Has Obama Confiscated Your Guns Yet?

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
Three news stories about guns caught my eye this week, and then I realized I hadn’t bugged the hell out of the National Rifle Association for about a year.  I miss the nasty letters and e-mails that I get if I write about the NRA and Bibles with camouflaged-draped covers.  According to NRA literature and press releases, Barack Obama promised in his 2008 campaign speeches to “ban the use of firearms for home self defense” and “ban the manufacture, sale and possessions of handguns.” 

The NRA also claimed Obama had a “10-point secret plan” to close 90 percent of the gun shops, ban all hunting ammunition, and confiscate all “hunting” rifles and shotguns.

In that Obama has been president for two years now and has certainly had time to accomplish his goals, I would like to hear from gun owners and NRA members if Barack’s jack-booted government thugs in their black Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) uniforms, body armor, and black face masks have broken down your doors yet and cleaned out your closets, gun racks, and gun safes.
Are We Safe Enough With 300 Guns?
The NRA spent $40 million in 2008 trying to defeat Obama because he was “such a threat to gun rights.”  As soon as Obama was elected, gun and ammo sales shot up because of NRA fear-mongering. 

For a little while, customers were claiming they couldn’t find the guns they wanted and couldn’t buy ammo because it was in such short supply. But actually gun ownership by household has gone down over the last three decades. After Obama’s inauguration, the same guys who love guns bought more guns.

In 1977, 54 percent of households had guns. In 2009, 33 percent had guns. (By the way, I am not anti-gun. I have a handgun, shotgun, and rifle in our house. But I am anti-NRA.)

The NRA claims the more guns the less crime. With a possible 300 million guns around we should be the safest people in the world. We aren’t.

At the 2010 NRA Convention, the Becks, Palins, and Gingriches were still calling Obama and the Democrats “gun haters, political elites, cancers, corrupters of the rule of law, Marxist revolutionaries, and members of secular and socialist machines.”  The only thing I can say is: “Get a life!”

Why Not Ban Armor-Piercing Ammo?
Obama, a Constitutional scholar, has said repeatedly that “the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and I respect the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms. I will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding citizens to purchase, own, transport, and use guns.”  Obama did vote for a ban on “armor-piercing” ammunition during his days in the Senate and indicated he was in favor of reinstating the ban on assault rifles.

Why the NRA fought a bill banning armor-piercing “cop-killer” ammo defies common sense. Senator Ted Kennedy, who knew something about ammo when he testified for the ban in 2005, summarized the NRA’s opposition: “This is not about hunting. We know ducks and geese and deer do not wear armor vests; police officers do.”

By the way, why do licensed gun dealers still sell .50 caliber spotting rifles and armor-piercing ammo to citizens? How many people need to blow up an engine block?  I understand it is a very popular weapon with Mexican drug dealers because so many of them drive armored SUVs.
How Does a 12-Year Old Boy End Up With Two Shotguns, a 9MM Glock, and Threats to Kill 20 Students and Teachers?
About a week ago a 12-year-old boy in Duvall, Washington was charged with assaulting and harassing members of his adopted family and told a juvenile court he was planning to kill about 20 students and teachers at his middle school. He said he was tired of being bullied.

The judge said the boy was such a danger to the community he had to be locked up in a detention center. He had previously been charged with choking his sister and will be arraigned on those charges. The boy had two shotguns and a 9mm. Glock in his possession. How did he end up with these weapons?

At this writing, the incident of the five guns recovered at or near Fargo South High School has also piqued my interest in that I once served as South High principal for seven years.

Was burglary the only motive? This case has more than one smell to it. I thought Lowell Wolfe’s explanation of why the school did not notify parents of the incident was just short of bizarre: “Absent threat to life, we’re much more relaxed about things.” 

I suggest the school authorities should “unlax.” No one should relax around guns.  I am not accusing the NRA of direct involvement in these two school cases. But I am accusing the NRA of creating a gun culture.

The NRA is always pushing to allow “conceal and carry” and “expose and carry.”  Do you really want to sit in a bar next to a drunken idiot with a .45 on his hip? This is part of the gun culture. I have never been in a military officers’ club that allowed guns. Generally it was up to base commanders to determine the rules, but I have never heard of a base club, enlisted or officer, that allowed guns. It’s been my experience that Marines shoot very straight while sober but are very sloppy and inaccurate when drunk. They might be experts in handling weapons, but are poor at handling liquor and emotions.

In a letter to the New York Times, a Marine Corps veteran helicopter pilot who flew out of Da Nang, Vietnam, responded to an article (“Taking Loaded Guns Into A Bar? In Four States It’s Already Legal”) with this statement: “Guns and alcohol don’t mix. Back in 1967 at the Marble Mountain Marine Corps base….we pilots were armed nearly everywhere we went–at the chow hall, in the ready room, sitting in the latrine–The only place we didn’t carry weapons was in the officers’ club, where they were prohibited by the base commanding officer.”

Why? Because the colonel, like any levelheaded adult, knew that alcohol impaired judgment and self-control.”

