Here I am, still glowing in the light of the victory for our individual rights that occurred this week in DC, and the gun grabbers are already mustering their next ruse to get around the Constitution. In an op-ed piece in the LA Times (), they are proposing another scheme designed to put society's burden on the gun manufacturers.
These gun grabbers want to set up a government-run program in which murder quotas are set and need to not be exceeded in order for the gun manufacturers to get financial bonuses. Yeah, that's what the leftist gun-grabbers are proposing - the victims of violent crime are further reduced to not just a statistic but a quota. And, as you can imagine, this quota is unattainable because there would be limits as to how many firearms can be manufactured, what types, blah, blah, blah. What control over gun violence do the manufacturers have? Are they any more culpable than the auto manufacturers and liquor distillers for drunk driving deaths?
My guess is that the gun grabbers lie awake at night trying to figure out how to distort reality to fit their vision of a disarmed utopia. The Supreme Court put that dream away for some time to come so the gun grabbers have been sleepless for several days now. What to do about giving each individual the right to defend themselves from the lawless thugs and gangbangers out there!? How can the gun grabbers disarm the people now and turn us all into victims?
Simply by applying the same principles used by the climate change crowd, that's how. They are proposing that if the death rates dictated by the quota system are significantly reduced, perhaps through the efforts of a few of the gun makers, then the excess 'credits' could be sold to other gun makers. Just like carbon offsets. Except this time, instead of carbon offsets, we are dealing in victims lives.
It's clear that the anti-capitalist Left isn't happy unless they can profit from someone else's misery. It turns the murder rate into a zero sum game, just like carbon offsets does for the environment. The gun makers can't win in this gambit because they have no control over gun deaths. The people that purchase firearms from them do so legally and, statistically (since the Left is all about statistics), they do not commit violent crime. Based on the gun grabbers view of the world, since there are nearly 65 million gun owners in this country, there should be 65 million gun deaths in this country. Except there isn't. By their own admission, there are 12,000 gun-related murders a year in this country. Assuming that this is true (and I didn't bother to verify it), the rate per gun owner is infintessimally small.
By comparison, there are 135,921,000 automobiles in the US (as of 2002) and there were 43,000 automobile-related deaths (also a 2002 statistic). While this death rate is infintessimally small as well, it is also 3 times as high as the rate for firearms and yet there is no public outcry by the Left to ban or curtail the sales of automobiles. And surprisingly, most Americans view owning and driving an automobile as an inalienable right but no such guarantee can be found in the Constitution. Driving is a privilege not a right. Owning a firearm is an individual right protected (and now affirmed by the Supreme Court) by the Constitution.
Furthermore, the areas that have been hardest hit by violent crime using firearms are the very places that the citizen is barred from owning a firearm. Which is what every gun grabber hates most and turns a blind eye to the most - that banning guns doesn't make criminals suddenly get a conscience. Law abiders comply with gun laws. Criminals do not. And criminals don't like their victims to be armed. Typically, if you are armed, you won't become a victim. Hence the reason that we gun owners say more gun ownership saves lives.
What does any of this have to do with the gun makers? Nothing. How will gun makers be able to control the violent crime? They can't. But that really doesn't matter to the gun grabbers because they want to set up the gun makers to fail at this game so they can again say that the only solution is a total gun ban. And if the gun grabbers ever do succeed, they, along with the rest of us, will always have to sleep with one eye open, losing sleep.
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