No piece, no peace!

Oklahoma’s gun apologentsia

The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies - the militia - would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
—Retired Chief Justice Warren Burger,
“The Right to Bear Arms,”
Parade Magazine,
January 14, 1990

Let’s begin.

This, then, from the president of the United States:

“I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense,” he said. “But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”

It’s how these things get started, it’s the slippery slope, it’s what dictators do, it’s … not Obama.

Ronald Reagan, in fact, wrote these words in 1991, in an editorial in the New York Times, after leaving the White House. Nobody in the GOP came down with apoplexy. Nobody questioned Reagan’s patriotism.

Let’s fast forward 25 years, to the GOP reaction—especially our representatives here in Oklahoma—to President Obama’s announced 23 executive actions last month, designed to tighten background checks and enforce existing gun legislation. To hear their harping, you’d think an inalienable right to firearms was on the tablets Moses handed to the Founding Fathers during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The president’s initiative—and this is the maddening part about the GOP meltdown—will simply enforce laws already on the books, something Republicans demanded he do in the weeks following the Sandy Hook massacre. Sure, it closes some gun show loopholes, strengthens some internal measures, and funds mental health and safe gun technology, but for the love of Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson themselves, Obama is not coming for your guns. If he were—and he’s been in office almost eight years—he’d have them by now. 

“If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin,” Obama said, “we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun.” 

To Oklahoma’s elected representatives, though, it’s that kind of logic that gets you to martial law. They were equal parts hysterical and hyperbolic, unfocused and unbelievable, more concerned with tossing red meat to a base that exists on the fringe of constitutional reality than offering anything meaningful to the majority of Americans who are tired of seeing dead first graders and bullet holes in break rooms—and who also understand that all amendments, including and maybe especially the 2nd, have limits. 

And who wouldn’t want to close loopholes, fund mental health and safe gun technology, and keep firearms away from crazy people?

Don’t answer that.

First District Congressman Jim Bridenstine apparently doesn’t know the federal government already has our social security numbers. 

“The president plans to prohibit certain Social Security recipients from legally owning firearms,” Bridenstine said in a release. “In response, I will cosponsor legislation to prohibit the Social Security commissioner from turning over Social Security numbers to the Justice Department-run gun background check system.”

Second District Congressman Markwayne Mullin needed two cans of Pledge to dust off this discredited trope. 

Second District Congressman Markwayne Mullin said “more gun control will not deter criminals from perpetrating evil acts.”

Senator Jim Inhofe, well, who the hell knows what’s going on here?  

“For months [Obama] has had his staff working night and day to find ways for him to push his gun control agenda unilaterally while we’ve been waiting years for any leadership or a clear strategy for the Middle East, ISIL and Syria.”

Senator James Lankford managed to blame gun violence on everything except, you know, guns.

Lankford said Americans are “broken-hearted by senseless acts of violence” and should “evaluate the root causes that lead to violence, like broken families, mental health, drug use and a culture that glorifies violence.” Lankford said Obama “generally misses those root causes.”

Tough to read those comments without wanting to repeatedly stab a ballpoint pen into your palm. Sabine Brown, Oklahoma Chapter Leader for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, has Lankford’s root causes right here. 

“Nearly 600,000 unique gun ads were posted last year by unlicensed sellers on a single site, Armslist.com, where in 32 states, including Oklahoma, it’s easy for felons, domestic abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill to buy a gun with no background check, no questions asked.”

So, look, senator, we’re not broken-hearted, senator, we’re alternately numb and furious at being played.  So much sanctimony, so little sympathy.  Theatergoers get murdered, you say they should have been packing; 14 get killed in San Bernardino, you send your thoughts and prayers; kids get shot in an elementary school, you advocate arming teachers. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, you tell us, is a good guy with a gun, but sometimes the “good” guy shoots the victim in the head, the 3-year-old shoots the 2-year-old, the wannabe hero shoots the actual hero. We have 300 million guns in this country and 30,000 gun-related deaths a year but, apparently, that’s the cost of freedom. We cannot inconvenience terrorists on a watch list who want to buy a glock from a guy behind a card table at Expo Square, we cannot study the effects of gun violence, we cannot force gun owners to carry insurance, we cannot limit the number of clips in automatic weapons, we cannot have one nationwide system for background checks, we cannot register guns the way we register cars, we cannot impede people’s right to firearms, we cannot implement research that proves gun control works.

And why? Because John Wayne and Westerns and because Charlton Heston and his “cold dead hands” and because Benghazi and because Obama did something sometime about something else and because we’re the greatest country in the world and because God watches over us. Let those European socialists outlaw guns and protect their children from lunatics who buy thousands of rounds on the Internet. This is America! And let’s not quibble over a comma. You say militia, I say four guys with assault rifles in the snack aisle of Target, let’s call the whole thing off.  

We now head to our WTF folder for this:

Sen. Josh Brecheen, R-Coalgate, has a measure that would reduce the handgun license renewal and application fee to $25 from $85.

Back in the winter of 2008—and this was before he was president, when we loved our insurance companies, celebrated our great victory in Iraq, marveled at the masters of the economy and their expert handling of the housing situation (presumably the very greatness to which Donald Trump will return us), Candidate Barack Obama said this about a country’s frustration: 

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

He was called an elitist, remember, un-American, uppity? Thing was, he was called that by anti-trade, anti-immigrant, gun-clinging representatives like ours.

And he wasn’t wrong.

“I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” the president said, “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

You don’t remember Obama saying that? Well, you shouldn’t, because he didn’t. It came from Karl T. Frederick. Who’s Karl T. Frederick? Past President of the National Rifle Association.

For more from Barry, read the 7th Annual Bad Penny Awards.