Confiscation
Another commenter, on gun rights and Obama:
Yes, Obama is gonna take away your arsenal! The President can’t confiscate anything, even a B-B gun.
Mayor Roy Nagin of New Orleans cannot confiscate guns, either. But because local regulations required the registering of firearms, Nagin (right after Katrina hit and with massive flooding still crippling the residents) sent the New Orleans police department to confiscate all civilian-owned weapons. From the New York Times:
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Local police officers began confiscating weapons from civilians in preparation for a forced evacuation of the last holdouts still living here, as President Bush steeled the nation for the grisly scenes of recovering the dead that will unfold in coming days.
Note the stated purpose: The government planned on forcing the citizens to do something they did not want to do, and so the first step is to take away their right to defend themselves. The article goes on:
Police officers and federal law enforcement agents scoured the city carrying assault rifles seeking residents who have holed up to avoid forcible eviction, as well as those who are still considering evacuating voluntarily to escape the city’s putrid waters.
“Individuals are at risk of dying,” said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of the New Orleans police. “There’s nothing more important than the preservation of human life.”
* * *
Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, said that after a week of near anarchy in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,” he said.
That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.
Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.
That is President Obama’s goal as well: “no civilians … will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind.”
Obama was on the board, for eight years, of the Joyce Foundation. This foundation’s overarching goal is to eliminate civilian-owned weapons. They push this quietly, funding research purporting to show that gun murders are pervasive and increasing. In fact, such murders are pervasive in the Democrat strongholds of inner cities, but were declining for decades until Obama decided that stirring up race riots suited his agenda.
Obama’s actions for the Joyce foundation were influential, and the board offered him the chairmanship. He declined this, as he was just beginning a run for the Illinois state senate,which he ultimately won through the simple legal maneuver of having the other candidates disqualified.
You wrote:
There is a Constitutional process, one people who believe the nonsense about Obama need to understand so they don’t shit themselves every time there is a mass shooting.
As President Obama has repeatedly demonstrated, he feels little constraint from Constitutional processes. He has gotten increasingly bold since he (and the Democrats) have gotten past their last elections during his term. His actions against the rule of law on immigration, healthcare, the environment, religious freedom, and his mandates on bathrooms show that issues large and small he feels are his alone to rule upon.
He is already changing gun-related legislation, again without bothering with Congress. As an aside, none of the “common sense” acts recommended by Democrats or implemented by Obama would have stopped any of the mass killings in recent memory. Not one. But Obama’s main intermediate goal is to establish a national registry of guns and gun owners, like New Orleans used in their great confiscation caper.
It is not President Obama’s goal to reduce the gang- and minority-connected gun violence that plagues the inner cities. None of his edicts are aimed at those problems, and he rarely even mentions them. His focus is on the hundred-million-plus Americans who legally own guns without incident. He considers this “uncivilized” and a threat to government. In the latter case, he’s sort of right - law-abiding citizens with guns are a threat to a tyrannical government.
Obama counts on the fact that rules once established are hard to undo. And after November’s vote, until he leaves office on January 20th next year will be a dangerous time indeed for the country.
The recent Heller decision ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right of citizens to keep and carry arms. But a new, progressive-appointed Supreme Court could easily rule otherwise.
The otherwise is essentially this: That the people (mostly Madison) putting together the Bill of Rights of individuals suddenly decided that the government needed permission in the middle of these individual rights to give guns to its own military force. That the militias, absent the Second Amendment, would only have been allowed to assemble a group of weaponless people to defend their states and the federal government. Absurd, isn’t it?
No, the Second Amendment is clearly an individual right. The language simply notes that a gun-owning and gun-using public would be that much more effective in a militia service, which is one justification (more are found in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers) for not interfering with their right to be armed.
But the Left is intent on interpreting the Second Amendment in just that absurd way, which will then allow the confiscation, using Obama’s list, of all civilian-owned firearms in the US.
Constitutional conservatives (including me) are very familiar indeed with the mechanisms for amending the Constitution, and we support what Article V calls “a Convention for Proposing Amendments.” This convention has already been approved by several states; I think it’s eight so far.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle