We’ve heard time and again how disappointed President Obama is with the fact that he hasn’t passed any new gun control legislation. The root issue there is that Obama sees any and all new restrictions on firearms ownership as “good” and “progress” no matter if they would have any impact or not — the “we have to do something” approach. A logical human would understand that the reason he has failed to pass his proposed gun control legislation isn’t that Americans don’t care, but instead because Americans are smart enough to figure out when a proposal will do irreparable harm to a Constitutionally protected right without reducing the “gun violence” being used to push that agenda. Having failed miserably in the seven years he’s had in office, Obama announced in an interview that he’s planning on using his last year in office to ram something — anything — through.
From the Washington Times:
In an interview published Tuesday in GQ magazine, Mr. Obama said easy access to guns is “the only variable” between the U.S. and other developed countries.
“The main thing that I’ve been trying to communicate over the last several of these horrific episodes is that, contrary to popular belief, Americans are not more violent than people in other developed countries,” Mr. Obama said. “But they have more deadly weapons to act out their rage.”
Asked by interviewer Bill Simmons of HBO if gun control will be the “dominant” issue on his agenda next year, Mr. Obama replied, “I hope so.”
“We have this weird habit in this culture of mourning and, you know, 48, 72 hours of wall-to-wall coverage, and then … suddenly we move on,” Mr. Obama said. “And I will do everything I can to make sure that there’s a sustained attention paid to this thing.”
The recent attacks in Paris seem to contradict President Obama’s statement. Despite having some of the strictest gun control laws in the world, multiple independent attackers armed with AK-47 rifles slaughtered hundreds of people on the streets of Paris. It was a mass shooting bigger than anything ever seen in the United States. So the idea that more restrictive gun control laws will instantly create a perfectly safe country is laughable at best and disturbingly divorced from reality at worst.
What still bothers me is the fact that Obama and his pals in the Democratic party still believe that any restriction on the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a good thing and “progress,” no matter what the actual impact of the law would be. No matter how small the restriction or how nonsensical the logic, the common shared belief is that any new law passed against gun owners is a step in the right direction. I’d be completely willing to work with the gun control activists if they were actually reasonable about crafting legislation aimed specifically at combating the “gun violence” bloody shirt they waive every time they propose a new law, but after reading so many proposals about banning barrel shrouds and exempting one version of a firearm they’re trying to ban simply because it comes in a camo pattern instead of black I’ve lost all hope.
If President Obama is serious about trying to reduce “gun violence” then he’d actually ask for the NRA’s help in crafting appropriate legislation. Instead he seems content to paint them as the enemy who must be vanquished.