One would think that U.S. Senate Democrats might smarten up and back off their stance on gun control after Hillary Clinton’s devastating defeat in last week’s presidential election.
One would be wrong.
Any chance of the Democrats turning from their all-out push for more restrictive gun laws was dashed on Tuesday when they chose Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.—one of the most anti-gun federal lawmakers in history—as Senate minority leader. He’ll be replacing Harry Reid, D-Nev., who is retiring.
All A1F Daily readers are familiar with Schumer. He has fought a decades-long battle to pass harsher and more restrictive gun laws on law-abiding American firearm owners—all the while ignoring the real problem of violent criminals ignoring existing laws and wreaking havoc.
Also, Schumer’s propensity for seeking the limelight for his gun-ban schemes is legendary. In fact, a favorite quip in the U.S. Capitol is that the most dangerous place to stand is between Schumer and a microphone.
In addition, Schumer is an NRA hater of the first order.[Schumer] has fought a decades-long battle to pass harsher and more restrictive gun laws on law-abiding American firearm owners …
“The NRA and its friends … have planted a poisonous weed of political paranoia in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Schumer once said. “ … This barrage of cynical, fundraising NRA propaganda about the Second Amendment has convinced many people that there is a vast plot to seize their guns and ‘take away their rights.’”
Indeed, over the years Schumer has provided plenty of support for schemes that would drastically limit gun ownership and take away the rights of all Americans. In his 18 years in the House of Representatives—and nearly that long in the Senate—there has hardly been a single legislative attack on the Second Amendment in which Schumer didn’t lead the way.
All the way back in 1995 Schumer was already on the attack against guns and gun owners. In an April 1995 Judiciary Committee hearing on the Second Amendment, Schumer mocked the NRA’s unyielding belief that the right applies to individuals, saying, “The NRA’s Second Amendment is an empty cereal box in the marketplace of ideas.
“Second Amendment fanatics just don’t get it,” he added. “The Second Amendment is not absolute. It does not guarantee the mythical individual right to bear arms.”
From the enactment of the Brady Bill in 1993, to Bill Clinton’s “assault weapons” ban in 1994, to efforts to impose licensing and registration on law-abiding gun owners, Schumer has always been in the forefront. He has supported gun seizures from law-abiding citizens in New Orleans, opposed the NRA’s successful efforts to shut down lawsuits that are designed to bankrupt the lawful commerce of firearms, and currently pushes misleading efforts to criminalize all now-legal private firearm transfers between law-abiding individuals.
Schumer’s registration bill, introduced in June 2000 and endorsed by Hillary Clinton, might be his most damning legislative push of all. That measure would have actually required anyone who owns a handgun to be licensed and to have their name placed in a national database—likely paving the way for confiscation, if history is any indication.
“The Second Amendment is not absolute. It does not guarantee the mythical individual right to bear arms.” — U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.Today, Schumer glibly claims to embrace the Second Amendment, but always with deep exceptions for endlessly escalating infringements that would ultimately render the right pointless. A master of deceit, he is following the cue cards provided by Jim Kessler, his former policy director, who authored a seminal propaganda directive called “Taking Back The Second Amendment” that changed the language of gun-banners and the media.
Kessler, recognizing polling data showing that a huge majority of Americans understand they possess the individual right to keep and bear arms, wrote in his manifesto: “[P]rogressives need not change their positions”—they need simply to “change the rhetoric they employ.”
Second Amendment aside, Schumer’s past push to silence American gun owners also placed a big target on the First Amendment. Schumer and his gun-hating cronies know that the only way to beat the nation’s gun owners “into submission” is to silence the NRA.
The current Republican majority thwarted a Schumer-led drive to rewrite the First Amendment—replacing James Madison’s hallowed words with ones that would give Congress the power to create endless fine-print alterations that would destroy the guarantee of free assembly and free political speech.
This Schumer version of the First Amendment would begin the process of banning grassroots communication expenditures for political speech. In a years-ago rant against the Second Amendment, Schumer labeled the NRA’s public discourse influencing like-minded citizens “the poisoning of our political dialogue.”
“He has never wavered from that view,” NRA EVP Wayne LaPierre wrote in a magazine column in June. “In Schumer’s world, the NRA’s use of your contributions to get our message to voters would be drastically diminished or outlawed.”
With Schumer taking the minority reins in the Senate, the resounding pro-gun vote by NRA members and other American gun owners in last month’s presidential election takes on even more importance. While he will no doubt continue to push his gun-ban agenda, if Clinton had won we might be facing a Senate Majority Leader Schumer—creating a two-headed anti-gun juggernaut that would have certainly led to further diminishing of our Second Amendment rights.
