Yeah, Beware of Democrats bearing arms (or claiming they support the
right) when it’s simply a publicity stunt to get into office and then
ban guns.

—–Original Message—–
From: Jim Dexter ]
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 1:23 PM
To: K-Talk Forum
Cc: NightOut
Subject: FW: The Democrats’ Assault (on) Weapons

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10619

The Democrats’ Assault (on) Weapons
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 4, 2003

PONTEFICATIONS

THE CRACK OF A 12-GAUGE SHOTGUN BLAST split the chill autumn air above
the Iowa cornfield, and seconds later its victim lay twitching in its
death throes. Moments later the killer fired his weapon again, gunning
down a second victim.

Gun in hand, the killer came costumed in a bright orange vest, two
flannel shirts, blue jeans and duck boots from L.L. Bean – or from
Central Casting of his Hollywood image manipulators.

“He looked,” said my radio show producer Scott Saloway, “like Michael
Dukakis playing soldier in that tank to prove his manhood.”

As he stuffed the two innocent wild pheasants he had killed into his
bag, presidential candidate Senator John Forbes Kerry, D-MA, promised
the gaggle of reporters within earshot that he would eat what he had
killed when he returned to Boston.

This presumably was Kerry’s attempt to take on the nobility of Native
Americans or the like. He would kill animals, but he would honor these
creatures by making their bodies part of his own. He would kill not just
for thrills or sport, but for humble food as our ancestors did. Back in
Boston, of course, multimillionaire Kerry regularly feasts on pheasant
and caviar while claiming to represent the poor.

By saying he would devour the small birds he blasted from the sky, the
left-wing Senator should have offended not only the gun- controllers,
environmentalists and members of People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals among his supporters – but also the vegetarians.

In fact, however, professed radical feminists never wavered from Bill
Clinton despite his frequent sacrifices of virgins to his lust. And
Kerry’s supporters will not waver at this cruel and cynical act of
animal sacrifice to the god of his political ambition, which they will
see as a sop to blue collar saps who can still be fooled by such small
gestures into voting Democratic.

To working-class rednecks who enjoy hunting, Kerry demonstrated his
marksmanship, his skill in killing two birds with two shots. It reminded
them of an earlier, freer America in which “gun control” meant a steady
hand and a sharp eye.

To his leftist loyalists Kerry displayed his Marx-manship by mixing
these hunter pictures with his usual sermon about how he had hunted
since age 12 but never used an AK-47 assault rifle. This was Kerry’s sly
wink to the Left that as President he would, like Clinton before him,
use every gimmick he could to take guns away from those dumb rednecks.

“It’s not a mixed message,” said Kerry. “I’m just being where I’ve been
all my life. I believe in the Second Amendment in this country. But I
don’t believe that assault weapons ought to be sold in the streets of
America. Never believed it, don’t believe it now.”

But Senator Kerry knows that in politics pictures trump words. When you
conjure an image but say its opposite, the message that sticks in the
mind of the audience is the image, not the subtitles. (Leslie Stahl of
CBS “60 Minutes” still talks of her revelation of this wisdom, given by
a Reagan aide, after she had done her typical anti- Reagan news story
but had shown President Ronald Reagan looking handsome and confident in
front of a sea of American flags.)

The reason Kerry projected this image of himself as a gun-toting hunter
is the fate of Al Gore in 2000. Vice President Gore lost President Bill
Clinton’s State of Arkansas, his own home state Tennessee where voters
knew Gore best and rejected him, and in a state Democrats had
taken-for-granted: West Virginia, where blue collar union workers spend
weekends hunting and caring for their guns.

Gore had advocated even more gun control. The 2000 Democratic National
Platform said, among other things, “Now we must do even more. We need
mandatory child safety locks. We should require a photo license I.D., a
background check, and a gun safety test to buy a new handgun. We support
more federal gun prosecutions and giving states and communities another
10,000 prosecutors to fight gun crime.”

This extremist stance almost certainly cost him the presidency. Kerry,
with a long legislative record as a gun control supporter, now
desperately wants to straddle this issue in the public’s perception by
planting one foot – or at least one toehold – on the pro-hunter side.

Democratic strategists apparently had hoped that by going silent on the
hot-button gun issue, they could make it disappear from the public radar
screen without alienating leftist anti-gun support. Their internal polls
seem to have shown otherwise – that Clinton and Gore so imprinted the
Democratic Party with an anti-gun stigma that some candidates feel
compelled to counteract this image.

“It’s very important for us as Democrats to understand that where I come
from guns are about a lot more than guns themselves. They are about
independence,” said North Carolina Senator John Edwards. “For a lot of
people who work hard for a living, one of the few things they feel they
have any control over is whether they can buy a gun and hunt. They don’t
want people messing with that, which I understand.”

