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“Can poor people be trusted with guns? Overwhelmingly, Republicans thinks so. But while Democrats fight against taxes on the poor and oppose voter photo IDs because they impose too much of burden, they seem to be doing everything possible – from fees, expensive training requirements, and photo IDs — to make it next to impossible for the poor to own guns.” – John Lott in Can poor people be trusted with guns? [via foxnews.com]

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27 COMMENTS

  1. At the risk of being completely blunt – They want economic slaves who blindly vote for them out of their own selffish interests. So they make it easy for them to get their Gov checks and vote. However, it is counter productive to allow your slaves to be armed.

    • See, the poor are just like little “chil’luns”. Can’t read, won’t eat right, never go to the dentist, etc. They can’t be trusted to do what’s right & take care of themselves.

      They need Mommy.guv to force them to do the right things. It’s really what’s best for everyone, isn’t it? (nod your head up & down please).

      • The Democrats want you to stand on top of your roof and wave to the helicopters to be rescued after the hurricane. They have no interest in the people who take the initiative to evacuate two days before the storm, get a hotel room 200 miles inland, and have no need to be rescued by the government.

  2. I’d thought about this awhile back and I guess it stands to reason that if you don’t trust that certain groups of people are capable of making good decisions with their money & careers you’d also believe they were incapable of making good decisions with firearms.

  3. The more any type of politician of any “party” claims to care for the poor the more they disdain them. I am from the city of Tammany Hall, this knowledge is in my bones.

  4. there is a part of me that hopes the most egregiously restrictive law possible passes in MD. I am not sure about the part about “one office in the state for filing for the license” I did not see that and did not hear it in Senate testimony. However, there is that tiny part that hopes it is because it will create an enormous backlog, backlash, make it easy to squash in court, and motivate people to vote these bum incumbents who have been in office for 15 years out.

  5. Typical leftist actions… falsely accuse conservatives of being racist while their policies are in fact racist themselves. Only problem is that since the left owns 99% of the media message, it’s highly unlikely to become a dominant story.

  6. Voting Rights. We believe the right to vote and to have your vote counted is an essential American freedom, and we oppose laws that place unnecessary restrictions on those seeking to exercise that freedom. Democrats have a proud history of standing up for the right to vote. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department has initiated careful, thorough, and independent reviews of proposed voting changes, and it has prevented states from implementing voter identification laws that would be harmful to minority voters. Democrats know that voter identification laws can disproportionately burden young voters, people of color, low-income families, people with disabilities, and the elderly, and we refuse to allow the use of political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens.

    from “Moving America Forward. 2012 Democratic National Platform” p. 18

    • I am not a big fan of the UN but their “election monitors” were shocked that the US didn’t require proof of identity to vote.

      I have often been accused by my Democrat friends of want to suppress the peoples’ votes. I proudly plead guilty to the charge. I want to suppress the votes of the multiple voter, the illegal immigrants and other excluded person but as a native of Chicago I especially want to suppress the votes those who have moved to that better shore. They may be citizens of heaven but they are no longer citizens of the United States.

      • I’m a liberal. The only meaningful argument against voter ID laws that I can see is that the ID is often not free to obtain. However, the obvious answer to that is to make a basic form of state-issued ID (which is strictly an ID – not a driving license nor anything else) free to anyone, and have the state foot the bill, just as it already does for all other aspects of running the elections. It’s just a cost of running a democratic republic.

    • Just wondering, do these disenfranchised citizens ever cash checks, buy beer or cigarettes, drive a car, apply for government benefits?

  7. Has anyone argued the following in court:

    If the 2a is a right, then all the fees, taxes, training requirements etc. make it a disproportionately burden on young citizens, people of color, low-income families, people with disabilities, and the elderly?

    Seems like a valid argument because depending on the ruling, it could mess up how other rights are applied so it force the courts to rule to remove some of those restrictions.

    • Their response would be “Noone ever died from being able to vote!” or some trash excuse like that

    • Read “Second Amendment Penumbras: Some Preliminary Observations” by Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit). The whole thing is 14 pages long ( 1 MB PDF ), but well worth the time.

      First Amendment analogies, in fact, suggest another doctrine that might apply: chilling effect. Traditionally, violation of gun laws was treated as mere malum prohibitum, and penalties for violations were generally light. During our nation’s interlude of hostility toward guns in the latter half of the twentieth century, penalties for violations of gun laws, especially in states with generally anti-gun philosophies, became much stiffer. Gun ownership was treated as a suspect (or perhaps “deviant” is a better word) act—one to be engaged in, if at all, at the actor’s peril.
      But with gun ownership now recognized as an important constitutional right belonging to all Americans, that deviant characterization cannot be correct. Regulation of firearms cannot now justifiably proceed on an in terrorem approach, in which the underlying goal is to discourage people from having anything to do with firearms at all. Laws treating fairly minor or technical violations as felonies must be regarded with the same sort of suspicion as pre–New York Times v. Sullivan laws on criminal libel: as improper burdens on the exercise of a constitutional right.

