by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Executive Editor Joseph Tartaro
It may seem like the anti-gunners are attacking everywhere, but they are only nibbling at the edges of the Second Amendment.
Their real agenda remains the same as it was 50 years ago. They want to get rid of every handgun and most of the long “sporting” guns. They don’t want the average citizen to be armed. They don’t really want the police armed. And they feel the military should only have guns with two exceptions. The first, for training purposes while in the United States; the second, while deployed in combat zones overseas.
Maybe billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates see this as a way to reduce their cost of security. If there are no guns in private possession, they’d save money by laying off the armed security guards they maintain for their own safety.
Whatever their real reasons, they see no reason for the average citizen to be armed and they don’t trust the law enforcement community to be armed while on normal duties, and they want to severely restrict the availability of arms for the military.
Of course they are smart enough to realize that the police and the military need guns, and, advised by some of their friends who hunt or target shoot, that there are some acceptable uses of sporting long arms by average citizens. These long guns, and a few “target” handguns for Olympic shooters they believe can be kept in carefully controlled armories from which they can be withdrawn for specific times and purposes for short periods of time, after which they would be checked back in to those armories. They see countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom as good models to follow.
Most readers might find this ludicrous, but the armories concept is an old anti-gun scheme which has been advanced at the state level and at least proposed at the federal level as far back as the late 1960s by politicians like Republican New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. (Some of our readers, who have a blind faith in the Republican Party as a safeguard of the Second Amendment should bear in mind that Rockefeller, and later Gov. George Pataki, were just two Republicans who pursued an anti-gun agenda with great enthusiasm, when they could. Pataki got New York’s ban on so-called assault weapons passed after Democrat Mario Cuomo had failed for almost a decade.)
But what the anti-gunners hate most of all and what they would like to sweep from the face of the earth are handguns. They really hate handguns with a special passion. At various times in the past they have tried by various means to get handguns banned completely. They’ve used the referendum and initiative process in Massachusetts (1976) and California (1982). In both cases the voters turned them down.
They tried doing it legislatively by stealth or subterfuge at both the state and federal level. In the mid-1970s, they claimed to be targeting only so-called Saturday Night Specials in a measure sponsored chiefly by a congressman from Illinois. However, the legislative language defining “Saturday Night Specials” to be banned actually included such guns as the Government Model 1911 .45, the Smith & Wesson Chief’s .38, and a long list of other handguns commonly relied on by both law enforcement and average citizens for personal and family protection as well as target shooting and hunting.
The “Saturday Night Special” strategy almost worked because a lot of people, including many gunowners and even some gun groups, were willing to agree that there was no need for anyone to own “cheap pot-metal guns.”
But the anti-gunners failed again.
Somewhere along that time, some of the anti-gun strategists figured out that they couldn’t get what they really wanted: to get rid of all handguns in America. Perhaps a few realized the impossibility of what they wanted.
As an astute pro-gun attorney friend put it about the end of the 1970s, there was no way the anti-gunners were going to get rid of all the handguns they hated short of building a giant electro-magnet that would suck up the millions and millions of handguns already in America, and not just the millions that the government and think tanks could estimate, but the millions more that are stored away from hidden eyes or buried somewhere.
The total number of handguns in America today is somewhere in the hundreds of millions, and includes some that go back to the cap-and-ball and even pinfire eras of the Civil War and the late 19th century.
So even though the anti-gunners claim they only want to get rid of the so-called criminal and as Bloomberg and friends like to call them “illegal” guns, they have suffered a lot of failures through the years, and some may even have come to realize the impossibility of their goal.
Even their scheme to sue the firearms industry out of business has failed, although their goal of reducing the number of firearms sold is still part of their playbook—even if just through bureaucratic stumbling blocks. And their magic “crime-fighting” tool of building files of sample bullet and cartridge markings has also failed.
Thus they have been reduced to nibbling at the edges of the Second Amendment which they failed to interpret for their own purposes by focusing on the “militia” clause. Now they are forced to disguise their agenda with terms that the general public might find acceptable. That is one of the main reasons they have focused so much time, energy and money on such schemes as waiting periods, background checks, user recognition technology—alias “smart guns,” microstamping, “safe gun” rosters, and several other similar stratagems.
That they have been stymied in other ways by the expansion of concealed carry laws and even “constitutional” carry doesn’t discourage them. Like rats, they keep nibbling at the edges.
