In his speech tonight to a packed room full of people eating things, Wayne LaPierre delivered the NRA’s official response to President Obama’s inaugural address. In it, Wayne showed all of the good ol’ fire and brimstone that the NRA should have packed into their first post-Sandy Hook speech, stating the NRA’s belief that citizens have the right to own the same level of firearms technology as the political elite, including standard capacity magazines and modern firearms. As Wayne put it, if it’s good enough for the political elites then it’s good enough for the average citizen to defend himself.. Make the jump for the full text . . .
Thank you for that kind introduction. And thank you for your warm welcome.
Yesterday in his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and he talked about “unalienable rights.” I would argue that his words make a mockery of both.
I’d like to talk to you about one line near the end of Barack Obama’s speech where he said, quote “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle.” Let me quote the president again: “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle.”
So what is this “absolutism” the president attacks? And what are the so-called “principles” that he wants us to settle for instead?
Obama wants to turn the idea of “absolutism” into a dirty word, just another word for “extremism.” He wants you to accept the idea of “principles” as he sees fit to define them. It’s a way of redefining words so that common sense is turned upside-down and nobody knows the difference.
Think about it. As families, when we’re broke and all our credit cards are maxed out, we’re forced to tighten our belts.
But when the government is broke and our bond rating is tumbling and the president wants more new social programs, borrowing more money is supposed to be “principled.” And anybody who questions that is a no-good “absolutist” — Obama code for extremist.
We as gun owners face the same kind of false ultimatum. We’re told that to stop insane killers, we must accept less freedom — less than the criminal class and political class keep for themselves.
We’re told that limits on magazine capacity or bans on 100-year-old firearms technology — bans that only affect lawful people — will somehow make us safer.
We’re told that wanting the same technology that the criminals and our leaders keep for themselves is a form of “absolutism” and that accepting less freedom and protection for ourselves is the only “principled” way to live.
Think about what that means. Barack Obama is saying that the only “principled” way to make children safe is to make lawful citizens less safe and violent criminals more safe.
Criminals couldn’t care less about Barack Obama’s so-called “principles”! They don’t have principles — that’s why they’re criminals.
Obama wants you to believe that putting the federal government in the middle of every firearm transaction — except those between criminals — will somehow make us safer.
That means forcing law-abiding people to fork over excessive fees to exercise their rights. Forcing parents to fill out forms to leave a family heirloom to a loved one — standing in line and filling out a bunch of bureaucratic paperwork, just so a grandfather can give a grandson a Christmas gift. He wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry.
There are only two reasons for that federal list of gun owners — to tax them or take them. And to anyone who says that’s excessive, Barack Obama says you’re an “absolutist.”
He doesn’t understand you. He doesn’t agree with the freedoms you cherish. If the only way he can force you to give ’em up is through scorn and ridicule, he’s more than willing to do it — even as he claims the moral high ground.
He said it yesterday! In the very same sentence that Obama talked about “absolutism” versus “principle,” he also scolded his critics for “name-calling,” as he called it.
He’s more than willing to demonize his opponents, silence his critics and slur the NRA — in the words of Senator Charles Schumer, as an “extremist fringe group.” And look at how he demonizes Republicans in Congress.
When Barack Obama says, “we cannot mistake absolutism for principle,” what he’s saying is that precision and clarity and exactness in language and law should be abandoned in favor of his nebulous, undefined “principles.”
I’ve got news for the president. Absolutes do exist. Words do have specific meaning, in language and in law. It’s the basis of all civilization. It’s why our laws are written down: So the “letter of the law” carries the force of the law.
That’s why our Bill of Rights was written into law, to ensure the fundamental freedoms of a minority could never be denied by a majority. Those are the principles we call unalienable rights.
Without those absolutes, without those protections, democracy decays into nothing more than two wolves and one lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. I urge our president to use caution when attacking clearly defined “absolutes” in favor of his “principles.”
Mister President, just because you wish words meant something other than what they mean, you don’t have the right to define them any way you want. Because when words can mean anything, they mean nothing.
When “absolutes” are abandoned for “principles,” the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone’s graffiti and our rights and freedoms are defaced.
Words do have meaning, Mister President. And those meanings are absolute, especially when it comes to our Bill of Rights.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from former Democratic U.S. Senator and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Fifty years ago, after he had been appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, liberal Justice Hugo Black said, and I quote: “There are ‘absolutes’ in our Bill of Rights, and they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolutes.'” End quote.
Let me read that again. “There are ‘absolutes’ in our Bill of Rights, and they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolutes.'”
Justice Black understood the danger of self-appointed arbiters of what “freedom” really means — like President Barack Obama — who want to redefine freedom, whittle away freedom and infringe upon the freedoms that we the people reserve to ourselves.
They’re God-given freedoms. They belong to us as our birthright. No government ever gave them to us and no government can ever take them away.
