Late last January, a Fox commentator noted that CNN had turned into a 24/7 “gun control” telethon. And now, on the evening of April 9, I sit here watching what CNN has called a two-day special devoted to exactly that topic.It is focusing on background checks. No surprise: the gun prohibition movement nationwide has lasered in on the exact same thing. They’ve been doing it for a while, ever since they realized that both the “assault weapon ban” and the “high capacity magazine ban” are being increasingly recognized as illogical and meaningless…as, indeed, they were proven to be the last time they were enacted.
The “opening shot” of the “two-day blast” (puns intended) centered on Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly. Before she was shot by psycho Jared Loughner, Rep. Giffords was a conservative Democrat who staunchly supported gun owners’ civil rights. She owned a Glock 19 pistol exactly like the one Loughner used, and to their credit, her husband admitted that. He also admitted that he and his wife owned a slightly larger capacity version of the same gun, the Glock 17, which he fired obligingly at a backyard plinking range for the CNN cameras.The Glock 19 pistol holds 15 rounds in its standard magazine, and the Glock 17 contains 17 rounds when its standard magazine is full. Each will take one more round in the firing chamber when fully loaded. Kelly made a big point of the fact that Loughner had used extended 33-round magazines in the weapon he used in the massacre.
Interesting, that, though Giffords and Kelly have now become icons in the “gun control” movement that wants to limit everyone to 10-round magazines (and New Yorkers to only 7), neither seems to have even symbolically given up their
“Sean AZ” commented in the last blog entry below this one that it looked to him as if the backstop Kelly was shooting at on CNN was unsafe. And in a previous entry here I commented on the disingenuous hypocrisy Kelly demonstrated recently in his purchase of a “high capacity assault rifle,” to wit the SIG version of an AR15. (The gun shop where he bought it refused to complete the transfer. When I am next in Tucson, I want to shake the hand of the gun shop owner who made that decision.)
So far in this particular stage of the “we gotta have universal background checks” CNN marathon, it appears that folks think we gun people want it to be legal for criminals to buy guns on the street, or have their girlfriends buy guns for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s already against the law, and has been for a very long time, and it’s us gun people who rage against the Obama/Holder Justice Department’s failure to prosecute more than a token number of criminals who do so. So far, even Anderson Cooper, the point man on this particular CNN blitz, doesn’t seem to be aware of the quicksand of creating felons out of a husband who leaves a gun at home with his wife, or parents who bequeaths a family heirloom gun to heirs, which lies in some of the currently suggested “background check” legislation passes. (Please see the blog entry below this one.)
To Cooper’s credit, while he’s obviously not “pro-gun,” he’s trying to show both sides like a professional journalist, in stark contrast to his fellow CNN denizen, Piers Morgan. Having been forced out of his journalism career in England by a hoax he perpetrated as a journalist, and a phone-tapping scandal, Morgan gets about half the ratings Anderson does. Anderson has already, honestly, brought out the fact that Loughner PASSED a background check when he bought the gun he later used that terrible day in Tucson.
My heart goes out to Gabby Giffords. It pains me to see what the brain damage inflicted on her by a monster has done. I can only wish she’d been carrying her own Glock 19 on that day, and seen the evil little monster in time to stop him.
In recent days, we’ve seen a senior proponent of the full capacity magazine ban reveal that she didn’t have a clue how either magazines or stripper clips worked, and neither apparently did her research assistants.
It was a moment of absolutely monumental cluelessness. It’s as if a denizen of Capitol Hill was pushing legislation to limit how much fuel you could have in your vehicle’s tank, and to limit your family car to low speed…and you discovered that the legislator had never driven an automobile and didn’t know a steering wheel from a spare tire. Not long before that gaffe, we saw Governor Cuomo push through the SAFE Act in New York State, not only limiting the public to seven cartridges in the magazine but crafting the legislation so sloppily that he and his minions didn’t realize they had written it to apply to police as well. This sort of thing reflects a level of ignorance on a par with the politician who, last year, made it clear he thought an island would tip over if too many people were located on one side of it,
or the candidate last year who declared that women’s bodies had some magic mechanism that kept them from getting pregnant if they were raped.
Such things should be taught in civics classes, as a warning to the electorate.
In the wake of it all, thankfully, more middle-of-the-road citizens are re-examining the whole “assault weapons/high capacity magazines” propaganda blitz, and seeing the mendacity and futility hidden therein. Yet pundits still tell us that the shining hope of the gun prohibitionists is “reasonable, common sense universal background checks.” Here, stalwart gun owners’ civil rights activist David Kopel explains all the bad stuff that hides in the proposed legislation: National Review.
Massad Ayoob
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