The Gathering Storm Over Guns
by Wayne LaPierre
05/01/2009


Barely 100 days into the new Obama-Biden administration, ominous storm clouds are already gathering over your most fundamental right as a free citizen: Your right to own a gun to protect yourself, your family and your freedom.

Betraying all their campaign promises to protect your right to keep and bear arms or your freedom to hunt, the Obama administration has put its chess pieces in place and set in motion its strategy to do just the opposite.

Throughout the West Wing, they’ve appointed a cabinet composed of some of the most experienced and politically effective gun grabbers Washington, D.C. has ever seen.


Meanwhile, powerful members of the U.S. Senate and House have admitted that gun bans remain a top objective, but only “when the time is right.” Which really means “when some awful tragedy conveniently captures national attention.”

Yes, Barack Obama had an extensive and extreme anti-gun voting record as an Illinois senator. Yes, he called for gun bans during the Democratic presidential primaries. But once he won his party’s nomination, Obama reversed that spin and spent millions showering key states with flyers promising voters that he would never try to take their guns. But after winning the presidency, those pro-freedom showers dried up overnight.


Pre-Election Promises Become Post-Election Perfidy

Barely 100 hours after winning the election, the Obama-Biden transition team posted an Internet web page outlining its ambitious anti-gun agenda.

Its legislative goals included permanently reinstating the Clinton gun bans, banning sale or transfer of firearms between private citizens (at gun shows and presumably anywhere else), and requiring that handguns be “childproofed” through nonexistent technology that, even if developed, would make them prohibitively expensive and far less reliable.

American voters immediately and rightfully cried foul. That’s when Obama and Biden -- who’d bragged, “I’m the guy who originally wrote the assault weapons ban” -- quickly deleted that web page from the Internet.

But they swiftly set about assembling an anti-gun all-star cabinet to achieve all that and more. Consider just a few of the gun-ban extremists who populate Obama’s inner circle.

Obama Cabinet Stacked with Anti-Gun Veterans

* Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel worked as President Bill Clinton’s point man on gun control. When Clinton administratively outlawed imports of many firearms and accessories, Emanuel bragged, “We’re bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns.”

After leaving the Clinton White House, Emanuel went on to make gun bans his stock in trade as a congressman from the anti-gun mecca of Illinois. There, he co-sponsored a bill to extend and expand the Clinton gun ban and repeatedly voted to expose America’s firearms industry to bankrupting, politically motivated lawsuits.

* Attorney General Eric Holder served as deputy attorney general under Clinton, where he tried to make you get a government-issued license to exercise your Second Amendment rights.

He also pushed mandatory waiting periods, “one-gun-a-month” rationing of your rights, mandatory trigger-lock regimes and bans on ammunition magazines.

As signer of a “friend of the court” brief defending the D.C. gun ban before the U.S. Supreme Court, Eric Holder believes that -- as his own Justice Department under Janet Reno asserted -- “the Second Amendment does not extend an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

* Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advocated gun bans long before she even assumed elective office. She helped organize the 2000 “Million Mom March,” and said of the protesters, “The moms have it right: we have to license and register all handguns.”

During her first run for the U.S. Senate, Clinton proposed that gun purchasers should be required to pass tests to obtain licenses; that all gun sales be recorded in a national registry; that new guns be logged in a “ballistic database”; that the Consumer Products Safety Commission regulate guns; and that gun purchasers be limited to one per month.

* Education Secretary Arne Duncan was named “Man of the Year” by the Illinois gun-ban lobby last year, and upon his appointment in the White House, the Brady Campaign called him a “wonderful selection” for the job. Their praise is telling.

As the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan last year bused Chicago schoolchildren to the state capital -- at taxpayer expense -- to serve as props for lobbyists pushing gun control in the state. He urged schools to have students submit entries in the annual Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence “Essay, Poetry and Art Contest.”

* Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein has a long record as a radical animal “rights” advocate. In a speech at Harvard, Sunstein said, “We ought to ban hunting, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It’s time now.”

