Assault Weapons Ban Effort DEAD!

[Roy]

This is some good news! I like the idea of enforcing the laws we alreay have on the books!

MSNBC.com


First 100 days: Assault weapons ban
Obama?s goal of permanently renewing the ban appears to be a longshot
By Pete Williams
Justice correspondent
updated 1:14 p.m. CT, Fri., April 24, 2009
WASHINGTON - Campaigning before a church congregation on Chicago?s South Side one Sunday in July 2007, Barack Obama said an epidemic of big city violence was ?sickening the soul of this nation.?

Among the potential cures, he said, was permanently reinstating a ban on assault weapons.

One-hundred days into his presidency, President Obama says it remains a goal. But it is one the White House has been forced to abandon.

Voices of agreement
President Obama and Vice-President Biden, ?support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent,? the White House website declares. Shortly after taking office, members of the Obama cabinet added their voices of agreement.

At his first news conference as attorney general, Eric Holder said, ?there are just a few gun-related changes what we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban.?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the idea during her trip to Mexico in late March. ?These assault weapons, these military-style weapons, don't belong on anyone?s street,? she said.

But the fire has gone out of President Obama?s goal of restricting the availability of firearms. ?I don't know of any plans,? said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, to seek an assault weapons ban from Congress.

Attorney General Holder admitted as much when asked, during a recent session with reporters, whether he expected any push for a ban this year to curb the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico.

His answer could have come straight from the National Rifle Association: ?I think what we're going to do is to try to, obviously, enforce the laws on the books.?

Support evaporated
Congress imposed a ban on what it called assault weapons in 1994, outlawing the sale and importation of 19 military-style weapons, copycat models with similar features, and high-capacity ammunition magazines. In a compromise with Republicans, the Democrats who controlled Congress agreed to let it expire in ten years unless it was renewed. By 2004, with Republicans in charge, support had evaporated.

Democrats again control Congress, and a Democrat is once more in the White House, the same conditions that allowed the ban to be imposed 15 years ago. But the make-up of Congress is different, with little appetite for restricting gun ownership.

The Senate?s majority leader is a westerner, Harry Reid of Nevada, where gun control is political poison. And though the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, comes from the more liberal San Francisco, she has shown no enthusiasm for reviving the assault weapons ban because of opposition among her colleagues.


Sixty-five House Democrats wrote Attorney General Holder in mid-March, saying they ?would actively oppose any effort to reinstate the 1994 ban? and predicting ?a long and divisive fight? if the administration tried to push for one. Many of them represent rural districts, where gun control is no more popular than in Nevada.


By the time President Obama made his trip to Mexico, he conceded the battle would be futile. ?None of us are any illusion that reinstating that ban would be easy.?

?What we're focused on is how we can improve our enforcement of existing laws,? he said.

Straw buyers
Enforcement of the nation?s gun laws is primarily the responsibility of ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Its agents and inspectors check to see that gun dealers obey laws governing sales. They look for evidence of ?straw buyers? ? people legally entitled to buy guns who then sell them to criminals or others who don't want any records tying them to a specific gun.

ATF says such buyers are responsible for a large proportion of guns that wind up in the hands of violent drug cartels in Mexico.

?These illegal purchases,? ATF?s William Newell told Congress last month, are ?a key source and supply of firearms for drug traffickers.?

The best way to improve enforcement of existing gun laws, said one veteran ATF agent, is to put more badges on the street.

?Give us more people to inspect gun dealers, looking for straw buyers, in the states where the guns smuggled into Mexico are coming from,? he says.


The number of ATF inspectors has remained remarkably flat in the past two decades, while support staffing has grown in other federal agencies, including the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration.

ATF had 764 inspectors in 1990. It has 771 today.

The number of ATF agents has risen 32% during the same period, but it is a comparatively small agency. ATF has 2,441 agents today, compared to the FBI?s 13,040 and the DEA?s 5,235.

It's no accident that the size of ATF?s inspections force has remained flat. The NRA has successfully fought efforts to expand inspections, claiming that licensed firearms dealers have been harassed.

?Despite its crime-fighting mission,? a recent report from the Congressional Research Service dryly observed, ?ATF?s business relationships with the firearms industry and larger gun-owning community have been a perennial source of tension.?

If new agents are hired, says the NRA?s Wayne LaPierre, ?You need to make sure they're directed to go after the bad guys, because owning firearms is a right in the United States, and what you don't want to do is harass law abiding people.?

The NRA is on a roll. The Supreme Court ruled last year that the Second Amendment protects an individual?s right of gun ownership, not merely the right of organized militias to arm themselves.


Unless the mid-term election brings a substantial change in the composition of Congress, an assault weapons ban has little chance of becoming law under Barack Obama, and ATF will not be able to count on a larger force of agents and inspectors.

Gun control, once considered a soccer-mom issue popular in suburban America, is again radioactive.


? 2009 msnbc.com Reprints
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30389664/



MSN Privacy . Legal
? 2009 MSNBC.com
UTROY
Proverbs 21:19 (why I hunt!)

 

[D13er]

All I can say to that is "watch the back door real close girls".....


great post/pic, thanks for sharing

JB

 

[Roy]

Hence the ammo shortage!


UTROY
Proverbs 21:19 (why I hunt!)

 

[3blade]

LAST EDITED ON Apr-25-09 AT 05:50PM (MST)[p]On his recent trip to Central America, President Barack Obama did more than cozy up to Marxist dictators; he also signed onto an international treaty that could, in effect, be used as backdoor gun control. It appears that Obama wants to use international treaties to do what congressional legislation is not able to do: further restrict the right of the American
people to keep and bear arms.

