Fear and loathing — not hope and change
Erik Onstott
The Orange Leader
All manner of ignorance and self-righteousness is on display on the op-ed page this election season. Many leftist pundits seemingly have nothing of substance to say about what their candidate offers for the country, aside from the ever-present empty bromides of “hope,” “inspiration,” and “change.” One such leftist pundit featured on this page said John McCain “doesn’t have...the ability to inspire.”
Perhaps not, but the only things Barack Obama and Joe Biden inspire in libertarian conservatives like me are fear and loathing. One reason is the Democratic ticket’s anti-gun record — quite fearsome all by itself.
For example, Joe Biden to this day boasts of writing the semiautomatic rifle ban signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 — the one that Clinton himself later blamed for the Democrats losing both houses of Congress that year. Barack Obama is on record as supporting that ban and more stringent ones on other types of firearms, including a ban on handguns.
What of those who didn’t turn in their guns after the passage of such laws? Door-to-door confiscation of the guns by armed government agents?
Don’t think they won’t try it, either. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on 60 Minutes in February 1995, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.”
Many would have defiantly told Sen. Feinstein to “Molon Labe,” roughly translated from the original Greek as, “Come and get them.” What then? I certainly don’t find hope or inspiration in such a scenario.
Obama has offered no hope for gun owners in his speeches on the stump. For example, in a speech in Pennsylvania last month, he said, “Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress.” Taken at face value, that sounds as if Obama, like Sen. Feinstein, does want to take the guns away and would if he only had the votes — which, in my estimation, makes him unfit to be elected dogcatcher, let alone President of the United States.
The loathing came as Joe Biden insulted gun owners’ intelligence trying to come off as the tough, macho gun guy. He told a union audience in Virginia last month, “I guarantee you, Barack Obama ain’t taking my shotguns, so don’t buy that malarkey...I got two, if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.”
Well, that’s nice that Barack Obama’s not going to take Biden’s Beretta shotguns — not that Biden would ever need them, with that armed security detail provided to him by the American taxpayers — but what about my Springfield Armory M1911A1 pistol, or the DPMS AR-type semi-automatic rifle I’d like to have?
Biden’s on record as denigrating not only the semi-automatic rifles, but also their owners. For one debate during the primaries, if you’ll remember, one voter submitted a question about gun control jokingly referring to his AR-15 rifle as his “baby.” Biden, true to form, said, “If that’s his baby, he needs help...he just made an admission against self-interest.”
It should be noted that the hunting firearms are every bit as fearsome as the oft-demonized handguns and semi-auto rifles. Consider that the shotgun was so effective in trench warfare in World War I that Germany lodged a formal complaint against the U.S. for using them, contending they were “inhumane.” Regarding the rifles, as someone else said, “Ten million scope-sighted high-powered rifles is the most potent force for armed resistance in the history of mankind. You can’t put a 500-yard security perimeter around every domestic enemy.”
And to paraphrase one of my favorite gun bloggers: To those of you who would throw the pistol and semi-auto rifle owners under the bus, when those armed government agents come for your deer rifles and duck guns (aka your high-powered long-range sniper rifles and big-bore street sweeper shotguns), we won’t be able to do a thing to help you because we’ll already have had our guns taken away from us — or we’ll already have been buried with what’s left of them.
And this is a critical issue, even if you don’t own a gun — even if you don’t have the slightest interest in owning one. As one of my favorite libertarian writers, L. Neil Smith, said, the issue of gun rights is “the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.”
Or, put another way, if Barack Obama and Joe Biden don’t trust you with a firearm — and it’s painfully obvious they don’t — what else do they not trust you with? And if they show so little respect for the Second Amendment, what other parts of the Constitution are they willing to throw under the bus? If this is what the future of this country holds with those two leading it, then Obama can stick his change back in his pocket and go on back to Chicago.
In fact, I hope he does. |