Sunstein has also said that livestock and wild animals should have legal “rights” and be permitted to file lawsuit; that current uses of animals are akin to “human slavery”; and that meat eating should be eliminated.

An Anti-Gun Strategy in Search of Tragedy

Though the administration and Congress haven’t publicly put gun control legislation at the top of their agenda yet, they’ve admitted they’re just waiting for the right moment to pounce.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said so April 12 on “60 Minutes.”

When “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Feinstein about the new gun bans, Feinstein allowed that she “wouldn’t bring it up now.”

But when pressed whether she would bring it up at all, Feinstein vowed, “I’m going to pick the time, and the place. No question about that.”

Despite Obama’s campaign promises and his stealthy approach to gun control since then, Feinstein made it clear on “60 Minutes” that she and her anti-gun allies are arrayed from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.

In her interview, Leslie Stahl asked, “Has anybody -- the Democratic leadership in the Senate, or anybody from the Obama administration -- looked at you and said, ‘Back off’?”

“No,” Feinstein admitted. “Nobody said a word to me.”

Like all anti-gun strategists, they’re waiting for the perfect tragedy to exploit. As of press time, the drug-fueled violence devastating Mexico appears to be it.

At a February news conference, Attorney General Holder plainly blamed Americans’ Second Amendment rights for mayhem in Mexico:

“[T]here are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make,” Holder said, “and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit at a news conference in Mexico City, claiming, “We know very well that the drug traffickers are armed by the transport of weapons from the United States.”

U.S. Senator **** Durbin (D–Ill.), the senate’s second most powerful Democrat, lamented that “an iron river of guns from the United States arms Mexican drug cartels to the teeth,” and he blamed American gun shows for the violence.

Make no mistake: New gun bans and restrictions are very much at the top of the agenda in the White House and Congress -- even if they don’t admit it yet.

If you want to keep your most fundamental rights as a free citizen, get ready. The onslaught is planned, prepared and unprecedented. And it’s coming.

Get informed and get involved. Join the NRA. Keep up with all the news on your rights through NRAnews.com on the Internet or Sirius satellite radio Patriot channel 144.

We must stand united and ready for this fight. Considering the players, their power, their promoters and their war chest, this will be the toughest and most definitive contest to preserve firearm freedoms in America for generations to come.

Mr. LaPierre is Executive Vice President and CEO of the National Rifle Association of America.

TOO MUCH POLITICS, TOO MANY LAWS, TOO FEW FREEDOMS..

Washington.... YOU'RE FIRED!

I assume you have heard about CIFTA? Below is a short excerpt form the much longer letter available at url below or many other places on the web. This is a very real thing and the major new outlets are reporting on Obama's desire for the Senate to ratify this.
http://www.gunlaws.com/GunLawUpdate5-CIFTA.htm

Oh yes... But Ive been told its just a fantasy because the messiah said he doesn't want to take anyones guns...

He didn't want to take over banks or car companies either. So he says.

Barack Obama on Gun Control
Democratic nomine for President; Junior Senator (IL)




Ok for states & cities to determine local gun laws
Q: Is the D.C. law prohibiting ownership of handguns consistent with an individual’s right to bear arms?
A: As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it.

Q: But do you still favor the registration & licensing of guns?

A: I think we can provide common-sense approaches to the issue of illegal guns that are ending up on the streets. We can make sure that criminals don’t have guns in their hands. We can make certain that those who are mentally deranged are not getting a hold of handguns. We can trace guns that have been used in crimes to unscrupulous gun dealers that may be selling to straw purchasers and dumping them on the streets.

Source: 2008 Philadelphia primary debate, on eve of PA primary Apr 16, 2008

FactCheck: Yes, Obama endorsed Illinois handgun ban
Obama was being misleading when he denied that his handwriting had been on a document endorsing a state ban on the sale and possession of handguns in Illinois. Obama responded, “No, my writing wasn’t on that particular questionnaire. As I said, I have never favored an all-out ban on handguns.”
Actually, Obama’s writing was on the 1996 document, which was filed when Obama was running for the Illinois state Senate. A Chicago nonprofit, Independent Voters of Illinois, had this question, and Obama took hard line:

35. Do you support state legislation to:
a. ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns? Yes.
b. ban assault weapons? Yes.
c. mandatory waiting periods and background checks? Yes.

