Up-date thoughts on the "Gun Debate"

In the world of American firearms and gun rights, the terms "executive order" (Biden for Obama) and "confiscation" (Andrew Cuomo) are hot fire-words in what's now a great big American stretch of smoldering pine needles.

And passions are certainly burning.  

The designs of Biden/Obama and Cuomo and their allies on gun issues face a great big mountain:  The Second Amendment and, even more deeply than that, a vast number of American gun owners -- and no small number of civil libertarians as well.

The hastily convened "Biden panel" to find solutions to "gun violence" is obviously contrived ritualistic window-dressing.  I commented the other day that "background checks" and related Federal controls at private gun shows would lead to background checks on sales between next door neighbors.  And that's exactly what Joe Biden said yesterday -- universal background checks on any -- any -- firearms transactions in the USA. 

One of the more curious things that keeps recurring is the apparent unwillingness -- or ignorance -- of many of the gun control people to recognize, via the very significant 2008 USSC Heller decision, the long overdue clarification of the Second Amendment as a full member of the Bill of Rights.  That failure to so recognize is legion  -- even among some of the media pundits on MSNBC; and the ardent English supporter of gun control -- Piers Morgan -- seemed unaware of the court decision when a firearms advocate brought it up in discussion.

Eric Holder is obviously aware of that decision and the Second Amendment.  But he could comment, apparently yesterday, that a change in attitude toward guns is needed on the part of the American people.  He drew the cigarette smoking analogy.  Well, aside from the fact that that's classic "apples and oranges," firearms ownership is a clear Constitutional right -- to say nothing of its very deep roots in American culture.  (And, BTW, I have never known a Native person who supported bureaucratic "gun control.")

Virtually none of the anti-gun people and groups appear to know anything of substance about firearms, gun rights, hunting and shooting sports generally, or the realities of the Second Amendment.  Most of them, and certainly Barack Obama, have never faced personal and lethal danger.

So it seems that the anti-gun and anti-gun rights forces now have on their hands one hell of a Tar Baby.

During the Clinton witch hunt against guns and firearms rights, NRA membership climbed from one and a half million to over three million.  Before Obama's anti-gun speech a month ago, NRA membership was well over four million.  Its membership has now increased 100,000 since that Obama speech and it's continuing to climb very rapidly.  Other firearms rights groups are quickly expanding.

And Barack Obama et al. have certainly placed a great many legislators, most of them Democrats, in growing political jeopardy.  Gun people have very long memories.  The Clinton witch hunt led to the virtual wipeout of Democrats in Congress in 1994 and hung over Gore in 2000 and, to a large extent, Kerry in 2004.

H

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

I have always lived and worked in the Borderlands.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE (Mississippi et al.):
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in Fall 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.) 

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my very well-reviewed 
"Organizer's Book" -- the inside story of the massive Jackson
Mississippi Movement, the murder of Medgar Evers, and more.
And with my new and very substantial introduction:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm