Gun Control with a Happy Face

(Via Ipse Dixit)

PrudentPolitics.com carries an excellent piece by Howard Nemerov, entitled Gun Control and the Next Big Lie.

A taste:

Get ready for gun control with a happy face. Gun banners pretend to no longer want to confiscate your firearms. They are concerned about safety. With all those firearms on the streets, now that 37 states have Shall-Issue Concealed Carry laws, the gun banners want to know who has them and where they are at all times. In their hoplophobia (irrational fear of guns) they believe that anybody carrying a gun is a hair’s breadth away from becoming a homicidal maniac or that demon-possessed guns will leap out of holsters and fire of their own volition. Of course, the only way to keep track of all those guns is to have a registry, and history has shown that registration leads to confiscation, which leads to loss of other civil rights. So we come full circle to a new confiscation scheme.

RTWT. It's worth your time.

I'd like to remind you of two things when you read this. First, the Violence Policy Center listed as one of its reasons for supporting a ban on "assault weapons":

Efforts to stop restrictions on assault weapons will only further alienate the police from the gun lobby.

Until recently, police organizations viewed the gun lobby in general, and the NRA in particular, as a reliable friend. This stemmed in part from the role the NRA played in training officers and its reputation regarding gun safety and hunter training. Yet, throughout the 1980s, the NRA has found itself increasingly on the opposite side of police on the gun control issue. Its opposition to legislation banning armor-piercing ammunition, plastic handguns, and machine guns, and its drafting of and support for the McClure/Volkmer handgun decontrol bill, burned many of the bridges the NRA had built throughout the past hundred years. As the result of this, the Law Enforcement Steering Committee was formed. The Committee now favors such restriction measures as waiting periods with background check for handgun purchase and a ban on machine guns and plastic firearms. If police continue to call for assault weapons restrictions, and the NRA continues to fight such measures, the result can only be a further tarnishing of the NRA's image in the eyes of the public, the police, and NRA members. The organization will no longer be viewed as the defender of the sportsman, but as the defender of the drug dealer.

I submit to you that now they have added "liberalized Concealed Carry" to the list of "dividing issues."

I'd also like to remind you that it was Broward County, Florida, Sheriff Ken Jenne who hoodwinked CNN's reporter John Zarella over the differences between pre-ban and post-ban "assault weapons" I reported on last May. For some reason, Florida seems to be a hotbed of anti-gun activity, perhaps because Florida is where the push for "liberalized" Concealed Carry began.

I've noted here on numerous occasions that the opposition has (with the notable exception of the Violence Policy Center) abandoned the "gun control" platform for the "gun safety" one, though both mean to them precisely the same thing: Gun ELIMINATION.