On March 11 the U.S. House of Representatives passed two gun control bills that would require stricter background checks on gun sales, including private firearms. David Adams, vice president and judicial director of the Virginia Shooting Sports Association (VSSA), said the right to own a weapon is “something that clearly belongs to Americans. He and other gun rights advocates warn that universal background checks are another step toward the ultimate goal – disarming law-abiding citizens.
Adams said, “Americans care about individual liberty. It’s what this country was founded on. Even though Europeans already owned guns at the Time of our founding, we are the only country where gun ownership is explicitly a constitutionally protected right in the Constitution. Canada doesn’t have it, Australia doesn’t have it. We need to understand that it’s part of our Culture and our way of Life.”
Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), said, “If the Second Amendment is repealed and you think you still have the First Amendment, forget it. You think you still have the Fourth Amendment? Don’t even think about it. Because they’ll argue that if they can go into anybody’s house and search it, they can stop the crime. And they will have more. Pretty soon, you’ll be living like you’re in a third world country.”
Clive added, “Don’t think that these things can’t happen here. I’ve seen things that I used to think would never happen here, and they’ve happened. This is our country. We either stand up and let the government we elect represent us and protect our rights or we’re going to be in a very tough spot. It’s not going to get better.”
He described gun control as part of a socialist agenda: “They [left-wing Democrats] seem to be clearly promoting socialism or communism, outright communism. Arming civilians can’t coexist with socialism and communism. I think (their) long-term goal is to have a bunch of docile citizens who can do whatever they want, because people will have no ability to resist, and at best, throw stones. We have seen what has happened in the past in many countries/regions.”
“They’re gambling on time, and they’re crafting it,” Clive said, adding that decimating police funding, letting illegal immigrants into the U.S. and making the public angry “are all inflaming emotions.” He said the government is waiting for something to happen before declaring a state of emergency or martial law, thus claiming the need to “temporarily suspend all your rights.
Adams expressed the same concern: “The government knows that once they disarm law-abiding citizens, they will have the power to rule at will and do whatever they want to us. I think it has been proven during the plague that Americans are more willing than I previously thought to give up basic rights: the right to go to church, to assemble, to go to the theater or to a restaurant. Everybody wants to be safe. But I think the government has learned that if the people are intimidated to a certain degree, they will give up any rights.”
“Their goal is to disarm us so they can move forward with their other agendas. That’s what they’re waiting for. They’re setting it up in full force. You can see them in action, no doubt about it,” Clive added.
Immigration Alert
Anthony Medina, a northern Virginia resident, is originally from Nicaragua. He said he experienced how the communist regime took guns away from the population.
Medina said he was educated in Spanish Jesuit schools while growing up, and his Christian faith helped him resist the idea of socialism. And after the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist party, took over Nicaragua through a revolution in 1979, many of his friends were big fans of socialist ideas.
Shortly before he left his country in 1984, when he was in his 20s, he was told that he would be sent to the Amerrisque Mountains to fight the opposition forces known as the Contras. He would then be sent to Cuba and the Soviet Union to continue his engineering Education. At the time, he was working for a power generation company. Despite government control of the media, he says, people learned that many of those who entered the mountains died shortly afterward.
The communist regime reinstated the Emergency Law from 1982 to 1988. During this time, the government first proposed a gun buyback program in the early 1980s. The program was popular because people needed the money. According to Medina, some people sold their old rifles to the government or exchanged them for 100 pounds of rice. Then the government started confiscating the guns. Some people kept guns that had helped the 1979 socialist revolution, but they could no longer be used because the government had a monopoly on ammunition.
Medina added that Nicaraguans will only be able to protest in 2018 and 2019 with homemade weapons and demand democracy. He said he wanted to share his experience with other Americans: “With communism, you have to think two to three steps further.”
Minorities are disproportionately affected
Economist John R. Lott Jr. says strict background checks disproportionately affect minorities: “People of all ethnicities tend to have names that are similar to others. Because of their past criminal history, 34 percent of black men in the United States are prohibited from owning guns. Whose name are they most likely to be confused with? With other law-abiding black men who want to buy guns to protect themselves and their families.”
