FrontPage Mag published an article Monday that provides five proofs that Democrats are on the verge of a sweeping gun confiscation push.
A new Obama administration healthcare rule “allowing health care [sic] providers to report the names of mentally ill patients to an FBI firearms background check system.” Because the definition of “mentally ill” is arbitrary, FrontPage Mag predicts the moniker of “mentally ill” will begin to be applied to “any belief or behavior that the left would like to stamp out– fervent adherence to the Constitution, homeschooling, and climate change ‘denial,’ for example–enabling the government to categorize those gun owners as mentally ill and disarm them.”
Executive expansion of the number of ATF and FBI personnel focused on guns. Obama’s January 5 executive gun controls included the addition of 200 new ATF agents, along with another 230 FBI personnel. The White House said the new ATF agents will “help enforce our gun laws” while the FBI personnel will help process background checks. The Washington Examiner pointed out that these 430 new federal positions–focused on guns–constitute a force “more than eight times the size of the team of commandos he is sending to the Middle East to take on ISIS.”
Increased, unvarnished calls for all-out bans on semiautomatic weapons. The Washington Post’s Eugene Volokh explained, “These aren’t calls for restricting supposedly narrow categories of guns that are allegedly used predominantly by criminals. These are calls for banning the sorts of guns that tens of millions of law-abiding Americans have in their homes.” Volokh explains the progression–from seeking a ban on “Saturday Night Specials” in the 1970s to a ban on “assault weapons” in the 1990s and 2000s to seeking an all-out ban on the possession of semiautomatic weapons now.
Confiscation is already underway in California. FrontPage reports that “California Attorney General and anti-gun extremist Kamala Harris recently announced that over the last two years her Department had ‘doubled the average number of guns seized annually.’”
It should also be noted that California goes about confiscation by using many of the tools Democrats are putting in place at the federal level–such as incrementally expanding the list of what it means to be prohibited from gun possession, then using those expansions to trigger the confiscatory policies that allow law enforcement to visit homes and round up firearms.
The “legal groundwork” for confiscation is already in place. This last point overlaps the previous one somewhat. But the California example serves as a blueprint for Democrats at the federal level, who have long been looking for ways to confiscate firearms.
In California, expanded background checks led to registration, which was complimented with confiscatory laws. On the national front, when Obama announced executive gun controls that included an expansion of background checks, he inched America as a whole further down the path California has been traveling for some time. Whereas some gun owners took solace in the fact that Obama’s gun controls appeared minimally invasive, and others correctly observed that the new controls will be impotent to stop mass shootings, many missed the larger point, which is that the purpose of the controls is not really to stop mass shootings in the here-and-now, but to incrementally expand government oversight into the exercise of Second Amendment rights. This expansion brings the Democrats closer and closer to the day Democrat presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton pointed to when she suggested an Australian-style gun ban is “worth looking at” for gun policy in America.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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