It’s common for those calling for more restrictive gun laws to make the initial statement, “I support the Second Amendment, but …”
Let me tell you, it’s not true. Look at any gun ban proposed by those who mistrust law-abiding gun owners and you’ll see that it is an incremental step to more and more restrictions, with the final goal being complete disarmament of American citizens and dismemberment of our constitutional rights.
Following the recent horrendous attack in Las Vegas, some gun-haters are putting aside their masks and bypassing the preliminaries, shooting straight for the ultimate endgame. Next time left-leaning friends tells you, “Nobody wants to take away your guns,” or they just want “common-sense gun safety measures,” show them the three proposals discussed below.
Australian Style Confiscation
In an article published earlier this week, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama called for implementation of Australian-style gun confiscation by the U.S. government.
In an article published earlier this week, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama called for implementation of Australian-style gun confiscation by the U.S. government.Dan Pfeiffer, writing at Crooked.com, a website founded by three former Obama staffers, said: “We are nibbling around the edges instead of proposing bold, meaningful solutions.” One of his “meaningful solutions" is confiscating firearms from law-abiding gun owners, just like Australia did in 1996.
Pfeiffer referred to his proposal as a “national gun buyback program similar to the one Australia instituted after a mass shooting that killed 35 people.”
That might sound innocuous to some who don’t know the real story behind Australia’s confiscation. The gun owners were monetarily compensated, after all.
But the truth is, Australia's government didn’t “buy back” anything, as it never owned the guns it forcefully confiscated. And if you don’t think “forcefully” is appropriate here, you don’t know the whole story.
Australian gun owners faced an offer they could not refuse. They had the “choice” to accept reimbursement and relinquish guns they had previously been forced to register with the government—or they could risk forcible confiscation of their property and imprisonment.
Australia’s national program followed an earlier mandate that had occurred in its state of Victoria. A public service announcement published there could not have been clearer about the consequences of non-compliance. It mockingly portrayed several men in a prison shower and warned, “This is your last chance.” Violators, the ad stated, faced “severe penalties that could include humiliating public arrest, a criminal conviction” and “up to 12 months in prison.”
Note, too, that the Australia confiscation that Pfeiffer promotes wasn’t at all focused on so-called “assault weapons.” Confiscated guns included such venerable hunting arms as the Remington 1100, Ruger 10/22, Mossberg 500 and Browning A5.
Police Visits For Gun Owners
Gun-banners wanting to stop short of mass confiscation might buy into a plan by a law professor, who suggested on a recent airing of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that police should be able to track gun purchases and pay unwarranted visits to those they deemed to have bought “too many” guns.
According to a report at Breitbart.com, Richard Painter said, “At a minimum, we ought to [keep] information on people like Mr. Paddock who are acquiring dozens of weapons over a very short period of time. … That information ought to be available.”
In other words, gun registration. And what’s Painter’s answer to such high-volume purchasers? Well, he believes the answer is to have the police visit them and found out why in the heck they “need” to practice their Second Amendment rights to such an extent.
Of course, Painter was reluctant to specify a number of guns one must purchase to spur visits by law enforcement, instead claiming, “I am not an expert on what the threshold ought to be. I think that’s that up to law enforcement.”
Long and short, he wants law enforcement to use gun registration records to visit law-abiding gun owners that officers deem to have purchased more guns than they should have. Can Painter say “Infringe,” with a capital “I”?
Go After The Guns
If there’s one thing you can say about Igor Volsky, the founder of gun-ban group Guns Down, at least he tells the truth. While Demanding Mom Shannon Watts would love to ban entire classes of guns and gun owners, she won’t come right out and say that. Not so with Volsky.
“It’s not enough to just limit the kind of people who own guns. You have to go after the guns themselves.” — Igor Volsky, founder of gun-ban group Guns Down“What I want to hear from them is that we need fewer guns,” Volsky was quoted as saying at theguardian.com. “By asking for half a loaf and not the full loaf, they [more moderate gun-ban groups] are really starting at a real point of weakness.”
In case that statement left some confusion about where Volsky stands, he quickly clarified it.
“It’s not enough to just limit the kind of people who own guns,” he said. “You have to go after the guns themselves. Guns are the problem.”
If it’s not obvious, what Volsky is calling for is mass confiscation of firearms from law-abiding Americans. How else would you “go after the guns themselves”? Simply put, going after guns means taking guns, which Volsky supports since he believes “guns are the problem.”
Interestingly, Watts—who has historically tried to at least make it seem that she has a more moderate anti-gun position, though we aren't sure who she thinks she's fooling—embraced Volsky’s call for confiscating privately owned firearms.
“I think it’s a very good sign,” Watts told theguardian.com. “Every movement has to have a left and right flank. That’s a sign of a healthy movement.”
In the end, while the gun control movement might appear to have a “left and right flank,” in truth, Watts is the left flank and Volsky is the even farther left flank. No matter what they claim, their ultimate goal is to take firearms out of the hands of law-abiding gun owners, while continuously working toward ways to make it harder for the average American to exercise his or her Second Amendment rights.
Mark Chesnut has been the editor of America’s 1st Freedom magazine for 17 years and is an avid hunter, shooter and political observer.