Philip Smith, national president of the National African American Gun Association (NAAGA), believes these two new bills in the House of Representatives have increased the burden on law-abiding gun owners in his community. He founded the association in 2015. The association currently has about 40,000 members and 125 chapters nationwide, with a 50/50 male and female composition. Nearly a third of its members joined in 2020. “What is most concerning is that most people do not feel safe in the community in general. They believe that owning a gun increases their sense of security,” Smith said.
He argued that African-Americans are “a case study in what not to do when it comes to guns. If you want your community to be economically unstable or unable to protect each other from domestic terrorists or racists, then make sure you don’t have a gun. If you want your own men and women to be slaughtered, make sure you don’t have guns. If you really want everything to be messed up, make sure you don’t have guns.”
He added, “As we’ve said, the very strong and safe communities in America today are the ones that have guns to protect themselves. They may not flaunt it, but everybody knows that if you cross the street and walk in a community with guns, you’re going to have trouble; you’re going to get some opposition. These are good communities. What’s going to happen if you continue to push for something that’s doomed to fail? Your community will continue to fall.”
Self-defense is a growing concern
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is a trade association for the U.S. firearms industry. It estimates that 8.4 million people in the U.S. will own a gun for the first time in 2020. Women account for 40 percent of all sales. Gun purchases by African-Americans are up 56 percent compared to 2019.
VSSA’s Adams said new gun purchases are primarily for self-defense. “The police came only after the incident. When measured in seconds, the police usually don’t arrive until several minutes later. People realize, hey, I need to do something to protect myself.”
Last year, Virginia tried to pass a bill similar to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) Assault Weapons Ban of 2021. The bill (HB961) passed the House but was defeated by the Senate in 2020. Cliff cited public protests in Virginia as the main reason the bill was defeated in the Senate.
Clive said all gun owners should work together to protect their collective rights. People who don’t own guns can also get neighborhood protection from law-abiding gun owners. “That’s why we need to be all in every election. We have to vote locally and vote in every election for you to have the opportunity to vote for those who defend our freedoms.”
“We have the right to fight for those issues that we think are very important. But I certainly don’t think anybody who wants to take away guns is helping my best interests. They’re not helping the best interests of my community at all. In fact, they don’t care about my community. They don’t care about poor black women or black families who have no protection against thugs and gangs. They don’t care if these people have guns, but I do. So I’m going to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves right now,” NAAGA’s Smith said, adding that background checks are only the “first step” and that “the ultimate goal is to take away all guns.”
“Controlling guns is really about controlling people,” Clive said. The 69-year-old gun rights advocate said he observed many years ago that gun safety activists initially wanted to take guns away, but introduced a compromise version because they realized it wouldn’t work.
He said he still remembers what Sen. Feinstein said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2014: “If I can get 51 votes for a total ban in the U.S. Senate, then everybody – Mr. and Mrs. America, give them (guns) all to me. I’ll do it.”
“The ultimate goal is always the same, and that is to disarm us.” Clive said he used the analogy of a frog boiling in warm water to describe the current situation: “For years, they’ve been doing the gun control thing; they’ve done a little bit here, a little bit there, never a big move. But there was one exception, and that was Clinton’s assault weapons ban in 1994, which woke everybody up. When the bill passed, the Democrats paid the price in both the House and the Senate. It was poison for them. After that, they went back to slow heating. Now, the gun controllers are heating up again with full force.”
“Assault weapons”: a marketing term
Adams said the term “assault weapons” is a marketing term for gun control groups. He said the public is often confused about semi-automatic guns and military machine guns. Semi-automatic guns fire one round each time the trigger is pulled. Military machine guns, on the other hand, can fire multiple rounds with just one trigger pull, without removing your finger from the trigger.”
When the assault weapons ban was passed in 1994, many people thought it was a machine gun, Clive said. “The people who regulate firearms were happy to see the confusion. And they bragged about it. They were doing it for the easy stuff first, namely semi-automatic rifles.”