Mister President, you may not like that. You may wish it were some other way. But you can’t argue that it isn’t true.
In that, the American people are, and will always remain, utterly absolute! We are not people to be trivialized, marginalized or demonized as unreasonable. We’re not children who need to be parented or misguided “bitter clingers” to guns and religion.
We get up every day, we work hard to pay our taxes, we cherish our families and we care about their safety. We believe in living honorably, and living within our means.
We believe we deserve, and have every right to, the same level of freedom that our government leaders keep for themselves, and the same capabilities and same technologies that criminals use to prey upon us and our families. That means we believe in our right to defend ourselves and our families with semi-automatic technology.
We believe that if neither the criminal nor the political class is limited by magazine capacity, we shouldn’t be limited in our capacity either.
We believe in our country. We believe in our Bill of Rights. And we believe in our Second Amendment, all of our Second Amendment.
Because we believe in the freedom and safety that it, and it alone, guarantees absolutely.
Mister President, you might think that calling us “absolutists” is a clever way of “name-calling” without using names. But if that is “absolutist,” then we are as “absolutist” as the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution … and we’re proud of it!
Thank you very much!
this idiot made it a republican vs democrat issue. its gonna alienate a lot of people..
It is.
I didn’t see any of that. The only metion of party came when he used FDRs bench appointee as an example in support of the existence of absolutes in the Constitution.
this idiot made it a republican vs democrat issue
Funny, I didn’t see that. Maybe he’s not the idiot.
Show me a current Republican congress critter that has introduced a gun control bill and Ill apologize. Until then, it IS a partizan issue, whether you like it or not.
That has exactly what to do with winning over some (or most) of the 35% of gun owners who vote for Democrats more than Republicans?
Hint: nothing. It has nothing to do with winning the ground war, at the individual-voter level.
Like it or not many voters and legislators (both
Democrat and Republican) vote lock step with
their party. Democrats especially jump on
anyone not on the party line. How many pro-2A
Dems have openly spoken in support of the
2A since December? A few, but not many.
It may not be the best expression, but this
makes it hard to label the fight as anything
other than left vs. right (i.e. Dems vs. Repubs,
Progressives vs. Conservatives etc…)
How many people could we really alienate with
strong language? This is not a general discussion
of ideals and policies, it’s a pinpoint debate on
1 topic, the 2A. I do not agree with everything the
GOP does, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to
support efforts to defend the Bill of Rights. I’m
willing to bet that a significant margin of the
cherished “independents” feel the same way.
Those that say they’re on the fence have already
chosen one way or another. If the petty labeling
of a defense of the Bill of Rights as a Republican
vs. Dem issue really is going to alienate support;
then facts are pointless because emotional
loyalty to the Rs or Ds has already overruled
their own responsibility to think for themselves.
How about 35% of gun owners who are Democrats or tend to vote that way?
35%. Over 1/3 of the NRA’s potential supporters.
Yeah, that’s good math.
I can recognize both GOP and DNC dog-whistle phrasing, and guess what? This was a speech by a Republican for Republicans. WLP is as tone-deaf as ever, he just sucked less this time. And that’s coming from someone who WANTS to see him succeed, not the knee-jerk NRA haters who will be shrieking about this speech tomorrow.
Where does the 35% figure come from?
Why isn’t it reflected in the posture of the Democrat party (dog whistling notwithstanding)? I am hard pressed to see the current struggle to defend the 2A as anything but a fight against Democrat politicians. Do you see otherwise?
Maybe that “35%” should stop stabbing themselves in the back and blaming their republican friends for the bleeding.
Gun control is part of the “culture wars” and people like you, Alpha, are an unorthodox disposable anomaly in the eyes of your ideological brethren. I wish you would see that.
Your Californian anti-gun pols don’t care what you think about guns even if you hold similar views on everything else.
Furthermore, the state is a naturally coercive institution and the bigger and more centralized it is, the less individual freedom people have.
A state that micromanages and can intrude on just about every aspect of a person’s life is supposed to keep its hands off your guns?
In the words of Yoda: “Sense, this does not make.”
I don’t know where you get the idea that what LaPierre said was a republican v dem issue. I read the text and the only mention of party is in reference to what Schumer said which is true.
Everyone here, and not here, needs to join and get behind the NRA. No compromise, no giving in. Americans do have the rights LaPierre states.
The Democratic party also made this an us VS them argument.
I’m voting Libertarian in the mid-terms. The Dems have pushed the moderates away with this issue, and I can’t hold my nose long enough to pull the “R” lever.
+1 Ted
I know how you feel, leaning Libertarian myself. However, there is a distinct lesser of two evils in our two-party system right now with respect to 2A rights, and Libertarian candidates still don’t have enough votes to win at this point. Look for (R) tea-party type conservatives at least if you can, not a perfect overlap with libertarian values but a better map on than other stripes. For congress, I’ve had choice between a moderate republican who would vote they way I would about 60% of the time. The other choice was a Progressive Dem., who would vote the way I want about 10% of the time (purple district). Which is better?