      Reynolds’s “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime” ( 6 pages ), is also relevant.

      Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process — the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what — is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today’s society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.

  8. So would it be fair to presume that a poor person who supports their right to keep and bear arms is considered a bigger threat than a non-poor person to our current Democrat Regime?

    Interesting.

    Is this why the Democrats didn’t want slaves to learn to read and write?

    • Looks like he had corrective surgery. I forget the condition, but it’s where the muscles kinda sag in front of the eyes obsfucating vision.

  9. “But while Democrats fight against taxes on the poor…”

    I had lunch the other day with a doctor and two co-workers, an RN and a paramedic. We had just finished a call on the critical care unit. The medic is above and beyond a bleeding heart liberal. So much so he uses food stamps. Funny, I make signifigantly less than him and support myself just fine without any assistance.

    Anyways we started talking about Obamacare and he was praising it left and right, “This country has it and that one and that one, blah blah blah and it works for them.” The doctor started to say how busy they already are in hospitals and how this will basically be a free pass for more people to just start, at which point I added that doctors and nurses are heavily burdened with the work loads they already have and this will signifigantly decrease their quality of care. For the first time since I have known him, that medic shut up and had nothing to say.

    • “Why yes, it all makes sense, no guns, free healthcare, yes yes” Until it’s their @$$ on the line and someone’s shooting at them. Then a gun becomes a “defensive weapon” and that month-long wait to see a specialist is too long, so they decide to go with a private doctor.

      • Well the day you need your gun, you’ll need to worry about the hours long wait in the ER before the specialist. Thats no lie either, Id bring a patient to the ER with a legit emergency and they will be on my stretcher for 2+ hours. This past flu season was no joke. Anyone with a slight sniffle flocked to the ER with “the flu.”

        Think its bad now, just wait untill everyone can “afford” healthcare. Sure life threatening emergencies will still be made priority but my two hour wait with an altered mental status will become four hours.

    • Pretty much no other country actually has anything similar to Obamacare, which is to say, government-mandated private health insurance. I think the only one that comes even remotely close is Singapore, but they mandate health saving plans rather than insurance.

  10. The Democrats need poor people to be dependent, powerless, unthinking and under control. The more people on the government teat, the more people who will vote to keep their free sh!t, thereby increasing the Donkey majority.

    It’s right out of Harry Hopkin’s New Deal playbook: “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” The twist on the program is keeping poor people, especially black people, disarmed. Power comes from the barrel of a gun, and the Dems are unwilling to share power.

  11. Since the NFA and before, gun laws have specifically targeted the poor. The “ruling class” has always wanted to make it so only the wealthy, intelligent, capable people are allowed to have firearms. The $200 NFA tax in 1934 is nearly $3,000 now. For years, San Francisco banned firearms ownership if you live in public housing, until it was overturned via lawsuit. The whole California Roster of pistols approved for sale and the testing process was designed specifically to make “saturday night specials” impossible to sell. The whole concept of “saturday night specials” was created to demonize inexpensive handguns. Some cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago, etc, have specific laws against these guns, even going so far as mandating a minimum price for a handgun and banning any guns with an MSRP under $x amount.

    We know that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms, including handguns, and to use them for self defense. Poll taxes, printing/publishing taxes, etc, have been overturned by courts as an infringement upon various other rights. I would expect that any excessive taxes levied against guns and ammo or any onerous or expensive licensing requirements needed to purchase/possess firearms or ammunition would also get shot down. All people have this right, not just those wealthy enough to afford it.

    The attempts to effectively prohibit people of lesser means from purchasing or carrying firearms is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. From minimum msrp for guns to CA’s “may issue” system, where in many counties ONLY those who are politically connected and/or very wealthy (which = politically connected), or are politicians/judges/etc themselves, are issued carry permits. Period. No permits are issued unless you pull political weight. That’s horrific and unjust. It’s an attitude of the ruling class that we should never accept.

  12. I made this point on a liberal board. The response I got was that voting was a *right*, and I shouldn’t talk about it in the same breath as my gun fetishism 😛

  13. Simple mathematics. The number of poor people in America far outnumbers the number of ridiculously rich people, many of whom obtained their wealth through unethical (though maybe legal) means. You think rich people want a bunch of ARMED Americans who can potentially threaten them?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTj9AcwkaKM

    This goes for both parties, Democrat and Republican. The new crooks of America don’t care about party affiliation.

  14. I doubt that it’s about screwing poor people out of gun ownership per se.

    When one wishes to screw everyone out of something, one screws whomever one can, as one can.

    Poor people are just the low-hanging fruit.

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