OBAMA CANNOT CURE THE JOBS PROBLEM SO HE SHIFTS TO GUN CONTROL!

Why Liberals Hate Guns 
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
01/14/2013 

         Why the left hates something – free enterprise, the “rich,” religion, Israel, America – says more about liberals than it does about the thing itself.

         So it is with the left’s endless, and increasingly manic, drive for more of what it disarmingly calls gun control, which many acknowledge to be a series of way stations on the road to total confiscation. In a 1995 CBS “60 Minutes” interview, Senator Diane Feinstein (D–Haight-Ashbury) confessed, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them – Mr. and Mrs. America turn ‘em all in – I would have done it.” What’s the difference between Hitler, Stalin and Feinstein – besides the facial hair?

         After the Newtown tragedy, and with a president who treats the Constitution as an annoying inconvenience, gun-grabbers are like gerbils on speed. The latest proposed attacks on the Second Amendment include: banning so-called assault weapons, banning large-capacity magazines, requiring a license to buy ammunition, preventing anyone under 21 from carrying a gun, requiring background checks for all gun sales (private and gun shows) and more stringent licensing of gun owners.

         In Connecticut, State Representative Stephen Dargan (D–New Haven) has introduced a bill to make public the names and addresses of all of the state’s 170,000 licensed gun owners. Why stop there? They could just select at random a few dozen gun owners a day, take them out and beat them to death.

         The object of anti-gun hysteria – Saturday Night Specials (“cheap and readily concealed,” in the liberal jargon of the day) or so-called assault rifles – shifts with opportunity. The root causes of the obsession remain the same.

         In the ‘80s, we were told that rifles weren’t the problem – that at least they had legitimate purposes, hunting and target practice, but handguns were only used to kill people. (Note: They do not consider self-defense a legitimate purpose.) Today, we’re told that rifles with large-capacity magazines (given the intimidating moniker “assault weapons”) are the real problem.

         The real problem is the leftist mentality – a high-caliber, rapid-fire weapon aimed at liberty and public safety.

         Here are the top five reasons the left hates guns, any gun, all guns:

         1. They need a way to show they care about crime – Rejecting personal responsibility (except for wife-beaters and junk-bond brokers), liberals oppose capital punishment, mandatory minimum sentencing, three-strikes-and-you’re- out laws, Miranda reform and anti-gang initiatives (other than Midnight Basketball). In the war on crime, gun confiscation is their silver bullet. Yep, they’re tough. They’re crime-fighters extraordinaire. (They should have capes!) They’ll see to it that grandpa doesn’t have a piece to defend himself from neighborhood burglars. In the meantime, gun control has no effect on the predators who stalk society. The absurdity of liberalism’s blind faith in controls on gun owners would be apparent if Nancy Pelosi called her next travesty, “A National Act to Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Hardened Criminals and Psychotic Killers.”

         2. They fear guns – Most opponents of the Second Amendment didn’t grow up around guns, don’t own guns, and have an inveterate fear of firearms. Their experience with guns is limited to movies and television, where, often as not, they’re wielded by thugs and terrorists.

         Because they refuse to admit the human capacity for evil, they act as if guns somehow determine behavior. (Instead of the finger pulling the trigger, the trigger exercises control.) Increasingly, the media talk about “people killed by guns,” as if the gun went out, picked a victim, and then plotted the time and place of his demise. Gun control is a form of sympathetic magic (voodoo crime control), where liberals exorcise their demons by projecting them onto inanimate objects, which they then punish by banishment.

         3. Elitism. Liberals despise gun owners (or the type of people they believe them to be) – During the 2008 campaign, when he thought he was speaking off-the-record, Dear Leader told a gathering of San Francisco donors that, in times of economic hardship, citizens of small-town America become bitter. Then “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

         What the president was saying, and I’m sure believes, is that someone who “clings” to guns is likely to be a religious fanatic, a racist and a xenophobe. Liberals imagine the average gun owner to be “poor, uneducated and easy to command (by the NRA),” as a 1993 Washington Post story described Christian conservatives. They have bad teeth, drive pickup trucks with gun racks and Confederate flag decals, belong to bowling leagues and watch NASCAR, professional wrestling and tractor pulls – with wives who are also their first cousins. They belong to churches which preach fire-and-brimstone, filled with congregants wearing their only pair of shoes.