I’m with you, we need to get people that respect the constitution back in office. Keep voting for candidates that lean this way every time you get a chance (especially in primaries against encumbent GOP candidates). However, If we don’t keep some kind of grip on the breaks right now, this train is going off the tracks before we can transform either party.
Ted, I have found myself voting more and more for moderates of both parties. It is not that I agree with Candace Straight on economic issues, or Mark Begich on anything, but I want both parties to get away from the extremists that seem to be drawing lines in the sand rather than seeking common ground.
I agree with Republicans that we need to cut Medicare and Medicaid, and I agree with the Democrats that we need to raise taxes on the top 1%. Both parties, though, have elected people to Congress who refuse to consider any plan other than their own.
Some Democrats in Congress believe that any sign of flexibility shown by Obama is a sign of weakness. This is not a recipe for progress.
Some Republicans in congress believe that anything other than 100% acceptance of GOP demands is a sign of partisan warfare. This is not helpful, particularly if you are one of those Republicans who would be happy with 20% of your demands.
In our local Congressional race, the local newspaper refused to support either candidate. They knew that one of them would win, they just didn’t want to be on record as saying anything good about either one.
NRA needs Mr Colin Nior as spokesman.
I have a problem with the title of this one. I didn’t read the “NRA Believes Americans Have the Right to Own “Assault Rifles”” anywhere. I did read “we believe in our right to defend ourselves and our families with semi-automatic technology.”
When do we get to go on the offense (can I say that without being accused of conspiring against the gubment?) and start trying to get the hughes amendment repealed? We believe in “shall not be infringed” but we also believe that “semi-automatic technology” is all that we have a right to?
That’s the vibe I got. When he said that we should have all of the same technology that the “political elite” use to defend themselves, I took that to mean everything.
Which might include some NFA reform on their agenda. We’ll see.
That would be………… over 9,000!
If the NRA takes on even the Hughes amendment, I’d be shocked, and I eat every word I’ve said to bad mouth them. Heck, I’d even try and scrimp and save enough money to be a life time member.
You can become a life member for $300 right now. Look around and find it.
If you have to scrimp and save for $300, you cannot even afford ammo right now, let alone any decent rifle.
NFA reform would be great. It’s time for us to win back the sacred ground that has been sacrificed in the past for “compromise” and political expediency!!!
Perhaps because La Pierre knows that the weapons he is defending aren’t assault rifles?
America’s cultural war is heating up and spreading.
OMG, an articulate statement from the NRA. I am proud to be an absolutist. I only read the transcript. I hope the actual presentation was as good as the wording.
Looks like the NRA is gonna fight for us after all.
Good.
You did good Wayne, you did good!
Meh, I wish he would have added one more section.
Mr President — we are fathers, we are mothers, we are sons, we are daughters, we are teachers, we are union members, we are firefighters, we are police officers, we are black, we are hispanic, we are asians, we are white, we come from all walks of life and occupations, we are Americans and we are gun owners who wish to be free to exercise our rights. Mr President, fight the criminals and stop trying to disarm law abiding citizens.
Since the president has choosen to qoute the founders of this country, I remind him of what Benjiman Franklin said “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
Or something along those lines — the fight is with everyone should be the message and taking away rights does not make us safer. I hate that it came across as OFWG vs Govt.
He tried. Damn decent attempt at a straight shooting equality statement.
We deserve better than decent from the #1 org representing our interests. They should be wreathed in holy fire raining down the smack downs on the civilian disarmament crowd. This, um, didn’t quite make it to that level.
Well he’s given it his best. Should we do any less?
I’m a registered Republican (I know, the horror…), and I did get some R vs D in this. However, the distortion of language seems to me to rest much more with the left. A standard capacity mag is a high capacity feeding device, an AR is an assault rifle, weapons of war, etc. Of course JW had us all chasing after WMD, and that didn’t turn out terribly well either.
Regardless, the main push is toward firearms freedom, and the NRA is still the 800 pound gorilla in that regard. The NRA is not looking to any other major social change except to maintain and expand 2A rights. Although individual members are probably pretty far to the right, the NRA will do almost nothing on other hot topics such as abortion and gay marriage. Mentioning that the US has a spending problem is pretty obvious, but I voted for the VP with an actual budget.
The NRA is a about guns. Support them, or the FPC, SAF, etc. Now is the time to be politically active.
Awesome speech Mr. LaPierre. Makes me proud to be a member of the NRA.
