"WHY THIS WEBSITE" POSTER TEXT
Welcome to the "ARIZONA GUN TALK" Patriot Poster Section - this is the site's introductory poster. Its authors are 2nd Amendment advocates who believe the 2008 elections produced a serious threat to gun rights. Key administration officials including the President, Attorney General, Speaker of the House, and influential members of Congress are hostile to private firearms ownership. This combined with Democrat majorities in the House and Senate pose a risk to gun rights.
Most of the individuals depicted in the poster are well known anti-gunners so their views on firearms will be discussed only briefly. Eric Holder supported the District of Columbia's now overturned ban on self defense. He argued that law abiding citizens could not use guns to defend themselves in the nation's murder capitol. That simply doesn't make sense.
Speaker Pelosi advocates gun registration even though registration has been a total failure in solving gun crime where it's been tried (Canada, Hawaii, Chicago, DC, etc). Further, felons are prohibited by law (see, Hayes v. U.S.) from registering firearms because of the 5th Amendment's protection against self incrimination. Gun registration laws can't be enforced against felons. Pelosi's advocacy of gun registration is at best an attempt to harass law abiding gun owners and at worst, a potential gateway to confiscation.
Diane Feinstein wants to reinstate the failed Clinton "Assault Weapon" ban even though it did nothing to reduce gun crime. So called assault weapons were responsible for less than two-percent of all gun crimes before, during, and after the ban's decade long tenure; it accomplished nothing. Further, banned rifles differ from their unbanned counterparts in only a few external features; both shoot exactly the same. The Senator's position defies logic.
Wife Mary and I don't understand what motivates Senator Schumer. He parrots the most virulent nonsense from anti-gun organizations. Schumer has evidentially discovered that being against firearms attracts money and votes independent of whether his anti-gun rants are true. A possible alternative is that he's a Progressive Movement true believer. His anti-gun stance may come from knowing that the movement can never gain control of an armed populace.
In a Democrat controlled Congress, these gun-control advocates are formidable opponents but at least they're a known quantity. Conversely, early in his campaign, candidate Obama's position on gun-control was not widely recognized. In 2007 when his candidacy began to gain traction, wife Mary and I were busy supporting the pro civil-rights side of DC v. Heller (see the "ABOUT US" Section). Our initial reaction to Obama was positive. We saw an intelligent, articulate African-American whose candidacy could help realize Dr. King's dream of a color-blind society. We believed him to be a redemptive role-model for millions of citizens who viewed themselves as victims.
This positive impression changed because of our Heller work. As a former intelligence analyst, curiosity led me to examine funding sources for anti-Heller friend-of-the-court briefs. That surfaced the Joyce Foundation with which Mary and I were only marginally familiar. Further study revealed that President Obama had served on the Foundation's board of directors for several years. The remainder of this text will focus on his Joyce Foundation service. The next poster (called "YES WE CAN") takes a wider look at the President's anti-gun history.
During his tenure, the Joyce board gave millions to the Violence Policy Center (VPC) - a Washington DC based organization comprised of unabashed gun-haters. Their ideas and policies are truly strange. On their website, they stated that, "Semi-automatic assault weapons ... are civilian versions of military assault weapons. There are virtually no significant differences between them." What this convoluted nonsense claims is that military machine guns and civilian semi-automatic rifles are essentially the same. While I was writing this text, television news showed a devastating US helicopter attack on Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Most were killed but if there were survivors, I'm sure they could explain the difference between civilian semi-automatic rifles and fully automatic military weapons! To further catalogue VPC's odd anti-gun stance, a year after the landmark Heller decision their website retains an article that says, ---"no gun control measure has ever been struck down as unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds." Oops. VPC also claimed that US manufactured 50-caliber weapons had been sold to terrorists; a charge for which BATFE could find no evidence. This is how Joyce Foundation money was spent during Barack Obama's stewardship.
Another Foundation initiative started during Obama's tenure encouraged law review articles hostile to the 2nd Amendment. Joyce sponsored one-sided articles in the Chicago-Kent Law Review that claimed there's no individual right to firearms. When academics from other law schools heard about the Joyce initiative, they volunteered to provide articles supporting the "individual right" position but were refused - no contrary opinions were allowed. In the last year of Obama's tenure, the Foundation funded the "Second Amendment Research Center" at Ohio State University. Its director's position is that while citizens may have an individual right to firearms, that right exists only in the context of militia service. Unfortunately for him and for OSU, the US Supreme Court disagreed. Oops again. Given that the university tolerated Woody Hayes' temper for many years, it appears it can also live with the Research Center's discredited position.
It's only a matter of time until President Obama's radical anti-gun beliefs resurface in new gun-control initiatives. Given today's Congress, such initiatives may well be enacted into law. "ARIZONA GUN TALK" was established to oppose Obama sponsored gun-control measures.