Photo by Gage Skidmore courtesy of Flickr under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0, image manipulation by America’s 1stFreedom.
At this point in the election cycle it’s always worth treating what a presidential candidate is saying seriously. This is especially true when what they’re telling us has been carefully crafted into a written plan.
Enter Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) “Protecting Our Communities from Gun Violence” plan. As this was being written, this was one of 59 plans she had on her website—Warren certainly does have a plan designed to control every facet of your life.
As Warren includes just about every gun-control infringement on your rights now being talked about on the left in her plan, this list of her most-egregious duplicities related to your right to keep and bear arms is admittedly subjective, but it is a taste of all she would like to do.
- Warren intentionally uses bad logic
“In 1965, more than five people died in automobile accidents for every 100 million miles traveled. It was a massive crisis. As a nation, we decided to do better. Some things were obvious: seatbelts, safer windshields, and padded dashboards,” writes Warren. “Other things only became clear over time: things like airbags and better brake systems. But we made changes, we did what worked, and we kept at it. Over fifty years, we reduced per-mile driving deaths by almost 80% and prevented 3.5 million automobile deaths. And we’re still at it.
“In 2017, almost 40,000 people died from guns in the United States. My goal as President, and our goal as a society, will be to reduce that number by 80%. We might not know how to get all the way there yet. But we’ll start by implementing solutions that we believe will work….”
Her plan is filled with faulty logic like this. Seatbelts and safety devices on autos are obviously comparable to safety devices on firearms, not to gun bans and other restrictions.
If she thinks firearms are not now well-designed, then she should do some research. But that clearly is not what she is saying; instead, she is using the disingenuous “gun-safety” appellation the mainstream media loves (in place of the term “gun control,” which has proven to not resonate with focus-groups) within a type of twisted logic to convince people that voting away their rights (by voting for her) is the reasonable thing to do.
- Warren wants Democrats to have unfettered power
“And we’ll make structural changes to end the ability of corrupt extremists to block our government from defending the lives of our people—starting with ending the filibuster,” says Warren.
She is referring to the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rules, which now require a 60-vote margin (out of 100) to bust. If her party wins a majority in the U.S. Senate, and if she were to win the presidency, ending this rule would make it easy for her to quickly get her way.
Along this theme, Warren later writes: “I will break the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress by passing sweeping anti-corruption legislation and eliminating the filibuster so that our nation can no longer be held hostage by a small group of well-financed extremists who have already made it perfectly clear that they will never put the safety of the American people first.”
She is clearly looking to create legal means to destroy her political adversaries—those Americans and their associations, such as the NRA, that stand for individual rights. She finds restrictions on government, such as the Second Amendment, to be inconvenient to her quest to impose restrictions you.
- Warren wants to price your freedom out of reach
“Since 1919, the federal government has imposed an excise tax on manufacturers and importers of guns and ammunition. Handguns are taxed at 10% and other guns and ammunition are taxed at 11%. These taxes raise less in revenue than the federal excise tax on cigarettes, domestic wine, or even airline tickets. It’s time for Congress to raise those rates—to 30% on guns and 50% on ammunition—both to reduce new gun and ammunition sales overall and to bring in new federal revenue that we can use for gun violence prevention and enforcement of existing gun laws,” writes Warren.
She is referring to Pittman-Robertson taxes on guns and ammunition, though these taxes were passed in 1937. Perhaps she confused the Pittman-Robertson Act with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (the link on her website is dead, so we can’t be sure). Whatever the case, these are taxes that hunters, and all gun owners, are proud of, as they fund conservation by design. Warren, however, wants to rewrite this critical conservation-funding law and to use the massive increases in taxes for her pet gun-control causes—including driving the cost of firearms and ammunition out of the reach of as many Americans as possible.
- Warren wants to criminalize everything having to do with guns
“Reform advocates are engaged in a valuable discussion about gun reforms that can be achieved by executive action. We must pursue these solutions to the fullest extent of the law, including by redefining anyone ‘engaged in the business’ [she includes a link to Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control group Everytown for this] of dealing in firearms to include the vast majority of gun sales outside of family-to-family exchanges. This will extend requirements—not only for background checks, but all federal gun rules—to cover all of those sales….” writes Warren.
Warren wants to use the full force of the federal bureaucracy to completely annihilate the individual right to arms. By using requirements written to regulate gun dealers, those with Federal Firearms Licenses (FFL), she wants to make owning a gun so burdensome and legally perilous that few will dare to exercise whatever is left of our Second Amendment rights.
- Warren wants to bankrupt gun companies
“As president, I will immediately take executive action to rein in an out-of-control gun industry—and to hold both gun dealers and manufacturers accountable for the violence promoted by their products,” writes Warren.
To do this, Warren says she wants to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). “Nearly every other industry has civil liability as a check on irresponsible actions, but a 2005 law insulates firearms and dealers from civil liability when a weapon is used to commit a crime, even in cases when dealers were shockingly irresponsible….”
This is a blatant lie. Anyone who reads the PLCAA will see this law explicitly does not do this. Gun makers and dealers can still be sued or held legally accountable if they make a faulty product or if they break an existing law.
What Warren, and others who want to repeal the PLCAA, want to do is allow gun makers and dealers to be sued if someone uses a legal product in an illegal way—this is like someone suiting a car maker after someone uses an auto to intentionally harm someone else.
- Warren wants a federal gun-licensing scheme
“A license is required to drive a car, and Congress should establish a similarly straightforward federal licensing system for the purchase of any type of firearm or ammunition,” writes Warren.
She neglects to say that the Second Amendment is a constitutional right, not a legal privilege, as driving is. She wants to force American citizens to apply for their Second Amendment rights. This would create a path for gun registration, which then, if history is any teacher, would later create a way for gun confiscation.
Even this, according to Warren, would only be the beginning.
“I will send Congress comprehensive gun violence prevention legislation. I will sign it into law within my first 100 days. And we will revisit this comprehensive legislation every single year—adding new ideas and tweaking existing ones based on new data—to continually reduce the number of gun deaths in America,” says Warren.
So she would never be done until you were disarmed and helpless. (Frank Miniter’s latest book is The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide to the Workplace.)
