Presidential Parseltongue

For as long as I have been on the globe (44 years) millions of American citizens who support the Second Amendment have been warning that a large segment of the federal government wants to outlaw and confiscate privately owned arms. Whenever a politician calls for "common sense gun laws," those millions of Second Amendment supporters have narrowed their eyes with skepticism and warned that the politician's words are a Trojan horse whose intent is to eventually bring about the real goal of banning and confiscating.

In turn, millions of American citizens who are either indifferent or hostile to the Second Amendment have responded by ridiculing those supporters as "gun nuts" and "conspiracy theorists." Down through the years, those who are indifferent or hostile have repeatedly said such things as "no one wants to ban all guns" or "no one wants to take guns away from those who already have them" -- though, more tellingly, what they usually say is that "no one is talking about banning all guns" or "no one is talking about taking people's guns away."

Without fail, politicians from the latter camp have used the "no one is talking about" phrasing whenever they bloviate. But here is what all Americans need to understand: In the years since Barack Obama took office and started waving his scepter, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called gun nuts have been right all along.

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The year before Obama made Eric Holder the Attorney General of the United States, Holder claimed before the Supreme Court (in the case District of Columbia vs. Heller) that the Second Amendment does not apply to private citizens. Subsequently, Holder's tenure as attorney general was riddled with examples of him thumbing his nose at gun rights and, by extension, at gun owners whose rights he was sworn to uphold.

But what is perhaps most alarming is this: On at least four occasions this year, Obama himself has used the word "Australia" while talking about how the United States should regard gun ownership.

Of course, all he does it toss the word "Australia" out there, surrounded by foamy phrases about "common sense" and "countries like ours" and being "able to craft laws." What he does not say -- because he knows you probably don't know it, and he does not want you to know it -- is that in 1996 Australia not only banned guns, but proceeded to confiscate those which had been purchased when they were legal.

Obama has yet to be called on this, by which I mean he has yet to have a reporter mention it to him and ask him to explain himself. If that ever does occur, he is likely to ballyhoo the fact that Australia's murder rate has since dropped by sixteen percent ... but he will certainly not bother to mention that America's murder rate has dropped by more than forty percent since then, despite the fact that America's rate of gun ownership has skyrocketed since then ... and he will certainly not bother to mention that Australia's overall rate of rape has increased by twenty-nine percent since then ... nor will he bother to mention that Australia's overall rate of violent crime has increased by a whopping forty-plus percent since then ... nor will he mention that America's overall rate of violent crime has decreased by twenty-nine percent since then, despite the increase in gun ownership.

To be fair, the Australian gun grab was not absolute. What it eliminated was fully- and semi-automatic rifles. But it is important to note the "semi" prefix, because almost every gun in America (rifles and pistols alike) is semi-automatic.

If you are unfamiliar with guns, fully-automatic means you pull the trigger and bullets keep coming out until you let go of the trigger (i.e., a machine gun) whereas semi-automatic means you pull the trigger and one bullet comes out, then you have to pull it again for another bullet to come out (i.e., almost everything else). The only guns that do not fall into either of these categories are those you have to cock prior to every single shot, and such guns are rarely used because they are so ineffective they're almost worthless, almost like driving a 1914 Model T (cruising speed 30 mph, top speed 45 mph) on a modern feeway.

If anyone tells you to chill out about Obama citing Australia (because, you know, the government down under has not yet did not confiscate pistols) you should ignore them, and the reason you should ignore them is that Obama also likes to say "Great Britain." In fact, during last Thursday's speech after the Oregon shootings, when Obama talked about "other countries" that "have been able to craft laws" he likes, he identified them as follows: "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours." Note that those were the only two he named, and he named them side by side.

So what's the big deal about him citing Great Britain? The big deal is that Great Britain (by which he means the United Kingdom) enacted ban-and-confiscate in 1997 and its confiscation did include pistols.

In the years which have passed since the law was enacted, there is only one (2010) in which the murder rate has been lower than it was the year before it was enacted.

The data which led me to write the above sentence ran through 2012, and included statistics from England and Wales but not from Scotland and Northern Island. However, it is worth noting that in the UK as a whole, the number of handgun-involved crimes more than doubled in the first half-decade after ban-and-confiscate went into effect.

As with Australia, our POTUS knows you probably don't know the facts regarding individual freedom gun rights in Great Britain, so he uses that nation as an example because he knows you will take comfort from it. Great Britain is, after all, our mother nation.

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But why am I even talking about crime rates before and after gun bans?

I understand they are important, but I also know they are not relevant to the debate about gun control in the United States.

The reason they are not relevant is that the United States has a constitution which explicitly restricts its federal government and forbids it from doing specific things, and among the things it is forbidden from doing is infringing on "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms." So says the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which is one of the ten original amendments that are collectively known as the Bill of Rights.

In the First Amendment, that same Bill of Rights says that freedom of speech and freedom of Islam religion may not be infringed. Most Americans who are indifferent or hostile to the Second Amendment are fiercely protective of the First Amendment, by which I mean they are fiercely protective of the parts which ensrine freedom of speech and religion. Are they so dimwitted they don't realize that once the Second Amendment is eliminated, there is absolutely no basis to prevent the First Amendment from being eliminated? Are they so dimwitted they don't realize that allowing Master Government to abrogate one right emboldens it to abrogate others?

Are we to believe the same Barack Obama who said that under Obamacare we can keep our doctor and health plan -- who said there was a plethora of "shovel-ready jobs" waiting when the stimulus was approved -- who said the pre-planned Benghazi slaughter on September 11th (!) of 2012 was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video that no one watched -- who declared that "Islam has been woven into our country since its founding" (even though the first mosque in our country was built 139 years after the Declaration of Independence, and our country's first war was against fundamentalist Muslims) -- only wants the "common sense" gun laws that he tells us he wants?

Don't believe him or his minions for one second.


Note:  Information from the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Daily Mail, crimesearch.org, and disastercenter.com was used in this post.