Donald Trump won the election, which has allowed many to conclude that the Second Amendment dodged an anti-gun bullet. You may agree or disagree, but one thing is for sure, the anti gunners have not given up their agenda—in the United States and across the pond. In a recent article published by the NRA, the Journal of the American Medical Association’s (JAMA) takes aim at Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.
It’s gratifying to see how conscientious the huge majority of carry permit holders are, and how seriously they take their responsibilities. Despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, these folks are not just numerous—now somewhere north of 14 million nationwide—but also astonishingly law-abiding—6 to 10 times more so than law enforcement, who are in turn 30 times more law-abiding than the general public. However, they are plagued by a few common problems.
Senate Republicans held a Supreme Court seat vacant for the next president. Now that it’s President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican majority in the Senate, what happens next?
Gun control advocates would have you believe, if only there were background check requirements for all gun sales and transfers and if only the so-called “private sale loophole” was repealed, criminals would no longer be able to obtain guns online or at gun shows without a background check. Then, they’d have you believe, we’d see an end to the proliferation of guns and “gun violence.” Who needs empirical evidence when you can have “magical thinking?”
This letter appears in the November ’16 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
Hillary Clinton has made clear that she would make gun control a top priority of her presidency, and has pointed to a new ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms as one of her chief goals. At a June 17, 2014 CNN “town hall” event, Clinton was asked, “Do you think that reinstating the ban on assault weapons and banning high capacity magazines would do any good?” Clinton affirmed her support for a ban, and stated, “We cannot let a minority of people—and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people—hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”
A gun without ammunition is really just an overpriced rock when it comes to self-defense. Where gun control has failed in its attempts to outlaw firearms and strip individuals of their Second Amendment rights, in California it is trying to outflank us by targeting the ability to buy ammunition.
Last week, state Representative Sonya Harper filed House Bill 6615, legislation that seeks to create a serialization system of “handgun ammunition” in Illinois. While HB 6615 claims to only encompass handgun ammunition, the language would also go so far as to include most popular pistol, rifle and shotgun ammunition.
The candidate who claimed politicians “need both a public and a private position” on policy issues demonstrated that tendency Wednesday night in the final presidential debate in a desperate bid for damage control on a statement she made in a private meeting with wealthy donors when she slammed the Supreme Court as “wrong on the Second Amendment” and called for reinstating the assault weapons ban.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was in New York City recently on an official visit. Commenting on the bombs that exploded while he was in town, he opined that such attacks are now simply “part and parcel” of life in major urban centers. While this may be true, the question of how do we proceed still exists.