Military personnel know what guns can do. It’s too bad the NRA does not exhibit the same kind of judgment and control. We should remember that guns were not allowed in Dodge City or Tombstone saloons either.
Why Do We Murder 12,000 With Guns Each Year While Great Britain Murders Only About 15?
The other news story that interested me was in the Washington Post about a week ago. The newspaper has taken a year to study gunshops, gun shows, the effectiveness of the ATF, the NRA’s influence on Congress, and the role of Congress in Second Amendment issues. 

It’s a big issue with some people because each year in the U.S. over 100,000 people are killed or wounded by guns–12,000 are murdered by guns, about 10,000 are killed accidently or commit suicide by guns, and about 80,000 are wounded by guns. 

I can’t find a total of what it costs to repair heads, guts, limbs, and lungs blasted by bullets but it has to be in the billions.  I saw a stat the other day that blew my mind. The average cost to enter the hospital emergency room door and register is now $522.  Guns should be a national taxpayer issue because in the end we all pay exorbitant fees for patching up the victims.

The second leading cause of death for children ages 10-24 is homicide, with 84 percent of the deaths due to firearms.

Various sources estimate there are 250 to 300 million handguns, shotguns, and rifles in the hands of citizens in this country.  No wonder we have 80 percent of the gun deaths in the industrialized world.

Here are yearly totals from some other industrialized countries: Germany 269, Canada 144, Spain 97, Australia 59, Sweden 58, Japan 47, United Kingdom 14, Denmark 14, New Zealand 10, Iceland 0.

Depending upon whether it is a “vintage” year or not, we are always around 40,000 deaths by gun, with between 15,000 and 19,000 suicides by gun.

Contrary to what the NRA says, if guns are kept in the home, the person most likely to blow your head off has a key to the house.
The NRA Is Considered the Top Lobby in the Country. 

It should be.  It has a gun to the heads of Congressmen and lots of money for their pockets.

The NRA has been lobbying Congress to gut any aspect of gun control for decades and has succeeded beyond its fondest dreams. Congress has cut funds to the ATF so severely it is impossible for the agency to do its job.

There are 115,000 firearms dealers in the U.S., with 12,000 gun dealers along the Texas-Mexico border selling guns to the Mexican drug cartels. Only 600 special agents are empowered to monitor all of these dealers. There are 60,000 retail gun dealers, so agents can inspect a gun store once in eight years.

The ATF has only 2,500 agents, the same number they had 40 years ago! In that same time the FBI grew from 8,700 agents to 13,000, the Drug Enforcement Agency grew from 1,500 to 5,000, the U.S. Marshall Service grew from1,900 to 3,300 agents.

The ATF is an absolute mess because of NRA lobbying and Congressional cowardice. It has not had a director for over four years. ATF agents cannot even require gun dealers to inventory their stock. The Justice Department Inspector General discovered that in 2004 only 4.5 percent of dealers were inspected. At that rate it would take 22 years to inspect all dealers!

ATF employees often joke about the fact that it is easier to close a dirty restaurant kitchen than a gun store that violates federal gun laws.

Most businesses are required to take inventories. Congress has barred gunstores from taking inventories. However, agents have determined that since 2005 (and don’t ask me how) 113,642 guns have been reported missing (so you can imagine how many actually are missing!). The gun dealers and the ATF have no idea whether these guns were stolen, lost, sold on the black market to Mexican drug cartels, or quietly delivered to felons or other prohibited “users.”

The area around the nation’s capital is an impenetrable swamp of gun malfeasance. As an example, two-thirds of the 6,800 guns recovered in criminal investigations came from just 40 of Virginia’s 3,400 gun dealers. The 40 dealers linked to the guns recovered in criminal investigations have sold 800,000 new and used guns since 1998. That’s just gun stores in one state! 

Remember the D.C. sniper case and the killing of ten people? The Bushmaster rifle used in the killings was missing from a Tacoma gunstore but was never reported as missing.
Tracking Guns by Abacus, Pencil, and Copy Paper
The Gun Control Act of 1968 requires licensed gun dealers to collect information on every gun they sell on Form 4473. A gun buyer must be 21, not a felon, fugitive, or illegal immigrant, and must not be mentally ill. The form must contain serial number and type of weapon, etc.

No records of gun purchases are on computers. Congress passed a law in 2003 that prohibits the ATF from requiring dealers to complete inventories! How can a business track products if it is not allowed to keep inventories? I suppose the NRA is proud of this legislation.

Each month The AFT Tracing Center in Martinsburg, Virginia receives thousands of boxes of Form 4473. Sales records are often ink-smeared or pencil-scribbled. Last year the tracing center had 12,000 boxes of records stacked along the walls that had never been touched. Perhaps 535 congressmen should go to Martinsburg and help the ATF workers to sort forms. It’s time they did something worthwhile.

Retired ATF Special agent James Cavanaugh related his problems to police chiefs at a crime summit last year: “I can tell you that most of the gun dealers are not bad gun dealers – they help us to get traffickers. But to really put this in perspective, a bad gun dealer is like a bad cop. He can really hurt us because he can really pump the guns out.” 
   
And then people get killed.

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