Texas/United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- When it comes to locking down a politician’s track record on the Second Amendment, sometimes it can be easy, especially when they are members of Congress. Their voting record is public, and they are often presented with the issues on a “yes” or “no” basis. Not much wiggle room there. In conjunction with public statements and introduced, it’s easy to pin down a Joe Biden or Eric Swalwell as threats to the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.
Julian Castro, though, is a little tougher to nail down. You have public statements, but mayors, especially in states with pre-emption, like Texas, often leave little more than those statements and policy proposals. What has been locatable, though, points to a candidate who gives lip service to the Second Amendment.
Lip service, though, is all law-abiding citizens who seek to exercise their Second Amendment rights would get. Here’s the scoop. In 2012, Castro and his brother were interviewed by ABC News in the wake of the Sandy Hook mass shooting.
“There is a feeling that the Second Amendment is there in the Constitution, folks will have the right to bear arms,” the then-mayor of San Antonio and now-presidential candidate said, providing lip service to our rights. “At the same time, like every other freedom, there are reasonable limits, regulations to be placed on it.”
Castro’s true feelings may have been exposed when he touched on Second Amendment issues in a 2016 speech while serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (the same post once held by Andrew Cuomo). In that speech, he stated, “We are long past the time for decisive action to protect innocent Americans from the epidemic of gun violence.”
His use of the term “epidemic” shows that he may well see our constitutional right to keep and bear arms as a threat to public health. This has been the same approach pushed by the Violence Policy Center – which seems its own extreme agenda of not just gun bans, but in giving unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats the ability to ban guns on their own.
Thus, it is no surprise that Castro’s idea of reasonable shows he might not understand what the terms means, especially in light of the Heller and McDonald rulings from the Supreme Court, according to a July 11 post from America’s First Freedom. Now, the presidential candidate is saying, “In an ideal world, people would not own handguns.”
Never mind that we do not live in an ideal world, and many Americans, including Kamala Harris, have made the decision to purchase a handgun for personal protection with that reality in mind. But Castro’s target of handguns not existing goes beyond those who seek a viable tool for the personal protection of themselves and their loved ones. Maybe he should talk to the millions of Americans who own handguns for other reasons.
For starters, how about those who hunt with handguns? How about the many competitive shooters, from Olympic events to practical shooting, whether IPSC or IDPA? None of them have committed crimes, much less carried out a mass shooting at a food festival, movie theater, concert, or school. Yet Julian Castro has no problem punishing them for crimes and tragedies they had no part in – adding injustice to the tragedy that already took place. And as we have seen in the Gilroy shooting, those onerous laws completely fail to stop the shootings but create conditions where there are plenty of potential victims for a wicked murderer.
Julian Castro is a bit of a longshot to win the nomination, thankfully. However, his lip service is something Second Amendment supporters should keep in mind as 2020 approaches – you can bet other anti-Second Amendment extremists will be trying that same gambit in the general election.
About Harold Hutchison
Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.