Interesting that LapPierre quoted Hugo Black. Black was a poseur. He claimed to be a 1st Amendment absolutist, but he was very selective in his allegiance to 1A. In Cohen v. California, which was a case where an American citizen wore a jacket with the phrase “F^ck the Draft” stenciled on it — it was 1971 and the war in Vietnam was still hot — Black voted with the minority that Cohen was not exercising his right to free speech. Black claimed that wearing the jacket was “conduct,” and therefore not protected by 1A. So Black was a lying sack of sh!t. And that’s my free speech.
Makes me glad he is on our side, me me glad to be part of the NRA!
That was some snazzy music.
“Stand and Fight.” and fight we shall ………………………………………..
Rule #3
Never fight on your enemy’s home ground.
In this situation never adopt the language that your enemy has created to convey a carefuly crafted emotion based political outcome.
Very well said and written. Thank you Nick Leghorn.
Wayne Lapierre did very well here. I have no complaints.
I too think he did well…
He’s digging in his heels and saying we shouldn’t budge. He offers no alternatives as to how to keep guns out of the hands of people who would misuse them (like that 15 year-old who killed his family and wanted to shoot up the local Walmart). As DrVino said, there needs to be a reasonable attempt to keep guns out of irresponsible hands, or they will be be taken from all.
Maybe that’s because there is no such solution without serious 4th amendment issues, or that is not draconian. The only kinds of law I can see that don’t run rough-shod over the 4A are of the kind where someone uses your gun in commission of a crime and you go to jail. You really want that? It’s asking for abuse.
Some seem to think that the 2A is naïve in the sense that it must not have taken into account any risk, and that now we must be compelled to surround it with all kinds of safety nets as if to cover some oversight on the part of the framers.
The only effective safety net, to quote CSN, is to teach your children well. America is advanced citizenship. Step up.
“America is advanced citizenship. Step up.”
I am stealing this line for sure.
I think the “America is advance citizenship” line comes from the movie, “The American President.” Can’t take credit for it. I have to say that is it VERY satisfying to use it on the pro-2A side, since that movie was rabidly anti-2A.
Glad you like the line.
WC wrote, “He offers no alternatives as to how to keep guns out of the hands of people who would misuse them …”.
I don’t care what anyone does, criminals will acquire whatever they want. If criminals in prisons can acquire picks, knives, and even guns, the sky is the limit when they are out on the streets. Heck a criminal can even make a fully functional zip gun with less than $20 in parts available at any good hardware store.
Mankind has never been able to prevent criminals from committing crimes. All we can do is respond when a crime is in progress. And the sooner that good people can respond, the better. So if a spree killer ever commences action where I am, that killer is going to encounter me, a good guy with a gun … and I will do everything in my power to immediately stop them — or at least slow them down.
Why don’t you take responsibility for your safety rather than hoping that other people can make the world safer around you?
Uncommon: I take the responsibility for my own safety, but I would also like the world to be safer for other people.
Me too. That’s why I carry a gun damn near everywhere. I’ve also got a first aid kit in my trunk.
Ted///The Nudge
Mr Colin Noir!
Hearts and Minds
NRA has so few cards to play
Play the STRONG Cards
What drives me crazy is the media portrays gun control as a battle between the NRA and the American people. Watch any news outlet and that is how it is portrayed. In reality the fight is between two sets of American groups, those with and those without. It’s easier to get your way when you frame the conversation as being a good vs evil, the NRA being mostly seen as evil. Its a good tactic for deamonizing ownership without really deamonizing your neighbor. No one wants to look their neighbor in the eye and tell them point blank you don’t support their beliefs.
That is one dishonest argument after another. Maybe when Obama was talking about “absolutes” he was talking about people who absolutely refuse to raise taxes back to the rate they were under Reagan.
Maybe he was talking about people who absolutely refuse to let their female employees have decent insurance coverage.
Maybe he was talking about 30-round magazines.
The LaPierre says that he understands more about “God given” freedoms than the President, the Supreme Court, and all of Congress. With all due respect, what a stupid thing to say.
We did not just elect LaPierre President. And there is a reason why. He is a very dishonest person, and he believes that gun rights are more important than other rights. He is a fringe fanatic, and most of the United States disagrees with him.
Low Budget Dave,
When I saw you put the words “God” and “President, the Supreme Court, and all of Congress” in the same statement I thought you finally figured it out. But you didn’t. While the State (President, Supreme Court, and Congress) might be your god, it isn’t mine.
I, like many others, support the ideals of individual liberty and personal responsibility … the very foundation of our nation spoken in our Declaration of Independence and reflected in our Constitution (which includes the Bill of Rights). In case you don’t remember, our Constitution is the Supreme Law of our Land — not the president, supreme court or congress.
The conflict that you see is the result of a large group of people who do not want to be responsible for themselves and who want to infringe the liberties of others. The fact that many entities in government are complicit doesn’t mean those people nor government are right in this case.
