This feature appears in the June ’16 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
Recently, I was talking to some NRA members born in the late ’80s about Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House, and I realized they were just kids when Hillary—as President Bill Clinton’s first lady in the late 1990s—was characterized by The New York Times as being “more forceful than the [p]resident in directly taking on the powerful gun lobby.”
It occurred to me that the only way for my new friends to understand the history of Hillary’s hatred for everything about our culture of freedom today is to take a short walk down the Clinton memory lane. Watch your step. It’s a very slippery slope.
Consider first that there isn’t any gun control idea that Hillary Clinton hasn’t supported. Most important among them is the dual threat of licensing and registration. And it all leads to Australia.
In two horrible installments in the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, Australian licensed gun owners first were stripped of their registered semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns and their registered semi-automatic rifles, and later dispossessed of a long list of registered handguns. Nearly a million registered guns were torched.
Rebecca Peters, who led that effort to erase Australian freedom, called the destruction of long guns “very, very moderate.” But here’s what Peters wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, “The National Firearms Agreement recognized the inherent inappropriateness of these highly dangerous weapons and took away nearly 700,000 of them to be melted down into soup cans and bus-stop benches.”
David Geffen—a Hollywood mogul with deep pockets and an off-again, now on-again Clinton booster—once characterized Hillary and Bill Clinton’s remarkable ability to lie: “They do it with such ease that it’s troubling,” he said.
Hillary’s biggest lie—always given with a reassuring smile—is her claim, “I believe in the Second Amendment.” But her version of the Second Amendment is always conditioned upon her demand for “common-sense gun safety”—as when, in a response to a question at a 2015 “town hall” meeting, she embraced the massive Australian gun confiscation.Between now and the November elections, we must mobilize every voter who believes in the Second Amendment and work to stop Hillary from gaining the White House.
Hillary’s connection with the loss of liberty in Australia isn’t just in her rhetoric today. It goes back to her deep, active involvement in the Million Mom March, the May 2000 gun-ban extravaganza on the National Mall. World gun-ban kingpin, billionaire George Soros, largely bankrolled the event, designed to kick-start a host of gun control efforts in Congress and in the states. Overseeing Soros’ money behind the scenes was none other than Peters, the “soup can and park bench” celebrant.
During the planning of the march, Hillary was characterized as an “insider,” reportedly holding White House meetings that the Washington Times said were “to plot strategy.” In fact, the up-front organizer of the march—former publicist to then-CBS News anchor Dan Rather, Donna Dees Thomases—had close ties to Hillary.
The march was a perfect political opportunity for Hillary, who had announced as a candidate for U.S. Senate from New York to earn her gun-ban bona fides. The New York Times obliged with a May 10, 2000, headline blaring, “Mrs. Clinton Backs Gun-Control Initiatives.”
The Times explained that, under Hillary’s plan, “[P]rospective gun buyers would have to obtain a photo license, which would be issued only after they had undergone a criminal record check and passed a gun safety examination. Also, all sales of new guns, or transfer of guns, would be recorded in a national registry.”
This, too, takes us back to Australia. In writing about the Million Mom March, Thomases called Soros’ Australian protégé Peters their “fairy godmother,” saying, “To hear Rebecca explain it, without licensing and registration, all of the other laws proposed (bans and confiscation) were difficult to enforce.”
In her successful Senate campaign, Hillary followed the script. “Hillary Clinton renews call for gun licensing and registration,” was a typical headline.
Once in the Senate, she became an active force for new onerous gun controls. She led efforts to force licensing and registration, and she pushed for reinstatement of a new hard-line version of her husband’s 1994 semi-automatic ban (which expired in 2004 after an
all-out effort by NRA-ILA).
Although the media now claims Hillary has abandoned her demands for registration and licensing, remember Geffen’s take on her dishonesty. Her current push for “universal” background checks actually is, as the gun banners always say, “a good first step” toward registration and licensing.
Given her recent vicious attacks on the NRA, Hillary understands that if she gets to the White House, she has to destroy the NRA to reach her ultimate goal—bringing Australian-style tyranny to our shores.
As a philosopher once said, to understand the future, you must study the past.
Between now and the November elections, we must mobilize every voter who believes in the Second Amendment and work to stop Hillary from gaining the White House.
