JOHN KERRY DECLARED WAR on America’s firearms owners during last night’s debate, but you have to see past his smokescreen of Big Lies and obfuscation to recognize that fact, and even then you have to read not just between the lines but well beyond them to understand the real meaning of Kerry’s words. Here is exactly what he said:
I believe it was a failure of presidential leadership not to re-authorize the assault weapons ban.
I am a hunter. I'm a gun owner. I've been a hunter since I was a kid, 12, 13 years old. And I respect the Second Amendment and I will not tamper with the Second Amendment.
But I'll tell you this. I'm also a former law enforcement officer. I ran one of the largest district attorney's offices in America, one of the ten largest. I put people behind bars for the rest of their life. I've broken up organized crime. I know something about prosecuting.
And most of the law enforcement agencies in America wanted that assault weapons ban. They don't want to go into a drug bust and be facing an AK-47.
I was hunting in Iowa last year with a sheriff from one of the counties there, and he pointed to a house in back of us, and said, "See the house over? We just did a drug bust a week earlier, and the guy we arrested had an AK-47 lying on the bed right beside him."
Because of the president's decision today, law enforcement officers will walk into a place that will be more dangerous. Terrorists can now come into America and go to a gun show and, without even a background check, buy an assault weapon today.
And that's what Osama bin Laden's handbook said, because we captured it in Afghanistan. It encouraged them to do it.
So I believe America's less safe.
If Tom DeLay or someone in the House said to me, "Sorry, we don't have the votes," I'd have said, "Then we're going to have a fight."
And I'd have taken it out to the country and I'd have had every law enforcement officer in the country visit those congressmen. We'd have won what Bill Clinton won.
Kerry’s words are taken from the full text of the debate as transcribed by The Washington Post, available here (sorry; registration required).
And here, also word-for-word, is the proposed “renewal” measure. Its Senate counterpart was approved as an amendment to S-1805 (approved in summary only, no doubt all the better to conceal its intended impact), but the full text of the bill was already waiting in the wings in the House, and Kerry knew this when he so proudly voted for the ban last Spring. S-1805 was of course ultimately defeated despite Kerry’s media-bolstered effort, but its intent is still very much alive, and HR-2038 (or something even more draconian) is the model from which it would be reanimated under a Kerry presidency, which would regard vengeance against the "gun culture" (for its pivotal role in the Democrats' 2000 Electoral College loss) as a number one priority.
In this context, note how the bill Kerry supports includes a dramatic expansion of prohibited firearms. It would destroy forever the National Match program (and all other marksmanship-training programs by which civilians become familiar with current-issue military firearms) by totally outlawing civilian ownership of AR-15s, the semi-automatic-only, now-legal version of the military’s selective-fire M-16, with the ban including even AR-15 match rifles.
Note too that – since civilian marksmanship programs play a vital role in preparing younger Americans for military service and in maintaining among older Americans precisely the sort of armed population that discouraged the Japanese from invading the U.S. mainland in World War II – this is yet another manifestation of Kerry’s not-so-closeted pacifism, especially his passion for unilateral disarmament. In other words, he intends to disarm the U.S. population of “assault” weapons just as surely as he intends to disarm the U.S. military of its nuclear bunker-busters – the only tool that would be effective against the dug-in atomic-arsenal facilities of Iran and North Korea. The internationalist appeasers are applauding, the pacifists are cheering, and the feminists – who damn all weaponry as extensions of the hated penis – are turning back-flips.
Remember that – based on the most painstakingly objective legal and historical research – the true meanings of the Second Amendment and an “assault” weapons ban are mutually exclusive. One cannot support both. Thus Kerry shows himself to be, quite simply, not only a liar, but a liar who would wantonly leave America defenseless, both at home and abroad.
Moreover, Kerry is unquestionably still a radical leftist – his refusal to repudiate his youthful expressions of support for the Viet Cong and the Communist regime of North Vietnam establishes that fact beyond any doubt – and from my years of association with the Left, I know leftist deceptiveness (and especially the feminist skill at subversion) well enough to be deeply concerned about Kerry's domestic intentions in general. For all Kerry’s talk of protecting Constitutional liberties, I believe his anti-Americanism has metastasized from hostility to the Second Amendment to antagonism toward the entire Bill of Rights. I fear he will seize upon the Islamic threat (even as he disdains proper defensive measures against it) to impose on this nation tyrannies of a magnitude we have not seen since the Civil War – including tyrannies of political “correctness” such as will criminalize legitimate debate in ways we can hardly imagine.
Yet based on every indication (voter registration; the burgeoning radical-leftist vote; the steadily deteriorating polls; the propaganda wave financed by George Soros, Michael Moore and their ilk; and most of all the unprecedented and unprecedentedly aggressive bias of the media), it is ever more probable Bush will lose the election, and possibly very decisively – this last because of the unprecedented but unpolled yet agitated-to-maximum-cowardice-and-selfishness youth vote. God help us; as Winston Churchill said on the eve of the Battle of Britain, only a miracle can save us now.
Posted by Loren at October 14, 2004 05:03 AM