Obama is using the oft-disproved contention that "90% of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States" as the stated basis of his support for the international treaty he is promoting. The treaty is formally known as the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and
Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials (CIFTA) treaty. The Bill Clinton administration signed the treaty back in 1997, but the U.S. Senate has never ratified the treaty. Obama intends to
change that.

To date, 33 nations in the western hemisphere have signed the treaty. The U.S. is one of four nations that have yet to ratify it. According to one senior Obama administration official, passing the treaty is a "high
priority" for the President.

If ratified, the treaty would require the United States to adopt "strict licensing requirements, mark firearms when they are made and imported to make them easier to trace, and establish a process for sharing information between national law enforcement agencies investigating [gun] smuggling."

Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee promises to "work for its [the CIFTA treaty's] approval by the Senate."

Should the Senate ratify CIFTA, Americans who reload ammunition would be required to get a license from the government, and factory guns and ammunition would be priced almost out of existence due to governmental requirements to "mark" each one manufactured. Even the simple act of adding an after-market piece of equipment to a firearm, such as a scope or bipod,
or reassembling a gun after cleaning it could fall into the category of "illicit manufacturing" of firearms and require government license and oversight.

In addition, CIFTA would authorize the U.S. federal government (and open the door to international entities) to supervise and regulate virtually the entire American firearms industry. Making matters worse is the fact that, as a treaty, this Act does not have to be passed by both houses of Congress, nor is it subject to judicial oversight. All Obama needs to do in order to
enact this unconstitutional and egregious form of gun control is convince a Democratic-controlled Senate to pass it.

Obviously, the United Nations, from its very inception, has been one of the world's most ardent gun control proponents. As anyone who has ever driven by the U.N. building in New York City knows, a huge statue of an American-made revolver with its barrel twisted in the shape of a pretzel greets every visitor. The CIFTA treaty is one of the U.N.'s pet projects in order to
achieve this long-held ambition.

Of course, Obama is a longtime liberal radical when it comes to the Second Amendment. As a senator, he voted against the Second Amendment at every opportunity. He has never seen a piece of gun control legislation that he did not support. And as I have said before in this column, gun control is high on the list of priorities for the newly elected President Barack Obama.

For Obama to intimate that 90% of the firearms used by Mexican drug cartels come from the United States reveals either a truly dishonest and deceptive mind or a totally misinformed and na?ve one. Many studies have thoroughly debunked the 90% myth, including one by William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott
in a recent Fox News report. According to these researchers, the real number is closer to 17%.

According to La Jeunesse and Lott, Mexican drug cartels, which control billions of dollars, obtain the overwhelming majority of their guns from the Black Market, Russian crime syndicates, South America, China, Guatemala, and even from the Mexican army.

In fact, Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar: AK-47s from China; fragmentation grenades from South Korea; shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc dealers; assault weapons from China; and explosives from Korea--just to name a few sources.

In addition, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo, more than 150,000 Mexican soldiers have deserted in just the last six years. The vast majority of them took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.

And please do not forget that corruption within the Mexican government is rampant. Many news sources have covered stories of how drug cartels bribe Mexican officials. An article in the New York Times last year reported, "One of Mexico's most notorious drug cartels made huge cash payments to officials in the Mexican attorney general's office in exchange for confidential
information on anti-drug operations . . . the cartel might have had an informant inside the American embassy."

The Mexican drug cartels control a multi-billion dollar enterprise that has more than enough resources to obtain planeloads of weapons from all over the world. For Obama to assert that 90% of the Mexican drug cartels' firearms
come from the United States is a bald-faced lie! Again, either Obama is stupid and na?ve or he is deliberately lying to the American people in order to "sell" the CIFTA treaty to the U.S. Senate. I think we all know that Mr. Obama is anything but stupid and na?ve.

Read more about the CIFTA treaty at

http://gunowners.org/a042109.htm

http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com

 

[Bulzeye]

The Mexican drug cartels are for the most part using fully automatic weapons like the AK-47 and M-16. Not the semi auto versions that you can buy at the local US gun shop. While it is possible to buy and own fully auto weapons here in the US it's highly regulated and very expensive. I'm sure there are a few US semi auto weapons that are sold south of the border each year, but it's doubtful that they are getting very many fully auto weapons from the US.

For BO to say or even suggest that they're getting 90% from the US is a bold face lie! Besides, why should the law abiding gun owners in the US be punished for Mexico's inability to subdue political coruption and the drug cartels?

 

[Deadred7o7]

"The Mexican drug cartels are for the most part using fully automatic weapons like the AK-47 and M-16. Not the semi auto versions that you can buy at the local US gun shop."


Well at least someone knows what "Shall not be Infringed" means.




Kyle
"If it moves shoot it again"

 

[RELH]

During my 30 years of law enforcement, I grew to have a very deep distrust of the ATF agency based on the way they did business and outright lying to the public and even Congress.
That 90% figure that Sen. Pelosi and Reid likes to throw around came from the ATF.
The Mexican Attorney General has stated that they have seized approx. 270,000 firearms from drug cartels. Of those 270, 000 they were only able to trace 16,000 weapons and of those 16,000 weapons, 90% were traced to the U.S. They were able to trace our weapons due to the stringent control we have on gun makers to provide the data on every gun made by them. I am willing to bet that a lot of those guns were stolen guns that ended up being sold in Mexico by drug dealers that trade heavly in stolen firearms.
When you crunch the numbers there was only about 16% that came from the U.S. The big majority were from communist block countries.
This has been pointed out to the major news agencies, but they still allow the anti gun libs in Congress to spout that 90% figure without calling them on the true facts.
This should tell everyone who's side most of our news agencies are on, and it is not pro gun or pro truth.

RELH