Uncommon: I agree that there is such a thing as an “absolute.” Right and wrong are pretty much the same in every country, with only a few minor differences. So if Obama was saying that all absolutism was wrong, then yeah, I would disagree.
What I was objecting to was that LaPierre keeps talking about guns as a “God given” right. That was his terminology, not mine. LaPierre was the one who implied that gun rights actually are absolute, and that the Second Amendment, in effect, trumps all the others.
He actually said that forcing people to pay excessive fees to exercise their rights is the same as denying those rights. There are three things wrong with this:
1. The fees are not excessive.
2. The fees are not levied on gun ownership (a right), they are levied on things like machine guns, silencers, and dealer permits. Those are not rights.
3. The Supreme Court does not get to decide what is right and wrong, but they do get to decide what is Constitutional.
I understand what you are saying, I just disagree. If the Supreme Court decides that sales tax on guns is constitutional, then they are hardly “trampling on the individual liberty at the heart of our nation.”
Similarly, if they were to decide that 2A makes all guns tax free, then I will accept that as the law of the land. I may disagree with them, but I am not going to accuse them of violating Gods law.
As far as his contention that the deficit is Obama’s fault: Pathetic. When George Bush came to office, America had a five trillion dollar surplus. Do you remember the outrage from the NRA and the GOP when Bush destroyed the surplus and turned it into a trillion-dollar deficit?
You don’t remember the outrage because it didn’t happen.
Which president didn’t pass a budget for 4 years, and accumulated that fastest growing deficit in history? See, I can use facts too. The facts supporting BHO being any kind of effective leader other than public speaking are pretty damn few.
Accur81: You realize that is how budgets work, right? Each President gets to start with the deficit and the budget guidelines from the previous President. If Congress refuses to pass your budget, you can’t do much to change the deficit.
Still, if you look at the numbers on a chart, Obama looks like a genius,
http://pipesandtheories.blogspot.com/2012/05/yes-obama-is-really-big-spender.html
Dave, I understand that Obo hasn’t done much that hasn’t been (basically) done since Ronnie started it oh so long ago. Growing government, growing the deficit and doubling the national debt, in part by cutting taxes on those most able to pay them. Clinton was the lone semi-exception, and even he hustled it too.
I’ve been paying attention since 1970 and I’m not a partisan sycophant.
Here’s my quibble. The court ruled in Miller that we could have all the guns concurrently deployed by the military. Hence the whole “militia” aspect. The Supremes only concern was that Miller’s short-barreled shotty was not a military weapon. Of course, had they Lexis-Nexis and google they would have known it was a WWI trench gun and would have found it thoroughly acceptable on those grounds. NFA or no.
Sadly, Miller was remanded to the Circuit and Miller was murdered even before the remand. Needless to say, the case was never reheard.
Regardless, Miller ruled the 2A was a “collective right”.
Actualy Dave the American people disagree with your statement. The only item in every survey conducted legitimately is we need to revamp the mental healthcare system in this country.
72% of the peopl in this country do not want their right to defend themselves infringed upon. I happen to agree. The president has and continues to try and redefine words a dicussion many have on a daily basis. There is a problem when you disagree with someone and you are now labeled for some reason as someone dishonest or clinging to your guns and religion. If the American people did indeed disagree with your statments they would not be buying firearms at the rate they are today. The numbers peak for themselves.
GCT: Just because a lot of people buy guns does not mean they are opposed to background checks. That is like saying that people who buy cars believe there shouldn’t be any traffic lights.
in fact, the vast majority of Americans support background checks. Look it up anywhere. They want the right to own guns, they just don’t see background checks as a denial of that right.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/gun-poll_n_2494513.html
The ultimate source of the slowest growth claim came from Paul Krugman who attributes the FY09 budget to President Bush. However, that is a flat out lie. (Well aren’t all Krugman’s claims.) The Democratic controlled Congress held off passing a budget until President Obama was inaugurated the first time. Then they passed the stimulus bill and spent the remain $200 billion left from TARP. Since the real Obama budget baseline is 2009 and the 50 year claim is BS.
You live in fantasy world created by the MSM.
(belongs in the exchange below)
TDI: Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economics. You are some dude who posts random half-facts on a right-wing pro-gun blog. The facts are available anywhere except Fox News, and you hardly expect the propaganda wing of the Republican Party to report anything good that Obama does.
Did you see this little tidbit on Fox News?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/12/11/president-obamas-record-and-proposals-cutting-spending
Or How about this: “It is perfectly reasonable to argue that much of the responsibility for 2009’s 25.2 percent rests with President Bush, and not with President Obama; in January 2009, before President Obama took office, the CBO released its forecast that fiscal year 2009 would see outlays of 24.9 percent of GDP based on pre-Obama policies.”
