US House considering DC gun legislation

[Bradley in DC]

http://dcist.com/2008/09/10/markup_o...eduled_tod.php

September 10, 2008
Markup on Norton Bill Scheduled Today

2008_0910_gun.jpgThe battle between Congress and the District over the city's gun laws continues today.

As we told you about yesterday and the Post wrote today, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is grappling with two bills related to the District's new gun regulations. On the one hand is legislation sponsored by a number of conservative Democrats that would dump the regulations all together; on the other, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton submitted legislation simply calling for the District to comply with the Supreme Court's June decision on the city's gun laws.

We've been told that the committee will markup Norton's legislation today at 1 p.m. While this is good news -- it basically means that Norton's alternative could get to the House before the more aggressive version -- there are plenty of factors in play. Members of the committee could try to add the stronger language as an amendment to Norton's bill, or they could just vote her down. And even if her bill gets through, that's won't necessarily stop Republicans and their Democratic allies from pushing their version through too. Basically, the fight won't end today.

Whatever we all think about the District's ham-handed approach to crafting new gun regulations, we know this much -- this isn't anybody's business but ours. Period. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) has already indicated that he's looking to amend the current regulations so that they're less restrictive while keeping some basics of the current regime -- gun registration, for example -- intact. This is a positive step, and one Congress should allow to run its course. (Do we all need guns right NOW?)

If you think the District isn't complying with the Supreme Court's decision, tell your elected officials so. But letting Congress trample on home rule on this issue sends them the message that it's OK that they trample on us in the first place. It's not.

[rwbris18]

Ever since the first human fastened a weapon and defended himself every dictator knows that he who controls weapons controls the populace. A free country permits it populace to own weapons freely only when the government and the citizens have nothing to fear from each other. Unfree countries do not; police states and dictatorships have total weapon control. Stripped of all its sociobabble, the modern issue of control is just that simple.

Gun control is so absolute in so many nations that it has created a vast global police state where governments do not trust their own citizens with private firearms. The fact that people have allowed politicians, bureaucrats, fascists, and dictators of all political stripes to disarm them does not speak well to the collective intelligence of these citizens. The fact that those individuals who still permit the illusion of free elections continue to support those police-state rulers defies human intelligence and logic even further.

The framers of our federal system of government saw this principle as one of timeless truth: whoever controls weaponry controls the people of the nation. They also recognized that so long as the people had the same access to weapons technology as the government, our nation would remain free of autocratic rule.

The major constitutional issue of gun control is that today our basic freedoms (i.e., our treasured Bill of Rights) are in imminent danger. That gun control has become a cultural jihad – a holy war – in the United States is obvious. According to its own leaders, the major objective of Handgun Control, Inc. is the total confiscation of all privately held firearms. Their strategy, and they make no secret of it, is to nibble and clip away at the gun control issue until they achieve total prohibition.

(Continued)

[rwbris18]

Their argument against universal armament is that we don’t live in dangerous colonial times anymore; that the code of the Western frontier is obsolete; that we don’t need guns anymore to protect ourselves. This is simply hogwash. I’d like any one of them to walk down a darkened street early some morning in any of America’s nastier 1,000 or so cities, and take a long their spouses and kids and pets and some personal valuables. Will anything be left to be found?

No serious, thinking person can possibly believe that once guns are outlawed the entire world will turn peaceful, kind, and gentle and that everything and everyone bad will go away.

First, our world’s not kind and gentle, and neither are many of us who live here. Nature is cruel and nasty. You have to be tough to win and to survive. Just think about this, can you recall where you EVER saw an animal in nature die a natural death (old age)?

My Point? Gun prohibition does not and will not work. A free people is an armed people. And if you take away free people’s personal firearms, as the One World Order Police State that now owns America is trying to do, they will make other Police States. While the methods, means, and technology are simple, convenient, and in place, police-state dictators provide the motive to make guns. Both ancient and current histories are replete with frightening examples.

Our founding fathers would be appalled at the number of attempts by autocrats and their armed supports to sodomize our Second Amendment to the Constitution.