Category: 2012 Election

Being very close personally with someone who worked at GOAL during the Romney Administration, there is a lot to like and a lot to dislike about Mitt Romney’s record on our issue. What’s not to like has gone largely undiscussed. What’s been discussed far more often is the assault weapons issue, which alternately has people or the media suggesting Romney made Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, or accusing him of being the Governor who passed Massachusetts’s Assault Weapons Ban in the first place. Both are untrue. The ban passed and signed by Governor Cellucci in 1998 never had an expiration. The problem came about in 2004 because Massachusetts Law makes several references to the federal ban. Without the supporting language from the federal ban, the definition of what exactly an assault weapon is in Massachusetts would have become uncertain. Fine, right? Well, no. Massachusetts is not a state where ambiguity in the law is decided in favor of a gun owner. The definition of assault weapon contains the language “shall include, but not be limited to,” which is like music to the ears of a prosecutor wanting to warn the fair citizenry that they exercise their right in his fiefdom at their peril. The limiting language in the Massachusetts definition was tied to a Federal Law which was about to disappear.

In 2004 that anti-gun leaders of the Massachusetts Legislature started to raise false concerns about needing to make Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, given that the federal ban was about to expire. This was never true, but presented an excuse to convince other legislators to revisit, and simultaneously greatly expand the definition of what an assault weapon is in Massachusetts, making the ban cover far more firearms. They went ahead and drafted a bill. Fortunately for gun owners in Massachusetts, GOAL was able to essentially gut the bill, and preserve the existing language in the definition, which included the federal list of exempted firearms. In addition they got a number of other easements to the bill which are detailed in their press release speaking about Romney’s record on guns. The anti-gun sponsors of the original bill were not pleased, but the rest of the Massachusetts Legislature went along with the GOAL plan of preserving the existing definition in the law, and slipping in some easements through under the radar. This wasn’t about making the ban permanent. Massachusetts Law would have still made assault weapons illegal, just with a far more nebulous definition of what exactly an assault weapon is.

While the anti-gun sponsors were not happy about what their bill had turned into, they got a lot happier when Governor Romney was misadvised about the bill he was signing and made the now infamous signing statement:

“Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts. These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.”

That was essentially cover for them, especially given that the media ran with this, and has kept running ever since. GOAL was inundated with calls from angry gun owners, who took the media and anti-gun legislators word on what the bill actually did. No one, not reporters, anti-gun folks, or angry citizens, bothered to read the actual law. While it takes some work to follow, but it’s pretty easy to see the effect of the first three sections of the law, if you look at the statute it is modifying, by inserting a concrete reference to the federal law with the addition of a date. The rest you need a deeper understanding of Massachusetts gun law to follow, but the “assault weapons” parts aren’t hard.

So Romney has never signed a gun ban, and anyone who suggests he has is missing the facts. He did other things, such as raising fees to try to balance Massachusetts’s budget, rather than raising taxes. Massachusetts has long required people to obtain licenses to possess firearms. Among those fees he raised were gun licenses, and the price hike was not trivial. The price was quadrupled without concern to what effect this would have on the exercise of people’s rights. The burden is not minor for someone who doesn’t have much money. That’s enough reason to distrust Romney on the issue as much as a gun ban is. I don’t blame gun owners who are wary of Mitt. But I’d like to see that wariness based on facts, and not bullshit peddled by the media.

The Google Alerts on “assault weapon” is lighting up like a Christmas tree this morning since the President came out and said what he really thinks. Papers from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune are atwitter on the subject. From Tam:

What I love about this is how every time he gives the gun control issue the most tentative touch with the tip of his tongue (what he actually said was “Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced,”) the media grabs him by the back of his head and turns it into a great, big sloppy slurp (“Obama Calls for Renewal of Assault Weapons Ban” blares the headline.) These guys are writing the NRA’s ad copy for them.

I tend to agree this is a good thing. We want Obama talking about this issue and the media playing it up as much as possible. The worst thing Obama ever did to NRA was to do and say nothing. It’s hard to demonize someone who really hasn’t gone after you, except for “under the radar.” Well, he’s not flying too stealthy anymore, and I’m going to bet there are people in Fairfax editing copy of that statement as we speak.

Remember, Barack Obama is the best pro-gun President of all times, according to the media, and these paranoid gun nuts are just a bunch of moronic hicks brainwashed by the NRA. This article in Forbes lays out the case for why that’s as big a lie as virtually anything else they’ve parroted this silly season:

More recently in a move unprecedented in American history, President Obama quietly banned re-importation and sale of 850,000 collectible antique U.S.-manufactured M1 Garand and Carbine rifles that were left in South Korea following the Korean War. Developed in the 1930’s, the venerable M1 Garand carried the U.S. through World War II, seeing action in every major battle.

I had kind of forgotten about this, because Presidents screwing us on importation rules has been a grand bipartisan tradition, but it’s certainly something to count against the President.

An Obama reelection presents an extreme risk of replacing at least one of five Supreme Court justices who have vindicated Second Amendment protections in the precarious Heller and McDonald decisions. If this were to happen, our right to bear arms might become a lost historical memory for future oppressed generations to read about.

This point needs to be pounded on until gun owners start to get it.

Still, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence continues to wage war on several fronts, most particularly attacking the constitutionally-sanctioned Second Amendment right of law-abiding citizens to carry guns for protection outside their homes, a right the vast majority of state governments acknowledge.  According to their director of legal action, Jonathan Lowy, “this battle is far from over.”

I think the Brady Campaign has largely beclowned itself under Gross, and is sliding further down the slope into irrelevance. Bloomberg and MAIG are the big threat now, and that’s another reality I think gun owners need to be made to understand.

UPDATE: First comment on that article illustrates an attitude you find often among gun owners who are ill informed:

No one…not even the President of the United States…can *legally* impose any restrictions on a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. Until the Bill is Rights is abolished that right is just as important as any other right in the Bill of Rights. Can you imagine the uproar if some silly woman senator suggested “Common Sense restrictions on the right to free speech? The Second Amendment is the ONLY amendment to specifically state that the “right to KEEP and BEAR arms shall NOT BE INFRINGED.

So…what PART of “Shall NOT be INFRINGED” do these people not understand? No one has the right to tell *anyone* that they cannot only KEEP but also BEAR arms anywhere at anytime. Why? Because the Second Amendment does not have ANY provision for that. It’s really simple. But some law breaking “government officials” believe that they can force people to do what *THEY* deem as right. Well, it AINT gonna happen.

The unfortunate fact is the Second Amendment only means what 9 unelected men and women in robes say it means. Beyond that, it does not protect you. A great many gun owners don’t understand the existence and recognition of this right by the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, doesn’t mean squat unless the courts enforce it. I think this is an understandable, if naive view, that people in the government will act in good faith. They won’t. I think a good reason the Court argument may not be effective among gun owners is that they don’t really understand the magnitude of the threat. “It’s in the Constitution, and I can read,” they likely think, probably also remembering back to civics class about what it takes to amend the document. But while Judges can read too, judges also have agendas.

What seems clear can be unclear. I can remember being this naive once, back when I was first getting into this issue in a serious way, and someone told me the Second Amendment was ruled not to be an individual right. I couldn’t believe this was the case, so I looked up the Supreme Court cases on it, and couldn’t find anything that lead to that conclusion. But this did lead me to the collective rights work of Saul Cornell, and I was outraged enough by it to seek deeper knowledge, which was part of my transition out of that space. Sometimes I think when ordinary gun owners find out how this really works, they are going to be pissed.