What liberal rag is that from? Forbes Magazine: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/09/03/yep-obamas-a-big-spender-just-like-his-predecessors/
Raising taxes to Reagan era rates would not pay for Obama-era levels of government spending. I will agree to raise rates back to 1980s if you will agree to cut spending back to 1980’s levels.
TDI: I am actually with you on this one. Social and military spending has grown so out of control that they threaten the safety of the economy.
At the same time, it is silly to suggest that we can run up these sorts of bills and just refuse to pay for it.
Federal taxes this year are about 14.8% of GDP. Under Reagan, who was no liberal, taxes were 18.2% of GDP. Easy math tells us that we could reduce the deficit by 3.4% of GDP just by going back to the tax rates of the Reagan Administration.
Unfortunately, current deficits are about twice that big. This suggests that we need to raise taxes and cut spending, in roughly equal amounts.
Now see if you can name a President that actually cut spending. Ike did it, but that was only because he inherited a bloated military. Since Ike, the only Presidents who have held federal spending growth under 5% per year are Clinton and Obama.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/
Once again you reveal a certain superficial level of knowledge. The combination of the recession and a highly progressive income tax has reduced taxes as a percentage of GNP. Prior to the recession taxes as a percentage of GNP were at their recent historical norms. The huge increase in the deficit over that caused by the recession can be attributed to the $840 billion failed stimulus bill that has been folded into the spending baseline by the use of continuing resolutions that have been required to fund the government because of the Senate’s refusal to pass a budget since 2009. (What a run on sentence.)
Trust me, you won’t that in Wikipedia either.
TDI: The historical average tax rate (since 1945 or so) is 18% of GDP. During the housing boom, it may have reached that level for a few hours, but that obscures the trillions of dollars worth of tax cuts that were handed out, and not paid for, during the Bush Administration.
In order to get “bi-partisan” support for the stimulus bill, tax cuts were added to that as well. More than $290 billion of the $840 billion you described as “failed” were tax cuts, rather than spending increases. Only about $90 billion of the total was spent on education, which actually does improve the economy. Only about $30 billion was spent on roads.
Even after adding it into the baseline, spending under Obama still grew at a slower pace than under any President in 50 years.
Source: Google
The ultimate source of the slowest growth claim came from Paul Krugman who attributes the FY09 budget to President Bush. However, that is a flat out lie. (Well aren’t all Krugman’s claims.) The Democratic controlled Congress held off passing a budget until President Obama was inaugurated the first time. Then they passed the stimulus bill and spent the remain $200 billion left from TARP. Since the real Obama budget baseline is 2009 and the 50 year claim is BS.
You live in a fantasy world created by the MSM.
I will add on the repost that after this exchange I nowunderstand why you would think our previous “who is Obama” exchange why you would think that it was name calling. Clearly your sources of information are at wikipedia level.
gun rights are the most important rights ever. look at europe if you want to see what will happen after you loose them: you will, slowly, loose all your other civil rights, too. thats whats happening here now and that will happen to the us, too – if you don’t keep the ability to fight for your rights. the only two long-term stable democracys i knew are switzerland and the us, both strongly supportet private gun ownership in the past. only a coincidence? i don’t think so. so if WLP thinks gun rights are the most importan, he’s absolutely right – the right of private gun ownership is the fundation of every other right, cause no gouvernment will ever respect these rights only for reasons of good will and law.
+1 … there are numerous videos on the internet showing australians, canadians and british saying to americans: “look what happens [increased crime rates from civilian disarmament and overwhelmed police etc. who can’t/won’t/have no real responsibility to take up the slack…] when you let your gun rights go…don’t let this happen to you…when they’re gone, you’ll never get them back…” it will be the beginning of the end, folks, and this is coming from someone who hardly ever posts and keeps his head down, but the time for that is over…
Really? Why on Earth would Australians, with a murder rate of 1/100K want to trade places with the United States, at 4.8. (The rate in England is 1.2, and Canada is about 1.6. )
So you are saying that gun regulation is the beginning of the end? Are you talking about the military dictatorships in Norway, England, and Canada? Or is there a wallaby totalitarian state that I am unaware of?
well, I am talking about the crippling of civil rights in the EU, more and more laws authorizing the gouvernments to spy us, about the fact that more and more decisions, who were formerly made by the elected national parliaments are now made in the un-electec EU-commision, about the continuus ignorance of the constitution especially by the german administration, about the fact that democratically elected members of parliament are under observation from the various intelligence services and stuff like that. Or, to say it more compact, about the beginning collaps of democracy and civil rights in europe.
question: what did hitler in 1938? he disarmed the jews in germany …
oh, did I mention that there are still shool-shootings in the EU? Here in germany, there is one every two or three years, and we have very strict gun laws. But there are almost no such incidents in switzerland, with a very liberal gun policy. or in israel, where teachers were allowed to carry weapons after one shoolshooting happening in 1974 …
btw. the murder rate in the UK rised significiantly after an almost-complete gun ban came into effect …
MUH: If you think you are being spied on in the EU, you should check out the laws in America. The Patriot Act basically overturned the 4th Amendment, and I don’t recall the right-wing ever making any fuss about it. If you think your guns will protect you from wiretaps, then I am not even sure where to start explaining how wrong that is.
