Republican reaction over President Obama’s intent to work on bringing about commonsense changes to the current gun laws is ridiculous…and predictable. No one does freak-out better than the GOP’s current crop of kooks. In this installment, Republicans inform us that President Obama a) should be impeached, b) lacks political courage and c) has a “king complex.”
“The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic. I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment.”
and…
“The President’s actions are not just an attack on the Constitution and a violation of his sworn oath of office — they are a direct attack on Americans that place all of us in danger,” Stockman said in the statement. “If the President is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist.”
“Look, I have questions about whether he’s [President Obama] truly committed to the Second Amendment as I understand it and most Americans would understand it. I don’t think he has the political courage to admit that.”
Rand Paul promises to issue a bill that will “nullify” the President’s executive orders announced yesterday.
“In this bill we will nullify anything the president does that smacks of legislation. And there are several of the executive orders that appear as if he’s writing new law. That cannot happen.”
“I’m afraid that President Obama may have this ‘king complex’ sort of developing, and we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
As the illustration reads – GunsOverPeople pretty much spells out the Republican position in the current gun debate. It’s never about the actual people for these scumbags. It’s only about money and profits and power…and keeping their corporate overlords happy.
As with every other major issue – gay rights, climate change, women’s rights, education, health care, the middle class, to name a few – the struggle to bring about commonsense regulations for a gun culture run amok, Republicans are on the wrong side of public opinion, the wrong side of decency, the wrong side of truth and as time will tell, the wrong side of history.
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your work is just so awesome..and share it constantly
See….the GOP is more than just Greed Oil Pollution!
I agree with Esther, awesome work! Thank you, Mario.
WOW ! You have the right definition for GOP. Maybe you could make one for the nasty NRA.
Where were the republican naysayers when Bush invented a whole new war machine for terrorists and a Policy on torture that made us the most despicable . I think Chaney and Bush took a rather regal position that was not accepted by international countries and continued the rampage in IRAQ that claimed a lot of american lives based on a lie.
Sorry but one needs to look at one’s self before ranting on others. They will use any argument to win but I am sure that Obama stands firmly on his two feet being a constitutional lawyer himself and previously the President of the Harvard Law Review .
Seems nowadays Republicans compete with each other to sound more extreme than the other. What a sad and pathetic bunch.
I think this time, the NRA and their cronies are going to lose this battle. There is nothing in the president’s proposals that smacks of an attack on the 2nd Amendment. Many guns will still be legal to buy, as long as you can pass a background check that shows you’re not a felon or have a serious mental illness.
(I also want to add here that I think the background check on the mentally ill needs to be comprehensive enough to separate from someone who went to see a therapist because of depression, or some other disorder that most Americans go through but not all seek help for.)
I also went to see a therapist for mild depression just last winter; she prescribed me to take more fish oil. It helped too. The depression wasn’t severe enough that I wanted to go out and have a mass killing and even though I don’t want a gun, I think I should still have a right to one.
Obviously, if someone suffers from a mental illness, that could cause them to even be possibly dangerous, it should block them from buying guns, anywhere and any place. It should also be a felony for anyone to privately sell a gun to someone without a background check.
Concerning Marco Rubio’s statement, “Look, I have questions about whether he’s [President Obama] truly committed to the Second Amendment as I understand it and most Americans would understand it….”
I don’t see why the president should be more committed to the Second Amendment than he should be to the first or any of the other Articles and Amendments. Those 26 people, including 20 children in that school had a right to live and pursue their dreams and not have their lives snuffed out like that; those things are also protected by that same Constitution.
The best thing that we and everyone else can do is make sure this issue does not go away as it has in the past, until comprehensive legislation is passed in our congress.
The guntards/NRA like to compare cars to guns, regarding human deaths. Cars do kill people, but that’s not their explicit purpose. Guns ARE made to kill, whether it’s people or any other living thing. And, yes, Big Pharma and the vidgame industry make billions, but they are only contributing factors to the problem. The real culprit is the firearms industry; they’re not content to make billions off sales to the U.S. gov’t for military use – the greedy bastards want to multiply their profit margin by selling millions of military-style weapons to the general public. Which, of course, makes assault rifles readily available to the nutcases. The whole problem boils down to $$, and the NRA is simply the weapons industry’s lobbying group.
And gun control is not the rescinding of the 2nd Amendment that the NRA would have us believe – check out http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery – it was a states’ rights issue.
And now I have to go oil my .22 rifle, which has been rusting away, back in a corner of my closet for 23 years. I’m awaiting the black helicopters. : )
MomCat,
With the defense budget subject to severe cuts to DOD,the Not Reasonable Alarmer ( NRA ) is running frantically to compensate for the loss of revenue. So Keane and La Pierre are thanking extremists on a daily basis for giving them more business in the last month and Americans are at the mercy of the crazies that passed under the wire of the background checks so they can do severe harm in the months to come.
Thanks to you I now understand the philosophy behind the 2nd amendment and I have more ammo of knowledge to debate this gun control issue with Republican bloggers elsewhere.
