The Gathering Storm Over Guns

Human Events:

The Gathering Storm Over Guns

by Wayne LaPierre (more by this author)
Posted 05/01/2009 ET

Barely 100 days into the new Obama-Biden administration, ominous storm clouds are already gathering over your most fundamental right as a free citizen: Your right to own a gun to protect yourself, your family and your freedom.

Betraying all their campaign promises to protect your right to keep and bear arms or your freedom to hunt, the Obama administration has put its chess pieces in place and set in motion its strategy to do just the opposite.

Throughout the West Wing, they’ve appointed a cabinet composed of some of the most experienced and politically effective gun grabbers Washington, D.C. has ever seen.

Meanwhile, powerful members of the U.S. Senate and House have admitted that gun bans remain a top objective, but only “when the time is right.” Which really means “when some awful tragedy conveniently captures national attention.”

Yes, Barack Obama had an extensive and extreme anti-gun voting record as an Illinois senator. Yes, he called for gun bans during the Democratic presidential primaries. But once he won his party’s nomination, Obama reversed that spin and spent millions showering key states with flyers promising voters that he would never try to take their guns. But after winning the presidency, those pro-freedom showers dried up overnight.

Pre-Election Promises Become Post-Election Perfidy

Barely 100 hours after winning the election, the Obama-Biden transition team posted an Internet web page outlining its ambitious anti-gun agenda.

Its legislative goals included permanently reinstating the Clinton gun bans, banning sale or transfer of firearms between private citizens (at gun shows and presumably anywhere else), and requiring that handguns be “childproofed” through nonexistent technology that, even if developed, would make them prohibitively expensive and far less reliable.

American voters immediately and rightfully cried foul. That’s when Obama and Biden -- who’d bragged, “I’m the guy who originally wrote the assault weapons ban” -- quickly deleted that web page from the Internet.

But they swiftly set about assembling an anti-gun all-star cabinet to achieve all that and more. Consider just a few of the gun-ban extremists who populate Obama’s inner circle.

Obama Cabinet Stacked with Anti-Gun Veterans

Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel worked as President Bill Clinton’s point man on gun control. When Clinton administratively outlawed imports of many firearms and accessories, Emanuel bragged, “We’re bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns.”

After leaving the Clinton White House, Emanuel went on to make gun bans his stock in trade as a congressman from the anti-gun mecca of Illinois. There, he co-sponsored a bill to extend and expand the Clinton gun ban and repeatedly voted to expose America’s firearms industry to bankrupting, politically motivated lawsuits.

Attorney General Eric Holder served as deputy attorney general under Clinton, where he tried to make you get a government-issued license to exercise your Second Amendment rights.

He also pushed mandatory waiting periods, “one-gun-a-month” rationing of your rights, mandatory trigger-lock regimes and bans on ammunition magazines.

As signer of a “friend of the court” brief defending the D.C. gun ban before the U.S. Supreme Court, Eric Holder believes that -- as his own Justice Department under Janet Reno asserted -- “the Second Amendment does not extend an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advocated gun bans long before she even assumed elective office. She helped organize the 2000 “Million Mom March,” and said of the protesters, “The moms have it right: we have to license and register all handguns.”

During her first run for the U.S. Senate, Clinton proposed that gun purchasers should be required to pass tests to obtain licenses; that all gun sales be recorded in a national registry; that new guns be logged in a “ballistic database”; that the Consumer Products Safety Commission regulate guns; and that gun purchasers be limited to one per month.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was named “Man of the Year” by the Illinois gun-ban lobby last year, and upon his appointment in the White House, the Brady Campaign called him a “wonderful selection” for the job. Their praise is telling.

As the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan last year bused Chicago schoolchildren to the state capital -- at taxpayer expense -- to serve as props for lobbyists pushing gun control in the state. He urged schools to have students submit entries in the annual Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence “Essay, Poetry and Art Contest.”

Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein has a long record as a radical animal “rights” advocate. In a speech at Harvard, Sunstein said, “We ought to ban hunting, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It’s time now.”

Sunstein has also said that livestock and wild animals should have legal “rights” and be permitted to file lawsuit; that current uses of animals are akin to “human slavery”; and that meat eating should be eliminated.

An Anti-Gun Strategy in Search of Tragedy

Though the administration and Congress haven’t publicly put gun control legislation at the top of their agenda yet, they’ve admitted they’re just waiting for the right moment to pounce.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said so April 12 on “60 Minutes.”

When “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Feinstein about the new gun bans, Feinstein allowed that she “wouldn’t bring it up now.”

But when pressed whether she would bring it up at all, Feinstein vowed, “I’m going to pick the time, and the place. No question about that.”

Despite Obama’s campaign promises and his stealthy approach to gun control since then, Feinstein made it clear on “60 Minutes” that she and her anti-gun allies are arrayed from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.

In her interview, Leslie Stahl asked, “Has anybody -- the Democratic leadership in the Senate, or anybody from the Obama administration -- looked at you and said, ‘Back off’?”

“No,” Feinstein admitted. “Nobody said a word to me.”

Like all anti-gun strategists, they’re waiting for the perfect tragedy to exploit. As of press time, the drug-fueled violence devastating Mexico appears to be it.

At a February news conference, Attorney General Holder plainly blamed Americans’ Second Amendment rights for mayhem in Mexico:

“[T]here are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make,” Holder said, “and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit at a news conference in Mexico City, claiming, “We know very well that the drug traffickers are armed by the transport of weapons from the United States.”

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D–Ill.), the senate’s second most powerful Democrat, lamented that “an iron river of guns from the United States arms Mexican drug cartels to the teeth,” and he blamed American gun shows for the violence.

Make no mistake: New gun bans and restrictions are very much at the top of the agenda in the White House and Congress -- even if they don’t admit it yet.

If you want to keep your most fundamental rights as a free citizen, get ready. The onslaught is planned, prepared and unprecedented. And it’s coming.

Get informed and get involved. Join the NRA. Keep up with all the news on your rights through NRAnews.com on the Internet or Sirius satellite radio Patriot channel 144.

We must stand united and ready for this fight. Considering the players, their power, their promoters and their war chest, this will be the toughest and most definitive contest to preserve firearm freedoms in America for generations to come.

Mr. LaPierre is Executive Vice President and CEO of the National Rifle Association of America.