The last school shooting I remember in Germany was Winnenden in 2009. Before that, I think there was shooting in 2002. So two shootings in ten years in a nation with a population of 80 million? Zero shootings would be better, of course, but we had 13 school shootings just last year in the US.
For all the publicity they receive, though, school shootings are not the measure of ineffective gun control. School shootings are rare events that can be done with a single gun, so statistics can’t be used to determine the cause.
Every year, approximately 100,000 Americans are victims of gun violence. Gun deaths and injuries in the U.S. usually occur quietly, without national press coverage, every day.
In 2010, 31,076 Americans died in gun homicides, gun suicides and unintentional shootings. This is the equivalent of about 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour.
Your best argument is that Switzerland has a liberal gun policy, but less gun violence? Do you really think that the laws in Switzerland are more liberal than in the US?
For example, in Switzerland, you need a permit to buy anything other than single-shot rifles. You need a background check no matter what. All guns are registered with the government. No one is allowed to carry a gun unless they have a permit, and you can’t get a permit unless you work in security. You are not allowed to own ammunition for your government-issued rifles, and you need a permit to buy ammunition for a private gun.
So yeah, lets adjust our gun laws to match Switzerland.
Your other example was Israel. The only problem is that Israel actually has strong gun restrictions and very low gun ownership rates, some of the lowest in the developed world.
Israel limits gun ownership to security workers, people who transport valuables or explosives, residents of the West Bank, and hunters. People who don’t fall into one of those categories cannot obtain a firearm permit. Moreover, Israel rejects 40 percent of firearm permit applicants, the highest rejection rate in the Western world. Both Switzerland and Israel require yearly (or more frequent) permit renewals to insure that the reasons are still applicable.
As far as your argument that Hitler disarmed the Jews, that is a over-simplification of what happened. The entire German population was mostly disarmed before Hitler came to power. Hitler allowed selected people to re-arm themselves, but prohibited Jews from doing so. Even if the Jews had been armed to the teeth, though, there would have still been a holocaust. It would have required more military action, but Hitler repeatedly showed that he was willing to do so.
Sorry I took so much time on this one post, but I keep hearing these same tired arguments over and over again. Each new person who discovers this board chimes in and repeats the same silly talking points from the NRA brochure.
There is one, and only one, argument against heavy regulation of guns: The Constitution protects gun ownership. That’s it.
The rest of the arguments are hopeless. You need it to defend your home? (You are five times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. ) You need it to overthrow a dictatorship? (That’s a video game you are thinking of.)
well, first a word about the shoolshootings in germany. there were shootings in 1964, 1983, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2009. If you add amok runs, the list is even longer: add 1985 and 2010 … after every one of them, politicians stricted or tried to stricten gun laws, but these shootings are happening even more frequently.
“In 2010, 31,076 Americans died in gun homicides, gun suicides and unintentional shootings. This is the equivalent of about 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour.”
Acceptable price for freedom and democracy. btw. if someone decides to commit suicide, who are you to abuse his dead for gun control? it’s his life and his decision what to do with it, i don’t see suicides with guns as a problem at all.
I read a statistic yesterday that claimes there is one defensive gun use every 13 seconds (in th US). Thats ~6.500 a day.
Btw. I said gun policy in switzerland is liberal, not “more liberal than in the US”. What your telling about carrying a gun there is not correct, that differs from canton to canton. And yes, there are background checks and stuff, but in fact nearly everybody _could_ own a gun. The administration has no right of denying a gun permit exept the reasons pointed out in the law – which don’t allpy for most switzers. it’s a fact that the gun-ownership-rate in switzerland is higher than in the US.
btw no, the german population wasn’t disarmed before hitler came to power. the rules were strict, but it was possible for a civilian to own a gun. the 1938-law led to massive gun confiscations.
Israel has gun regulations, but teachers who has served in the military can carry guns in shool, that applies to almost every teacher in israel.
The risk of shooting myself is not a valid argument for taking my right of self-defense away. i belief in self-responsibility, if someone shoots himself its his fault and no argument to denie my rights. if overthrowing a dictatorship is a video-game phantasie, then tell me: how could CH and the US manage to stay democracys for such a long time? while nearly every other democracy on the earth had become a dictatorship temporarily, permanent or is becoming one right now?
you’re right at one point: a gun won’t protect me from a trap wire. but it could protect “the people” of a country from a gouvernment who wants to use them excessively. that protection is not a individual one. without private gun ownership, the american revolution had never happend.
oh btw. i never read a NRA brochure ever. all i told you is just common sense and some facts.