To be a classified a Military style Assault Rifle it has to have a selector switch, these rifles have been illegal since
1934. So what they want to do is ban ugly semi-autos and leave the nice looking ones ‘wood stocks, ect,’ legal.
This will make a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy but considering AR-15′s and their clones account for less then 1% of crimes committed with guns it will have no effect on gun violence. Back ground checks should be mandatory. We live in a dangerous world and now half of Americans hate the other half of Americans and I don’t see it getting better with 24 hour a day misinformation channels spewing out Orwellian Propaganda. Twice in my long life I have saved my life by having a weapon in my house and I’m glad it was a bad ass politically incorrect weapon because when someone shoots at you it can just plain rattle your nervous system.
In general, “assault weapons” are semiautomatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition that were designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use.
An assault weapon can be a pistol, a rifle, or a shotgun.
The Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 banned the manufacture and sale of 19 specific assault weapons identified by make and manufacturer.
It also provided for a ban on those weapons that have a combination of features such as flash suppressors and grenade launchers.
The ban did not cover those weapons legally possessed before the law was enacted. This law took effect September 13, 1994, and expired on September 13, 2004, due to a sunset provision.
The number of mass shootings meeting the specified definition averaged 1.5 each year between 1982 and 1994, annual average was about the same, at 1.6 per year, between 1995 and 2004, but after the Assault Gun Ban expired, the frequency went up, reaching 3.4 per year on average between 2005 and 2012, with an especially high number (seven) in 2012.
Homicides did indeed decline sharply over the 1994 to 2004 period that the law was in effect (more precisely, September 13, 1994, to September 12, 2004). The overall homicide rate in the US was 9.5 deaths per 100,000 population in 1993, and this fell to a rate of 5.6 in 2005. The homicide rate from use of guns fell from 6.6 in 1993 to 3.8 in 2005.
The underlying numbers also indicate that over the period as a whole, 73% of the weapons used in the mass shootings (and there were typically multiple weapons used in each mass shooting) were either semi-automatic handguns or long-barreled assault weapons.
While the law was controversial, and some attribute the loss of the Congress by the Democrats to a resurgent Republican Party that year (when Newt Gingrich became Speaker) to passage of the act, the act itself did little to “ban” assault weapons, despite the title.
First of all, the law only affected the manufacture and subsequent sale of newly produced assault weapons.
The existing stock of such weapons would remain, and could be sold or transferred between owners.
In anticipation of the law, manufacturers flooded the market with a huge supply of newly produced weapons.
Second, the law defined “assault weapons” in a highly specific way. As an advocacy group later noted, gun manufacturers soon found they could circumvent the law with what were little more than cosmetic changes to the existing arms.
Finally, while the Assault Weapons Ban also limited the manufacture and sale of newly produced high capacity ammunition magazines (limited to ten rounds or less), the manufacturers also ramped up production of these clips and flooded the market in the period before the law went into effect. The high capacity clips were still widely available in 2004.
In 2010 there were 358 murders involving rifles. Murders involving the use of pistols in the US that same year totaled 6,009, with another 1,939 murders with the firearm type unreported.
In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.
There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000.
Two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides.
Of the 30,470 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2010, 19,392 (63.6%) were suicide deaths, and 11,078 (36.4%) homicide deaths.
What are the countries of origin of the guns that are traced?
Traced guns come from many countries across the globe.
However, 78% of the guns that were traced in 1994 originated in the United States and most of the rest were from–
Brazil (5%), Germany (3%), China (3%), Austria (3%), Italy (2%), Spain (2%).
We do see the lower homicide rates, and especially the far lower homicide rates by firearms, in countries that have controlled access to firearms, such as most of Europe and Japan. And it is not true that the overall level of crime is especially high in the US.
OECD stands for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. It consist of 30 countries that are high-income, and considered developed.
According to statistics issued by the OECD, the overall crime rate in the US, as well as the rate of criminal assaults and threats, are in the middle of the ranges for the 26 OECD members reviewed. Where the US stands out is not in criminality, but in homicides resulting from criminality.
The easy availability of guns certainly has something to do with this.
All this to say that there is a priority developing for a Superior court decision on the interpretation of the 2nd amendment ASAP because if they know the history of this amendment,guns and rifles are mostly what the founders wanted its citizens to possess.If law and order is one of the principles of this democracy,we will have to have the police community respect the constitutional interpretation of our legal respresentatives or esle lose their jobs without full pensions..Since Superior court cases take some time before looking at arguments,the President should step in and ask a decision in the coming months.This is too important to be put off to two years hence.
You’re correct “alwaysoccupy” – I guess I could have said “we have too many guns causing too many deaths” but it somehow would ring hollow though true.
Of course the facts never stopped those who care not about truth if it doesn’t fit their narrative.
The Supreme Court does indeed have to settle the question whether Americans have the “unlimited” right to “bear arms” or whether the 2nd amendment allows for common sense limitations as to what weapons should be readily available to the average citizens.
My feeling is that “firearms” in the 1700′s when the 2nd Amendment was written meant, for the most part, a “musket” – so it gave citizens the right to “bear” a musket.
Anything above that is a generous interpretation of what the Founding Fathers envisioned.
I think we can all agree they NEVER envisioned the “weapons of mass destruction” available to common citizens today.
The Supreme Court will have a very tough decision to make with very tough pressures from all sides on this issue.