Adams added that no machine gun can be purchased without a rigorous government background check and a $200 tax to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Moreover, only such guns manufactured before 1986 can be purchased. These guns are collector’s items and very expensive.
“They (gun control groups) have found language that is tested against specific groups that Americans are not aware of or don’t pay enough attention to. The mainstream media and the gun control groups use the same terminology. And the mainstream media doesn’t do any fact-checking of what they say.”
The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence says on its website, “The gun lobby’s primary concern is selling guns, not keeping Americans safe. They actively promote the fear-based message that people need a gun to protect themselves. Instead, the evidence suggests that gun use actually increases the risk of suicide and homicide.” As for what evidence is being referred to here, Gifford did not respond to inquiries.
Gun control groups like the Gifford Center, Lott said, “talk a lot about mass shootings and other types of attacks. They constantly and falsely claim that the United States somehow leads the world in mass shootings.” According to his research, the U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population and less than 1 percent of the world’s mass shootings.
Lott also authored “More Guns, Less Crime,” which was originally published in 1998 and has since been reprinted twice. According to Lott, the first edition took about 20 years to study all U.S. counties and considered many factors, such as law enforcement, poverty, unemployment and 13 different gun control laws. His main finding was that police are critical in reducing crime. The ability of people to own guns for self-defense also deters criminals.
“In the 2020 federal election, just looking at the congressional races, Bloomberg claims he spent about $110 million on this campaign, while the NRA (National Rifle Association) only spent about $2.3 million. Not only in this election, but in at least the previous four consecutive elections, you’ve seen a similar disproportionate amount. Gun control groups are talking about how much money and other things people in the gun industry make, and how many votes they buy. If spending money bought votes, then Bloomberg and the gun control people would now have everything they’ve wanted for years,” he added.
Gun control follow-up
One of two bills that passed the House on March 11 would require background checks on private gun sales. The other extended the background check period from three to 10 business days. On the same day, Senator Feinstein, a California Democrat, and U.S. Representative David N. Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, introduced the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021.
Senator Feinstein was the principal author of the original 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which expired in 2004. It targets semi-automatic “assault weapons,” including the popular AR-15, as well as machine guns with high-capacity magazines capable of firing 10 rounds in bursts. The bill also includes a buy-back program for semi-automatic firearms. Thirty-four other Democratic senators, including Senate Majority Leader Schumer and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), co-sponsored the bill.
Lott said the future of the two bills in the House could face a “nuclear obstruction” (filibuster), which would require 60 votes of 100 senators to pass. However, the Senate could introduce a “nuclear option” that would allow it to end the “filibuster” with a simple majority.
Lott noted that during the Obama administration, a 2013 initiative, “Choke Point,” was a hallmark of future gun control measures. The initiative investigated financial institutions that dealt with businesses deemed “high-risk,” including firearms and ammunition sales. A 2014 report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that the initiative led some banks to “terminate relationships with a wide range of perfectly legal and legitimate merchants.
An Operation Choke Point in 2013 during the Obama administration was a hallmark of later gun control measures, Lott said. The operation investigated financial institutions that dealt with businesses deemed “high-risk,” including gun and ammunition sales. A 2014 report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that the initiative led some banks to “terminate relationships with a large number of perfectly legitimate merchants.
That’s the kind of action the government uses to go after terrorists, and now it’s being used to go after law-abiding companies,” Lott said. When Trump became president, he immediately ended that policy and began streamlining regulations. The bureaucracy has been slow to make regulatory changes. They already had final rules in place in November. But they have to be published in the Federal Register. They were supposed to be published in early February, but the Biden administration pulled them before they were published. So they can go backwards. Maybe they’ve already gone back.”
BloombergQuint, a joint venture between Bloomberg News and Quintillion Media, reported that publication of the final rule was suspended in January 2021. Democratic Sen. Kevin Cramer (D-N.Y.) introduced the Bank Fairness Act on March 3 to address the problems left by the suspension of the final rule, and Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Barr (R-Texas) introduced a similar bill in the House on March 10.
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