Gun control entirely unacceptable
by Sam Hanna, Jr. - posted Wednesday, January 30th, 2013 @ 4:54 pm

Led by the chief provocateur, Barack Obama, perhaps the Left paid attention to a startling remark offered some time ago by the president's former chief of staff.

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before," said Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel is mayor of Chicago, Ill. these days. More than 500 individuals were murdered in the Windy City in 2012. It was a record, far outpacing New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans, cities that are known for violent criminal activity.

Chicago also sports some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Not quite as stringent as the ones in Connecticut where 20 children and six adults were shot to death in cold blood last month, but the gun-control laws in Chicago are far beyond anything lawmakers have ever entertained in earnest in the Deep South where gun ownership is second nature.

But it was along the Emanuel vein, so to speak, that Obama, with the Left snapping at his heels, charged Vice President Joe Biden to lead a blue-ribbon panel to craft proposals aimed at curtailing gun violence. Obama unveiled the committee's work earlier this month at a White House gathering.

The Biden committee, among other things, recommended a ban on assault rifles, including the weapon that a deranged young man supposedly used in the schoolhouse shooting in Newtown, Conn., the Bushmaster AR-15. Extended ammunition clips should go by the wayside, too, the Biden committee declared.

Not one to pass up an opportunity to grandstand for his friends in the national media, Obama used the White House gathering on Jan. 16 to announce his signing of 23 executive orders that he said were necessary for the federal government to stem violence committed with guns.

Obama's executive actions included ordering federal agencies to make more data available for background checks, appointing a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and directing the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence. Though the president's executive orders were not necessarily an infringement upon one's constitutional right to bear arms, they were troublesome because Obama bypassed the Congress and carried out his wishes through executive action.

Without a doubt, Obama utilized his prerogative to issue executive orders because he fully understands it would be more than a bit difficult to convince the Congress – particularly the U.S. House of Representatives – to approve gun-control legislation. That's not the case because the U.S. House is out of touch with the American people, which the Left claims, but because enough members of the U.S. House understand that disarming the populace represents the first step in creating a subservient nation.

Though the Left takes pleasure in mocking believers of the 2nd Amendment for correctly pointing out that people – not guns – commit crimes, the Left seems to have never understood the obvious. That is, no gun-control legislation of any sort will prevent a criminal from securing a gun to commit a crime.

Make no mistake, there are steps a civilized society can take to curtail violence. Putting God back in the classroom and stationing an armed police officer at the front door of schools would be a good start. Conducting extensive background checks to possibly prevent a mentally challenged individual from buying a gun is acceptable, too.

It is entirely unacceptable, though, to prohibit any law-abiding citizen from purchasing and possessing a gun of any kind.