The Founding Fathers would have put it more starkly, in terms the
National Rifle Association or Gun Owners of America have used. Chairman
Mao was right: political power does grow out of the barrel of a gun.

Guns in the hands of the people are both the symbol and the reality of
ultimate power residing in their hands. What message has it sent,
therefore, that leftist Democrats are almost rabidly determined on any
pretext to take those guns, and with them the ultimate power of the
people away?

Fearful of the people, Democrats are changing their rhetoric, if not
their real agenda. In the U.S. Senate, Minority Leader Tom Daschle of
South Dakota and other Democrats are co-sponsoring a bill to shield gun
makers from lawsuits

(But in the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California opposed
reducing the time for background checks of gun buyers from three days to
one – a measure to make gun show purchases over a weekend
plausible.)

“Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, a longtime gun control advocate,” reports the
Washington Post, now “is careful to highlight his support for
law-
abiding gun owners.” Presidential candidate Gephardt has refused to give
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives more power to
investigate gun crimes. “They have enough,” he now says.

General Wesley Clark recently hired as his presidential campaign’s
communications director the former spokesman of Americans for Gun
Safety, which is busy trying to make gun control more acceptable by
repackaging the same old authoritarian “take power away from the people”
agenda.

The leader of the Democratic pack, especially in rural gun-loving key
political states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, is Howard Dean. As
Governor of rural Vermont, Dean chose not to support certain gun control
measures and won the endorsement of the NRA after taking the position on
a 1992 NRA questionnaire that he opposed “restrictions on semiautomatic
weapons.”

“I believe in the assault weapons ban and I believe in its
reauthorization, because deer hunters don’t need to have assault
weapons,” Dean says today as a Presidential candidate. “I believe in the
background checks we have in retail, and I believe they should be
extended to gun shows. But after that, I think every state ought to make
its own gun laws.”

New York and California “can have as much gun control as they want,”
Dean with disregard for Second Amendment rights recently told a New
Hampshire interviewer, but the federal government should not “inflict
regulations” on Montana, Vermont or other states where gun crimes are
rare.

Shotgun in hand, Senator Kerry on Saturday after his killing spree, with
pheasant blood from his publicity stunt still on his hands, fired back
at Dean. “You cannot favor federal gun control and allow the states to
do it their own way. That’s a complete contradiction,” said Kerry.

“If you can go buy a gun under one loophole in one state and then drive
it in your car secreted across a line to another state, the people in
those states are not safe,” said Kerry. “The governor can’t have it both
ways.”

Kerry, likewise, cannot pretend to be a pro-gun hunter for the TV
cameras when only days earlier he was being wildly applauded for his
strident gun control advocacy by the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun
Violence (the group formerly called Handgun Control).

“Our party will never be the choice of the NRA,” said Kerry at the
September 2, 2003, South Carolina speech kicking off his presidential
campaign, “and I’m not looking to be the candidate of the NRA.”

Senator Kerry was among those gun controllers who, as a pretext, sought
to empower the Consumer Product Safety Commission in regulating
handguns. What he could not kill outright, Kerry aimed to choke slowly
to death by ever tighter, ever more onerous regulations and lawsuits.

Bill Clinton won the support of Senator Kerry and a raft of other
far-
Left Democrats for his many attacks on the Second Amendment.

Let’s pause to remember just a few of the gimmicks and schemes Bill
Clinton, that so-called Southern Good Ole Boy, used to destroy the
rights of gun owners.

1. Clinton directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta to create a whole department to study guns and gun violence as
if they were a disease. This, like his effort to give regulatory power
over guns to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, were to lay the
basis for banning and restricting firearms as a public health and safety
measure. (The CDC study of “children” harmed and killed by guns became
notorious when scholars noticed that it had defined “children” as anyone
up to 22 years of age – this to jack up the statistics with dead and
wounded 17-21-
year-
olds, mostly victims of inner city drug turf wars, while pretending that
these were infants.) This could also open the door to thousands of
lucrative lawsuits by Democrat-supporting trial lawyers, cities, and
leftist groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP).

2. Clinton sought to outlaw possession of any firearm within 1,000 feet
(roughly one-fifth of a mile) of any school. But in most cities almost
everyplace is within that distance of a school, public or private.
Anti-gun activists even tried to invoke home schooled kids (whom they
otherwise despise) as a way of banishing guns from large areas of cities
and suburbs.

3. Clinton closed large amounts of federal land to firearms, whether for
target shooting or hunting.

4. Clinton diverted $45 million in taxes paid by gun owners from its
designated “sportsmen’s trust fund” to other uses, including funding of
an environmental group and turning previous hunting land into a wildlife
preserve where hunting was prohibited.