Obama’s campaign said, “Sen. Obama didn’t fill out these state Senate questionnaires--a staffer did--and there are several answers that didn’t reflect his views then or now. He may have jotted some notes on the front page of the questionnaire, but some answers didn’t reflect his views.”

Source: FactCheck.org analysis of 2008 Philadelphia primary debate Apr 16, 2008

Respect 2nd Amendment, but local gun bans ok
Q: You said recently, “I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns.” But you support the D.C. handgun ban, and you’ve said that it’s constitutional. How do you reconcile those two positions?
A: Because I think we have two conflicting traditions in this country. I think it’s important for us to recognize that we’ve got a tradition of handgun ownership and gun ownership generally. And a lot of law-abiding citizens use it for hunting, for sportsmanship, and for protecting their families. We also have a violence on the streets that is the result of illegal handgun usage. And so I think there is nothing wrong with a community saying we are going to take those illegal handguns off the streets. And cracking down on the various loopholes that exist in terms of background checks for children, the mentally ill. We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment and people’s traditions.

Source: 2008 Politico pre-Potomac Primary interview Feb 11, 2008

Provide some common-sense enforcement on gun licensing
Q: When you were in the state senate, you talked about licensing and registering gun owners. Would you do that as president?
A: I don’t think that we can get that done. But what we can do is to provide just some common-sense enforcement. The efforts by law enforcement to obtain the information required to trace back guns that have been used in crimes to unscrupulous gun dealers. As president, I intend to make it happen. We essentially have two realities, when it comes to guns, in this country. You’ve got the tradition of lawful gun ownership. It is very important for many Americans to be able to hunt, fish, take their kids out, teach them how to shoot. Then you’ve got the reality of 34 Chicago public school students who get shot down on the streets of Chicago. We can reconcile those two realities by making sure the Second Amendment is respected and that people are able to lawfully own guns, but that we also start cracking down on the kinds of abuses of firearms that we see on the streets.

Source: 2008 Democratic debate in Las Vegas Jan 15, 2008

2000: cosponsored bill to limit purchases to 1 gun per month
Obama sought moderate gun control measures, such as a 2000 bill he cosponsored to limit handgun purchases to one per month (it did not pass). He voted against letting people violate local weapons bans in cases of self-defense, but also voted in2004 to let retired police officers carry concealed handguns.
Source: The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson, p.148 Oct 30, 2007

Concealed carry OK for retired police officers
Obama voted for a bill in the Illinois senate that allowed retired law enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons. If there was any issue on which Obama rarely deviated, it was gun control. He was the most strident candidate when it came to enforcin and expanding gun control laws. So this vote jumped out as inconsistent.
When I queried him about the vote, he said, “I didn’t find that [vote] surprising. I am consistently on record and will continue to be on record as opposing concealed carry. This was a narrow exception in an exceptional circumstance where a retired police officer might find himself vulnerable as a consequence of the work he has previously done--and had been trained extensively in the proper use of firearms.“

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that another theory came forward about the uncharacteristic vote. Obama was battling with his GOP opponent to win the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Source: From Promise to Power, by David Mendell, p.250-251 Aug 14, 2007

Stop unscrupulous gun dealers dumping guns in cities
Q: How would you address gun violence that continues to be the #1 cause of death among African-American men?
A: You know, when the massacre happened at Virginia Tech, I think all of us were grief stricken and shocked by the carnage. But in this year alone, in Chicago, we’ve had 34 Chicago public school students gunned down and killed. And for the most part, there has been silence. We know what to do. We’ve got to enforce the gun laws that are on the books. We’ve got to make sure that unscrupulous gun dealers aren’t loading up vans and dumping guns in our communities, because we know they’re not made in our communities. There aren’t any gun manufacturers here, right here in the middle of Detroit. But what we also have to do is to make sure that we change our politics so that we care just as much about those 30-some children in Chicago who’ve been shot as we do the children in Virginia Tech. That’s a mindset that we have to have in the White House and we don’t have it right now.

Source: 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum Jul 12, 2007

Keep guns out of inner cities--but also problem of morality
I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manfuacturer’s lobby. But I also believe that when a gangbanger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels someone disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do ew need to punish thatman for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there’s a hole in his heart, one that government programs alone may not be able to repair.
Source: The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, p.215 Oct 1, 2006

Bush erred in failing to renew assault weapons ban
KEYES: [to Obama]: I am a strong believer in the second amendment. The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that we should pass a law that prevents law abiding citizens from carrying weapons. You end up with a situation where the crook have all the guns and the law abiding citizens cannot defend themselves. I guess that’s good enough for Senator Obama who voted against the bill that would have allowed homeowners to defend themselves if their homes were broken into.
OBAMA: Let’s be honest. Mr. Keyes does not believe in common gun control measures like the assault weapons bill. Mr. Keyes does not believe in any limits from what I can tell with respect to the possession of guns, including assault weapons that have only one purpose, to kill people. I think it is a scandal that this president did not authorize a renewal of the assault weapons ban.

Source: Illinois Senate Debate #3: Barack Obama vs. Alan Keyes Oct 21, 2004

Ban semi-automatics, and more possession restrictions
Principles that Obama supports on gun issues:
Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.
Increase state restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms.
Require manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with firearms.
Source: 1998 IL State Legislative National Political Awareness Test Jul 2, 1998

Voted NO on prohibiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers.
A bill to prohibit civil liability actions from being brought or continued against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition for damages, injunctive or other relief resulting from the misuse of their products by others. Voting YES would:
Exempt lawsuits brought against individuals who knowingly transfer a firearm that will be used to commit a violent or drug-trafficking crime
Exempt lawsuits against actions that result in death, physical injury or property damage due solely to a product defect
Call for the dismissal of all qualified civil liability actions pending on the date of enactment by the court in which the action was brought
Prohibit the manufacture, import, sale or delivery of armor piercing ammunition, and sets a minimum prison term of 15 years for violations
Require all licensed importers, manufacturers and dealers who engage in the transfer of handguns to provide secure gun storage or safety devices
Reference: Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act; Bill S 397 ; vote number 2005-219 on Jul 29, 2005

http://www.ontheissues.org/Barack_Obama.htm

Isn't it funny how he knew the serious problem with guns all along and has held to the fact something needs to be done. He has not been advocating a free for all with guns never.

so this was BEFORE he became president????

HAHAHAHA!!!!!! That's good stuff...

They can take my guns from my cold dead hands...

A wise man would look at disarming the real criminal instead of us.

Let's just hope, BHO is not caught out somewhere in a dangerous situation. He could have maybe depended on an armed citizen saving his life

pfft...he has the secret service

The criminals fill their jails. Imagine how much money is made and spent by putting people in jail. Its a cash cow. The more laws they pass the more cows they can put in the pens.

How many gang-bangers go to their local gun shop to purchase weapons? Anyone wanting to commit a crime with a gun and get away with it going to be smart enough not to go to the local gun shop and buy the gun legally. How are gun control laws going to stop criminals who already buy their guns illegally? Are the going stop the black market? No. Anyone with a half a brain can see that. Well the that only leaves one option, these laws are only for those legally purchase and legally use guns.

That is absolutely correct. Alcohol was banned and it spawned organized crime. The people most likely to commit crimes will always be able to get a weapon from some criminal looking to make a truck load of cash.

ding ding ding ding....you WIN!!!!!

Nope. That is exactly what a right means. And nowhere in constitution there is a mention of socialist "zoning law".

Is this Obama dude REALLY all that smart as he is being sold as?

wasn't he a professor of constitutional law????

Obama?

No, he has not done ANYTHING in his whole life.

Obama isn't going to take away the guns. Even if for some bizarre reason he would, SCOTUS won't let him.