Bucking our society’s leftward lurch has been public opinion on two issues, pre-natal infanticide and Second Amendment-protected rights. In fact, leftists were very quiet on gun control for a long time after some analysts attributed former vice president Al Gore’s 2000 election loss to advocacy of the position. But now gun control is back, and Democrats have finally perhaps found a foolproof formula for passing it: Tie it in with the fight against terrorists. Writes the Associated Press:
Congressional Democrats are trying to build support for an effort to bar gun purchases by terror suspects, hoping to take advantage of the same public anxieties about security that gave Republicans a ringing House victory.
… If the Republicans who control Congress block votes on the proposal, Democrats hope to profit politically by winning sympathy from angry voters.
“By leaving this terrorist loophole open, Republicans are leaving every community in America vulnerable to attacks by terrorists armed with assault rifles and explosives purchased legally, in broad daylight,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday in a written statement.
The bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have the attorney general compile names of known and suspected terrorists, likely drawing from huge lists the government already keeps. Federally licensed gun dealers would be barred from selling firearms to people on that list if government officials believed they planned to use the weapons for terrorism.
Some credulous sorts might wonder incredulously, “What could be wrong with keeping guns out of terrorists’ hands?” But as American Thinker’s Carol Brown points out, the glaring problem is: Who will be declared a terrorist? As she writes, “The attorney general would make a list based on data the government already has amassed. Or, potentially, based on anything else for that matter. Perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center’s [SPLC’s] list of troublesome people would serve as a guide.”
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The last point about the SPLC — now working hand-in-glove with the government — is interesting because the organization has an unusual definition of “troublesome people,” one that includes me.
After I wrote a 2009 piece defending radio host Rush Limbaugh, who was prevented from buying into the St. Louis Rams due to political correctness, the SPLC put me on their “HateWatch” page. My alleged offense?
I used the word “lynched,” or a variation thereof, a few times in my article when describing the persecution of Limbaugh.
The SPLC didn’t mention that they just so happened to find me hateful shortly after I did an exposé revealing how they were using deceit to scare their supporters into donating money. Pure coincidence, though, I’m sure. But no matter. In the article about me, they also described broadcast giant Michael Savage — on whose show I appeared regularly at the time — as a “hate-radio host.” So one could wonder, given that Savage was unfairly placed on a list with terrorists and criminals by the U.K. government and was banned from entering Britain, could he be prohibited from buying guns under Feinstein’s bill? Could I? Could you?
The Left is fond of saying “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Yet while usually a pronouncement born of relativism, the truth is apparently that an actual freedom fighter is a terrorist to the Left. Just consider a 2012 study by the Department of Homeland Security, which, as The New American noted, stated “that ‘those who are reverent of individual liberty’ may promote terrorism.” In the same vein and proving that the SPLC’s targeting of me and Savage was not an isolated incident, The New American reported just last month in “New Obama Terror Czar Will Target Conservatives, Christians”:
The Obama administration’s increasingly controversial Justice Department, in partnership with the ultra-leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, announced the creation of a new czar position to focus on “domestic terrorism” — especially the alleged threat from Christians and Americans with “anti-government” views.
… The impetus for the Obama DOJ’s new focus on conservatives, libertarians, Christians, and others appears to be the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), widely viewed as an “anti-Christian hate group” and strongly criticized even by mainstream voices on the Left.
So while, as the AP reports, “NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker noted that there have been numerous instances of innocent people mistakenly added to terror lists,” one should also wonder about innocent but “troublesome” people purposely added to the lists with the government’s “living” definition of the word “terrorist.”
And truly troublesome is that an organization such as the SPLC would be shaping that definition. The SPLC’s snake-oil-salesman status was revealed long ago by Harper’s Ken Silverstein in the startling 2000 exposé “The Church of Morris Dees” (Dees is the SPLC’s founder). Among other things, Silverstein points out that the organization’s entire legal staff — liberals themselves — quit in 1986 in protest because Dees would ignore issues that truly affected the poor and downtrodden in favor of those that would make him money.
Yet just like the SPLC, Feinstein’s bill may be phony but effective. As Carol Brown put it, “Wow. I have to hand it to the Democrats. They’ve devised a strategy that combines gun control, faux window dressing concern about national security, and the likely targeting of law abiding American citizens who might wind up on The List.” And opposing this bill may be difficult, and politically expensive, for representatives.
After all, probability dictates that there will be other terrorist attacks on U.S. soil — it’s just a matter of time — and, as in Paris, they’ll likely involve firearms. And this probability grows greater by the day as Barack Obama insists we absorb Mideastern Muslim migrants who, as Syrian figures, the Greek government, intelligence officials including the FBI director, and others have warned, simply cannot be properly vetted. Moreover, while the almost 70 individuals arrested during the last 18 months for alleged involvement in Daesh (ISIS) plots included some Muslim “refugees,” it’s also now being reported that Obama has completely ignored “72 documented cases of terrorist activity by suspected Muslim immigrants inside the United States since July of last year,” writes WND.com.
And what will the reaction be — if Feinstein’s bill fails — when there is a serious terrorist attack in the United States involving firearms? The Democrats and their public-relations team (the media) will talk 24/7 about how the GOP has blood on its hands for “putting politics ahead of lives.” No, it won’t be true. And, no, this isn’t to imply the bill should be passed, only that Feinstein may finally have found her formula.
And she has long been seeking it. As she said on CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes on February 5, 1995 while commenting on the incorrectly termed “assault-weapons ban”: “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them — Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ’em all in — I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren’t here.”
Whether the votes for the current bill will be there remains to be seen. But the formula — import people who’ll commit crimes and terrorist acts and then use the mayhem as a pretext for stripping everyone’s rights — is here, there, and everywhere in the halls of government.