5. Clinton promoted laws that made those convicted of misdemeanors, not
just felonies as previously, ineligible to purchase firearms. He also
encouraged legislation to make those merely accused of violence – e.g.,
a man accused but not convicted of spousal abuse by his wife -
ineligible to buy a gun, a measure that where enacted made it illegal
for many serving police officers to buy firearms. (Democrats are
lobbying to restore voting rights to convicted felons on the theory that
these criminals – up to 85 percent of whom register Democrat – have
“paid their debt to society. But Democrats do not support returning
these felons’ Second Amendment right to keep, bear and purchase arms.)

6. Clinton demanded the outlawing of “cop-killer bullets” and firearms
able to penetrate bullet-proof vests. By definition, this would outlaw
virtually every hunting rifle and cartridge. Clintonistas also waged a
hate campaign in the leftist media against “Black Talon,” bullets
designed to fragment on impact. Depicted as ghoulish weapons to mutilate
those shot, the bullets in fact were designed, for safety, to break
apart and lose their energy when hitting any wall in a house instead of
continuing on into neighboring apartments or homes. This was typical of
the relentless Clinton hate propaganda against firearms.

7. Clinton banned imports of more than 50 models of modified “assault
rifles,” i.e., ordinary semi-automatic rifles stylized to resemble
military guns. He also restricted the clip capacity of any firearm to 10
bullets. (But after it gave huge donations to the Democratic Party, he
did allow Communist China to export one of its assault rifles into the
United States for sale.)

8. Clinton launched a full regulatory and IRS attack on one gun
manufacturer, Smith & Wesson, leaving it only two choices – to go
bankrupt or to sign an agreement with the Clinton Administration in
which the company complied with a wide range of the greatest regulatory
fantasies of gun controllers. Had Gore been elected President, this
outrageous political use of government tax and regulatory power would
likely have been used against all gun makers, one by one, to drive them
out of business.

9. Clinton signed into law a new gun control law that required
background checks for long guns as well as handguns – the first time
these hunter weapons had been so thoroughly regulated by the federal
government. This new law, however, included a provision requiring that
once background checks approved a gun buyer, the federal computer record
of the purchase be erased. Clinton quietly directed federal agencies to
violate this law by retaining electronic records of who had purchased
what gun – thereby illegally implementing de facto national gun
registration of new firearms purchasers. (Has President George W. Bush
completely eradicated these illegal records by Executive Order? If not,
why not?)

This list of Clinton depredations on gun owners, buyers, sellers and
makers could go on for dozens, even hundreds, of pages. It is
transparently clear that Bill Clinton and Al Gore wanted Americans
disarmed, all the better to make them submissive to and dependent upon
government. (The Clintons and Gore, meanwhile, gave anti-gun speeches
while surrounded by Secret Service agents armed with fully automatic
weapons. Why did they not lead by example and disarm their
bodyguards?)

But like Senator John Kerry, Bill Clinton was not averse to taking
reporters to photograph him hunting. To win one key vote to enact the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Clinton reportedly made a
deal to go duck hunting with Oklahoma Democratic Congressman Bill
Brewster, a board member of the NRA and co-chair of the Sportsman’s
Caucus in the House of Representatives.

Even Hillary Clinton, when running for Senate in upstate New York,
reportedly told an NRA member and then Newsday that she had hunted
ducks, but she declined to give details about where, when, with what
kind of shotgun, or how many birds she killed.

“We have Kerry boasting about how he shot woodchucks at age 8 and Dean
touting himself as an avid outdoorsman and sometime hunter,” wrote
Deborah Orin of the New York Post.

Governor Howard Dean, she notes, “signed a Vermont law to create special
deer and turkey seasons for kiddie hunters aged 15 and under,
saying: ‘This is a great bill. Any time we can get kids interested in
hunting, it’s a good thing.”

Cultures in which kids learn to handle guns responsibly and well are
best able to defend themselves and their rights. Those kids who grew up
shooting have been the backbone of America’s battlefield might. What
happens to our future when guns are outlawed in America, and only
outlaws have guns?

Senator Kerry used his sharp-shooting skills learned as a boy in
Vietnam, allowing him to kill instead of being killed. But Kerry is
right about one thing: his Democratic Party is not the party of the NRA
and Second Amendment rights. When you see Bill or Hillary Clinton or
John Kerry carrying a shotgun, remember that their target is not some
poor duck or pheasant. Their target is you.

Democrats might pretend to be gun-friendly to win your vote, but every
vote for any Democrat empowers the gun grabbers and controllers. Just as
you would be wary of Greeks bearing gifts (like the Trojan Horse),
beware of any Democrat bearing arms in a publicity stunt like Senator
John Kerry’s ritual killing of animals last weekend.