Vin Suprynowicz

In the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty’s father fails to follow the common-sense course — sending soldiers to arrest the evil fairy, warning her that if any harm comes to his daughter through that malevolent curse concerning sewing needles, said fairy would have her wings plucked and find herself locked up in a dark place for a long time.

Instead, the king attempts to ban all sewing needles from his kingdom. Brilliant. We all know how that worked out.

Yet today’s politicians continue attempting to solve their problems — an unwillingness or inability to identify, treat, or lock up dangerous lunatics; a generation of spoiled, jobless, quasi-literate youth who amuse themselves playing endless blow-off-their-heads video games in dark basements — by attempting to ban various sorts of firearms, a 500-year-old technology now so well developed that cheap automatic rifles are widely stamped out in Third World countries in factories originally designed to produce typewriters and license plates.

They might as well try to ban people from using telescopes to look at the planets.

Meantime, anyone for some unintended consequences?

“Major firearm conglomerate cancels Colorado expansion because of gun control,” reported the Andrew Brietbart Web site in late August.(http://tinyurl.com/ndoq5yc) “Gun control laws passed by Democrat state legislators” and signed by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in March have cost an opportunity for Colorado to “gain millions economically from any expansion of the Freedom Group Family of Companies (FGI),” reports AWR Hawkins for Brietbart. (FGI includes Remington, Marlin, Bushmaster, DPMS, Barnes Bullets, Para, and AAC, among others.)

An “anonymous source familiar with FGI” told Breitbart News that this year’s “passage of anti-gun legislation in Colorado has taken the Centennial State out of contention for expansion opportunities.”

It would be foolish, Mr. Hawkins notes, to build or expand manufacturing plants in Colorado for rifles and pistols designed to use magazines that became illegal when Colorado’s strict new victim disarmament laws went into effect July 1. In fact, that would be sort of like manufacturing automobiles in a state that had banned automatic transmissions, or any transmissions at all. Cars would be little more than novelties without transmissions. Similarly, without a magazine you have to feed single rounds into a firearm individually, like the nineteenth century British soldiers at Islandlwana.

(The Zulus attacking at Islandlwana in 1879 were armed primarily with spears. Yet they slaughtered 1,300 Brits armed with single-shot Martini-Henry rifles. “Repeaters” with magazines were finally adopted, even by the conservative British Empire, to prevent a repetition.)

Standard rifle or pistol magazines with a capacity of more than 15 rounds are now banned in Colorado, except of course for government police and the Army. (I wonder why they need them?) But Bushmaster and DPMS — among the companies owned by FGI — manufacture AR-15s and pistols with standard magazines holding 30 and 26 rounds.

NOT FOOLED

Moreover, another gun control measure “that did not pass but was pushed by Democrats would have made manufacturers, sellers, and owners of so-called ‘assault rifles’ liable for the misuse of their weapons,” Hawkins notes. “Even if the gun were sold to a legitimate, law-abiding gun owner, the manufacturer, seller, and owner would have been open to liability had the gun been stolen and misused.”

It doesn’t take a genius to read the ambulance-chasers’ handwriting on the wall. In early August, FGI announced a $32 million expansion . . . in Arkansas.

“Looks like gun control is proving costly to Colorado,” Hawkins notes.

Recall elections rarely succeed, especially when collectivist New York millionaires pour in their loot to defend their gun-grabbing buddies. But writing in The Washington Times, also in late August, Jon Caldara of Colorado’s Independent Institute points out that Colorado politicians this time may face some actual repercussions for their knee-jerk votes to ban the nasty guns . . . for everyone but their own cops and G-Men.

“To someone living on the coasts, the fight in Colorado over gun control . . . might be hard to understand,” Caldara offers at http://tinyurl.com/pbht7ey. “Restrictions on gun-magazine capacities and background checks for all gun transfers might sound benign. So how could it lead to the first recall elections in the state’s history?”

Like most states in the West, Colorado has more guns than people, Mr. Caldara points out. More than 100,000 men and women in Colorado hold concealed-carry permits, “so people here largely know how guns actually work. Consequently, we are less likely to be rattled from the emotional spin of anti-gun hysteria. We know guns that look ‘mean’ aren’t actually military machine guns, that they function like any other semi-automatic gun (pull the trigger once and only one bullet comes out), that the ammunition they use isn’t ‘high-powered,’ and so on.
…

So Coloradans were wise to the “emotional process” through which “anti-gun opportunists . . . would try to exploit our grief . . . when a horrific shooting took place in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., last year. . . . Even our Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper used the national airwaves to say the gun wasn’t the issue — the killer’s mental state was,” Mr. Caldara reports. “So imagine the shock to Coloradans when some months later, that same governor was pushing gun restrictions on the law-abiding.”

Led by officials including Colorado state Senate President John Morse of Colorado Springs and state Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo, Colorado’s Democratic politicians enacted sweeping restrictions on gun owners. Now Mr. Morse and Ms. Giron face the first recalls in state history. Why?

The new restrictions were so poorly written that they “could make nearly all magazines, regardless of capacity, illegal,” Mr. Caldara reports. “They render gun transfers so onerous that a gun buy-back in Colorado was just canceled because there is no way for the guns turned in to be destroyed.”

So bad were these bills that in January, Colorado’s 62 elected county sheriffs came out unanimously against them. “Regrettably (Gov.) Hickenlooper refused to accept a single phone call from these sheriffs to hear their concerns. However, as reported by the investigative news site CompleteColorado.com, he had lengthy phone calls with New York’s anti-gun mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, during the debate.” In the end, only totalitarian Democrats voted for the bills.

VOTING WITH THEIR FEET

The wave of absurd new victim disarmament laws “has led to an exodus of gun manufacturers to more friendly climes, with anti-gun states losing the significant tax revenue and jobs these companies provide,” the National Rifle Association reported on Aug. 23.

Among the companies that have chosen to relocate is Magpul Industries of Erie, Colo., a manufacturer of AR-15 parts and magazines.

But Colorado’s not the only state facing adverse economic consequences from the “ban all the sewing needles” approach. Following New York’s enactment of the so-called S.A.F.E. Act, Kahr Arms of Rockland County, N.Y. announced it would be moving some of its operations to more gun-friendly Pennsylvania, the NRA’s lobbying arm reports. Kahr had been considering building a new facility, with 80-100 additional jobs, in Orange County, N.Y. But when subsequently asked about the move by the Wall Street Journal, Kahr Vice President Frank Harris said the company no longer “feels welcome” in New York.

In reaction to Connecticut’s recently enacted victim disarmament legislation — including “mental health background checks” required to obtain a “permit” to buy ammunition — PTR Industries, a maker of semiautomatic rifles in Bristol, Conn., confirmed in June it will be moving to Aynor, S.C.

Other manufacturers, including Sturm, Ruger & Company and Beretta, have sought out firearm friendly states for their expansion plans, with Ruger opening a new plant in North Carolina. Even Remington, which has built firearms in Ilion, New York, for more than 150 years, is reported to be looking to move part or all of that operation to a gun-friendly state.

How sad. The Industrial Revolution with its key innovation of interchangeable parts was born, in large part, among the innovative firearms manufacturers and entrepreneurs of New York and New England — Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson.

Modern firearms — and the fact that a free people’s right to possess them may not be “infringed” — are the canine teeth of our liberties. Yet which are determined to become the Slave States, today?