U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich … announced plans to introduce legislation requiring secure firearm storage in homes with children,” Fox News reported. It’s a direct response to the Oxford school murders, following Rahm Emanuel’s “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” political template.
“The Michigan congresswoman’s legislation, called the ‘Safe Guns, Safe Kids Act,’ would require gun owners to safely secure firearms in living situations in which children could access the weapons,” the report elaborates. “It would also impose a penalty of up to five years imprisonment if a child accesses a firearm and injures himself or others as a result.”
“The goal of the law is to keep children safe, and the congresswoman does not want Washington to politicize the legislation, she said,” the report continues. “Rather, she is looking for the endorsement of law enforcement and lawmakers on the right.”
Right. That’s why she’s trying to enact a law that will ultimately be enforced with guns and looking for Republican cosponsors who are long on “law and order” rhetoric and short on realizing what’s really going on here. As with all serial gun-grabbers, Slotkin is exploiting headline news to try for an incremental gain. Once that is out of the way, she’ll move on to her next objective and then the next. If gun owners don’t fight her every step of the way, they might as well clear the field to the end zone, because that’s where she’s heading.
But don’t take my word for it — take hers. Except for the part where she says “I believe in and support the Second Amendment” right before showing everyone her big “but.” And note she first tries to establish her gun owner creds:
“I grew up in a gun-owning family, and when I served as an intelligence officer alongside the military in Iraq, I was trained on and carried a Glock 17 handgun and an M-4 semi-automatic weapon. My husband, who served in the U.S. Army for 30 years, carried a weapon every day he was deployed.”
Live and learn: I assumed the military deployed with select-fire M-4s. Then again, reading this closely, Slotkin says she served “alongside,” not “with.” She was a CIA analyst. And I should hope her Army husband would deploy with a weapon. But what’s that got to do with U.S. citizen disarmament?
She’s deliberately ignoring our birthright and exploiting the “Only Ones” logical fallacy knowing that many will see that experience as making her opinions on the matter authoritative: “I’m the only one in this room professional enough that I know of to carry this Glock 40…” BAM!
She’s also advancing another insidious meme: People who agree with her are patriots. People who don’t are extremists.
And what are Slotkin’s supposedly professional opinions?
“We must prohibit terrorists, the mentally ill, and domestic abusers from obtaining guns. And as an Army wife, I do not believe ordinary citizens should be able to easily obtain weapons or materiel that allow them to outgun their local police or military.”
Sounds reasonable. No?
If there’s a terrorist, what the hell is he doing out? Likewise leaving a known violent lunatic or someone who assaults others free to stalk among us seems like an insanely irresponsible way to guarantee that violence will happen at any moment. And apparently, being “an Army wife” is all the credentialing one needs to make that call.
But that’s not what Slotkin really means, is it? She’s not talking about people who have been convicted of a crime, she’s talking about people who have been suspected or accused of one and added to a secret watchlist or “red-flagged” without due process. She knows none of that will stop truly dangerous characters from “obtaining guns” as a simple Google search for terms like “Chicago homicides” will prove to anyone who cares to try.
But again, don’t take my word for it.
And as for “outgunning the police or military,” here we know she’s deliberately conflating semiautomatics with machineguns, a ploy right out of the Violence Policy Center playbook:
“The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”
It figures a self-identified “militia expert” would understand the subversive impact on “the security of a free State” by disarming the Militia. You’d also think an intelligence pro would take lessons learned from not being able to do that in the Middle East—despite all that blood and treasure—and apply them here. (The inconvenient truth for violence monopolists like Slotkin is, we DO “outgun the military and police,” probably on an order of magnitude just based on a comparative headcount, just as the Founders intended.)
OK, fine, but what about leaving guns where kids can find them and kill themselves and others? Do I just want them to?
No, of course not. That’s why children should be competently trained and provided access at developmentally appropriate stages. Compare that to the “commonsense gun safety law” crowd that teaches its children ignorance and avoidance, and then presumes to dictate one-size-fits-all “lock up your safety” edicts for the rest of us, that invariably demand firearms and ammunition be locked up separately, rendering them useless in the event they’re needed for defense.
Instead, the Fox News article references “$10 gun locks,” as if that will satisfy Slotkin’s unceasing demands.
We’ve seen a real-world demonstration of a doctrinaire gun-grabber making a fool of himself on that from decades ago with what still holds true today:
“Dennis Henigan of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence drops the ball in front of a roomful of reporters, while trying to prove the efficacy of Saf-T-Lok, a purportedly easy-to-use combination lock in the gun’s grip. Henigan fumbles and fails to unlock the gun in a well-lit room with no intruder at the door… Finally disengaging the safety, he apologizes, ‘Most people aren’t as klutzy as I am.'” -From “Lawyers, Guns and Money” by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard, Feb. 1, 1999
But what about if the child gets hold of a gun negligently left out and someone gets hurt or killed? Don’t we need laws?
Last I looked, the Crumbleys are in jail and facing charges (and see Dean Weingarten’s thoughts on the media-fueled bias). But the question here really is are such laws as Slotkin proposes legitimately authorized at the national level so that they’re imposed everywhere, in Everytown? It’s not surprising that someone who so cavalierly ignores her oath to the Constitution on the right to keep and bear arms is also undaunted by the concept of federalism, ignoring the Tenth Amendment:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
If the national government can assign itself whatever powers it wishes, how is that different from the kind of unmasked tyranny the Second Amendment was designed as an ultimate check and balance against?
There’s another consideration Slotkin and her kind don’t want constituents knowing about, much less talking about: Responsible children saving lives with firearms.
Here’s an account from over 20 years ago, where a 12-year-old saved his grandmother’s life from gun-wielding predators trying to rob a convenience store. And here’s one from a week-and-a-half ago, when “The 14-year-old son of a pizza shop employee shot one of three would-be robbers in the face after he started choking his mom in Philadelphia.”
Such stories aren’t that hard to find:
- 12-year-old boy defending mother fatally shoots armed home intruder
- South Carolina boy, 13, defends home from would-be burglar
- Alabama 11-year-old shoots suspected home invader
- Kid Shoots Burglar with Dad’s AR-15
I could keep listing headlines, but the point is made. If you’d like to read more, I also found what looks like a good resource, “ Kids Using Guns to Defend Themselves (and others).”
The outcomes in all of those incidents sure beat what happened in the Merced pitchfork murders. But based on results, that’s the outcome the Slotkins and Demanding Moms of the world insist on for your children (and their own, if they stopped to actually think about it), and preferably for the deaths to happen with a gun so they can exploit them for political grandstanding and create more pressure for more disarmament.
“For the children…”
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
