The Democratic presidential candidates met and talked of massacres, murders, and gun control. With no shame, candidate after candidate spoke with the confidence of David that if only these new gun controls would be enacted, then we could avert the senseless horror of gun violence. That was the 2020 Gun Safety Forum staged Tuesday by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the March For Our Lives Organization, founded by a Hollywood producer and fronted by students.
It was a day removed from the second anniversary of the Las Vegas massacre when 58 people were killed and 851 were injured at the Route 91 Harvest music festival. The anecdotes of lives shattered started with Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak (D) who could not keep the tears back as he recalled the fateful day. It’s a wonder we don’t have full confiscation already as the American people are fed a consistent diet of this kind of rhetoric, or is propaganda a better term?
AR Does Not Mean Assault Rifle
Sisolak’s tears are not of the crocodile variety, however. The insincerity is the burlesque that these laws will somehow make a significant difference in homicides in the United States. Let’s recall that in 1959 when the AR-15 was invented, a young teen could walk down the street carrying one he bought via mail-order, all perfectly legal then under federal law. If the laws have only gotten more restrictive, how has gun violence increased so much? How has it become a “public health crisis” as so many of the candidates proclaim?
None offered answers to that question, but save Bernie Sanders, recovering from his stent installations, all the 2020 Dem contenders were there and ready to offer a fix for America: removing our civil rights. Announcing plans to ban AR-15s and weapons like them (any modern rifle, for instance), closing various loopholes, and requiring nationwide background checks and licensing were de rigueur. Closing loopholes must poll quite well because the list of them that needs to be closed for us to achieve peace keeps growing.
Bill of Rights Loophole
The latest imposition on our rights is the boyfriend loophole. This term of art is a new objection to a federal law that prohibits those convicted of domestic abuse from possessing firearms. The law – 18 U.S. Code § 922. – covers intimate partner violence. Who is an intimate partner? “[T]he spouse of the person, a former spouse of the person, an individual who is a parent of a child of the person, and an individual who cohabitates or has cohabited with the person.” These candidates want to add a category to the law – boyfriend/girlfriend. While that plays well with the students, their passion for the cause is only matched by their constitutional ignorance. It will be a problem for all people who demand due process and a fidelity to the Constitutional guarantee of protection from ex post facto laws.
Adding penalties to crimes already adjudicated is no position for a liberal to take – except on guns apparently. If guns are involved somehow, progressivism demands less due process, as demonstrated with red-flag laws and the proposed solution to this “loophole.” It also demands a higher tolerance for cognitive dissonance.
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