         The reality is somewhat different. In 2011, Gallup said 47% of all adult Americans have a gun in their homes, the highest percentage since 1993. That’s a lot of pickup trucks and bad dental work.

         According to a 2012 Gallup survey, 56% of gun owners are non-white, 35% female, 67% have college or post-graduate degrees, 47% earn over $70,000 annually and 35% are Democrats. Most still have their own teeth. Even so, prohibitionists view gun owners as “them” – poor, dumb, racist and violence-prone – those that “we” need protection from.

         4. They’re control freaks, who believe that all problems can be solved by the omniscient power of state intervention – Not surprisingly, anti-gunners also believe that greed can be legislated away, that the answer to poverty is income-leveling, that people can be indoctrinated to love one another, that unemployment is due to insufficient regulation of the economy, and that human nature is infinitely malleable, clay waiting to be molded by the benevolent hand of the state.

         As with gun control, past experience counts for little.

         If after $1 trillion of deficit spending, unemployment is higher then when we started, claim they’ll be a delayed effect, or the problem otherwise would have been much worse, or we didn’t fully realize the damage done by the last administration. If it’s noted that Chicago – ruled by Democratic machines since time immemorial – had more than 500 homicides committed with guns in 2012, six times the national rate, (despite having some of the most rigid gun laws in the nation), say restraints aren’t tough enough, or guns are being brought in from neighboring states, or it’s a Republican plot to discredit Rahm Emanuel by running guns to Chicago gangs.

         5. Anti-gun agitprop is a way to shift attention from liberalism’s manifold failures – In America, as gun ownership has gone up over the past two decades, homicide rates have declined. In Britain, handguns were banned in 1996 and more than 160,000 collected from law-abiding citizens. Over the next two years, gun crimes increased 40%.

         The real factors impacting on crime include fatherless families, media glorification of violence, addiction, illegal immigration and the failure to deal realistically with the mentally ill.

         According to the Centers for Disease Control, 85% of children exhibiting emotional disorders, 80% of rapists and 70% of those in juvenile facilities come from fatherless families. (Liberals practically invented the phenomenon, with welfare “reform” of the ‘60s, which created single-parent households among the poor, and easy divorce.)

         Almost every serial killer was addicted to violent video games. (Democrats, who rely on campaign cash from Hollywood, are no more likely to challenge violent movies and games than they are to take on trial lawyers with tort reform.)

         The U.S. Bureau of Prisons reports that 26.4% of inmates in federal prisons are non-citizens. (Illegal immigration is the lifeblood of the Democratic Party. Last year, Obama bypassed Congress to amnesty millions of illegals by executive order.)

         Illicit drugs are involved in 60% to 80% of all arrests in the United States. Jared Lee Loughner, charged with shooting then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killing six others, was described by friends as a chronic pothead. (Liberals are in the forefront of efforts to decriminalize drug use, including “medical marijuana.")

         Likely mass murderers are akin to Congressional Democrats, in need of restraint to keep them from harming the public and themselves. James Holmes – who had fluorescent orange hair – told arresting officers in the Aurora, Colorado shootings that he was “the Joker.” Classmates said Jared Loughner was delusional. And Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School killer, was described by his brother as having a personality disorder. (In the ‘60s, the left championed de-institutionalization of mental patients. Liberals in the ACLU have adamantly opposed committing potential human time bombs, until they explode.)

         Gun control is a way to distract the public from the left's historic contributions to violent crime in America.

         Guns have given so much to liberals over the years – excuses for the abject failure of so many of the left’s pet panaceas – that they should build a monument to them: The Tomb of the Unknown Firearm. Guards would be unarmed, naturally.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website,DonFeder.com.