been backed up by peer-reviewed studies.
A study by Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvell that was published in Econ Journal Watch in January 2009 looked into Lott’s findings. It determined that: “Many articles have been published finding that shall-issue laws reduce crime. Only one article, by Ayres and Donohue who employ a model that combines a dummy variable with a post-law trend, claims to find that shall-issue laws increase crime. However, the only way that they can produce the result that shall-issue laws increase crime is to confine the span of analysis to five years. We show, using their own estimates, that if they had extended their analysis by one more year, they would have concluded that these laws reduce crime.”
The fact that disarming citizens doesn’t reduce crime was also expressed in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion for McDonald: “[The] number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq … 80 percent of the Chicago victims were black…. If, as petitioners believe, their safety and the safety of other law-abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials.”
However, despite all of the statistical examples, Emanuel and Obama still blame Chicago’s murder rate on guns. By Obama’s own words, a second Obama administration would mean that policies now harming residents in Chicago would be pushed onto the rest of America.