MUH: On this board and others, people keep repeating the study from 1995 about how “Americans use guns in self-defense some 2.5 million times a year, or once every 13 seconds”. If you do a Google search, you will find millions of citations of this study posted online.
The trouble is that this claim of 2.5 million defensive gun uses is manifestly flawed and wrong. Let’s review the ways:
1) Even if it was true once, it isn’t any more. Some of the data was collected in 1981, near the very peak of the post-Vietnam War crime wave. There is no way that defensive gun use would remain fixed at one level even as criminal attempts are down by one-third.
2) 10% of Everyone who owns a gun, more or less, was included as an annual defensive gun use. The authors of the 1995 study aggregated 13 prior polls of gun users, most of which did not define what was meant by “use.” As the authors of the 1995 aggregation study themselves admitted: “The lack of such detail raises the possibility that the guns were not actually ‘used’ in any meaningful way. Instead, respondents might be remembering occasions on which they merely carried a gun for protection ‘just in case’ or investigated a suspicious noise in their backyard, only to find nothing.”
3) The figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses is supposed to represent the number of such uses per year. Yet none of the studies aggregated in the 1995 paper measured annual use. Most asked some version of the question, “Have you ever?” Two asked instead, “Have you within the past five years?” The authors of the 1995 study took those latter two surveys, multiplied the rate in the survey by the number of U.S. households, then divided by five to produce an annual figure.
Statistically, almost everyone lies to that question anyway. Gun owners lie because they want to justify the money they spend on guns. Some people lie to make themselves look more interesting. Some people lie because they have the date wrong. But almost everyone who reports a defensive gun use in the past year is lying.
The reason they asked “five years” is because when they asked “one year”, the rate dropped to nearly zero. People’s memory compresses exciting events into “the last five years” pretty easily, and makes it much easier to answer “yes” when they suspect the real answer is “no”.
I know someone who drew a gun once on a random guy he thought was going to rob him. (Odds are that random guy was just begging for money, but how would I know.) If you ask him if he has defended himself in the last five years, he will answer “yes”, even though I first heard the story eight years ago.
Even if people aren’t lying, they are thinking something like, “I still remember the night I warned off a prowler with my shotgun. When was that anyway? Three years ago? (Fourteen.) The answer to the question is ‘Yes.’ ”
4) Meanwhile, over in the world of hard numbers, the FBI counted an average of 213 justified firearm homicides per year over the period 2005-2010. If the figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses were any way close to accurate, it would imply that brandishing a gun in self-defense led to a fatality only 0.00852% of the time. The real world doesn’t work that way. In the real world, by the time an experienced gun owner draws a gun to defend himself, someone gets shot about 5% to 30% of the time. We don’t know what percent of those people die, but I am guessing it is a lot more than two out of every ten thousand.
More to the point, there are only nine million property crimes reported in the entire U.S. each year. Are we to assume that another two million would have taken place, if not for the presence of a gun in the house? And with two million people shooting at criminals, only a few hundred died? If so, then these people need to become better shots.
5) They want you to believe that “defensive gun use,” is a law-abiding citizen confronting a criminal aggressor. Yet the vast majority of homicides and assaults take place between people who know each other, not strangers. They frequently disagree over who is the criminal. When guns are produced by one party to a confrontation, the other party may back down, but that doesn’t mean it was “defensive”. The law might (easily) have considered the gun owner the “criminal” and the other as a “law-abiding citizen.”
When we hear “defensive gun use,” it is usually not a householder confronting a prowler. It is much more likely that we are talking about two acquaintances, both with some criminal history, getting into a fight, and one of them (or both) producing guns. This is not exactly a great argument for owning guns, it is a great argument for judging your friends more carefully.
Citizens beware!
The Declaration of Independence is NOT the foundation of law of the land. That lies in the United States Constitution. That has been repeatedly upheld in the courts, and yet it is often missed or dismissed.
I love the provisions and unalienable rights provided in the Declaration of Independence, but they are not the basis of our Constitutional law. The Liberals (politicians, etc.) try to play at our emotions by quoting the Declaration of Independence, but when push comes to shove, Liberals (ACLU, etc.) dismiss it because it is the Constitution that frames the legal system.
But then I say, by all means let them use the Declaration of Independence as part of our legal system! If we can accept the Declaration of Independence as part of our legal foundation, then we MUST include God in our legal system because of its inclusion in the Declaration of Independence. (Just my Christian perspective…)
My point is that the average Joe has no clue about what is where. Read your founding documents. Learn what they say and mean. You may be surprised.
Wayne is on our side 100%
No AWB Ban
No Hi Cap Mag Ban
No background checks on privates sales
He did not say anything against Democrats… he is against Obama.
We want Democrat Gun Owners on on our side.
Give the NRA your support.