Armed and dangerous

Debra J. Saunders Tuesday, February 4, 2003

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IT’S MORE than a little ironic that many of the politicians who push for
stringent gun-control laws now want the federal government to sit on its
hands while a madman like Saddam Hussein sits on stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons.

Start with Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who has supported a ban on
Saturday night specials — a.k.a. “junk guns.”

Boxer wants the law to prohibit not just criminals but also working
mothers and fathers in the flats of Oakland, from buying Saturday night specials.
God forbid that poor folk should buy a gun they can afford in order to
protect their families.

In 1999, Boxer said that she supported more stringent gun control. “Here’s
my goal: I want to make sure that guns are kept away from criminals, from
people with mental problems, and from children,” she said.

But when it comes to protecting the world’s children from Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein — a criminal with mental problems who has violated U.N.
resolutions requiring him to give up his caches of weapons of mass destruction
– well, the record shows that Boxer voted against last year’s Senate
resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq to enforce the U.N.
resolutions.

Yet in the wake of Sept. 11 and in the face of a possible terrorist attack
with weapons of mass destruction, suddenly civil liberties are more
important to the anti-gun crowd.

Last month, the Senate voted to freeze funding for the Department of
Defense’s project to monitor public databases in search of suspicious patterns
of activity; those involving certain travel destinations and credit-card
purchases. Critics claimed that the Total Information Awareness program would
violate individual privacy and civil liberties. One Senator told the
Washington Times that TIA represented the most “far-reaching government
surveillance plan in history.”

Yet many of the politicians who voted against funding the program have
been unhesitating boosters of mandatory gun registration. They didn’t lose
much sleep over trampling on the privacy and civil rights of law-abiding gun
owners.

As Boxer once put it, “You register your car. What’s the problem
registering your gun?”

I’ll stipulate: The decision to place Iran-Contra scandal alumnus Rear
Admiral John Poindexter at the helm of the Dept. of Defense’s Total
Information Awareness program was a major blunder.

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the government isn’t likely to
learn much more about you under the Total Information Awareness program
than could be learned by a bank checking into your creditworthiness.

And there’s a big difference between culling from what is already public
information and creating a national database of personal information that
previously didn’t exist.

Before voting to defund TIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was a co-
sponsor of an early measure to study its possible incursions on personal
privacy and civil liberties. Yet Feinstein has been a longtime advocate of
prying federal gun-control registration.

In 1999, Feinstein vowed to introduce “legislation to provide for a
precise system of registration and licensing of every weapon in this country.”
Personal privacy? Civil liberties? Not for gun owners.

The anti-gun Democrats are ready to go after law-abiding gun owners, but a
law-breaking thug such as Saddam Hussein evokes from them only calls for
patience. They won’t address danger and evil looming on a global scale, nor
do they care much about the civil liberties of those who are gauche enough
to own guns.