It\u2019s been half a century since Jack Finney\u2019s 1954 novel (and Don Siegel\u2019s 1956 film adaptation) \u201cInvasion of the Body Snatchers\u201d introduced us to the notion of \u201cpod people\u201d — creatures that look like our neighbors but turn out to be pod-grown clones lacking nearly all human qualities including, presumably, any sense of irony.<\/p>\n
If David Letterman convenes an all-races child chorus to sing us a song on his TV show, we\u2019re already laughing even before we find out what Politically Correct cliche he\u2019s going to lampoon. But when the simpletons (or do they just consider us simpletons?) now in charge at the White House surrounded themselves with little children, chosen by race, who had written in letters detailing such well-thought-out policy prescriptions as \u201cI love my country and I want everybody to be happy and safe\u201d in a ceremony announcing yet another try at the standard police-state \u201cdisarm the civilians\u201d agenda last Wednesday, did the jaded commentators of the Lapdog Press give them the dose of the ridicule they deserved?<\/p>\n
The government makes school attendance mandatory, turns those little propaganda camps into self-defense-free zones by barring staff from going armed (180 degrees opposite of the policy Israel has used to stop school violence dead in its tracks since 1974), and then Clarabelle Biden asserts that when violence strikes \u201cIt\u2019s hard for the nation to comprehend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama lines up the white kid and the black kid and the Hispanic kid (was there even a Muslim kid?) behind him and tells Grant and Julia and Hinna and Teja to wave, says \u201cWhat we should be thinking about is our responsibility to care for them, and shield them from harm,\u201d but then has virtually no specific proposals to deal with scary young men who spend half their lives in darkened rooms blowing things up on video, let alone arming our teachers.<\/p>\n
Nor can he even entertain the thought of simply disbanding the vastly expensive and absurdly ineffectual government schooling monopoly, putting parents back in charge of their own kids\u2019 educations, a system that worked pretty well till the current, compulsion-based Prussian system was imposed on America at bayonet point in the years following the Civil War.<\/p>\n
The chief speech-reader claims 900 Americans a month \u201cdie at the end of a gun\u201d — without telling us how many were suicides, how many were felons shot by cops while committing crimes, how many died in drug-turf disputes directly attributable to his own beloved federal War on Some Drugs. (His high-school nickname was Barry the Stoner, and he can\u2019t even take a stab at getting the Drug War repealed?)<\/p>\n
The statists who want only the police and the army to be armed — the Nazi-Bolshevik model — always accuse the NRA of advancing self-defense rights only because \u201cThey\u2019re in the pay of the gun manufacturers.\u201d Looking at the way gun sales have skyrocketed in the past month, the manufacturers should save their biggest payoffs for Obama and Biden.<\/p>\n
And they\u2019ve done it all merely by threatening to re-enact gun bans that have already been proven useless and have about as much chance of making it through this Congress as a new requirement for police stations to hand out unlimited free marijuana.<\/p>\n
Not, for the record, that such nonsense ever \u201cprotects the children,\u201d anyway. As my friend John Lott pointed out in Investors Business Daily last week, when jurisdictions ban guns, \u201cIn every single place that we have data for, murder rates went up. Chicago and D.C. provided spectacular failures within the U.S. But this has been true worldwide. The U.K., Ireland and Jamaica, despite being island nations that can\u2019t blame a neighbor for supplying guns, have suffered more murders after gun control was passed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat has happened when Americans have been allowed access to guns? … Concealed handgun permits and gun sales have been soaring over the last four years, as regular people have worried that Obama would push through gun control. Yet, murders and violent crime have been falling. … The states that have had the biggest increases in concealed handgun permits and gun ownership have seen the biggest drops in murder and violent crime rates.\u201d<\/p>\n
Furthermore, gun bans are anti-woman. Ask any rape victim or battered wife or girlfriend how the equation changes when the lady has a gun.<\/p>\n
The leaders of Wednesday\u2019s bizarre pod parade even mentioned pressuring doctors to ask patients if they have guns at home, despite the fact that\u2019s barred under the president\u2019s own health care law. As government agents under Obamacare, maybe they could also ask if we\u2019ve filed our taxes.<\/p>\n
Yet not a single member of the press responded by asking Mr. Obama \u201cSince you mentioned it, sir, how many guns are in the White House, today? Start with the Secret Service agents, and don\u2019t forget the Marines. How many have magazines holding more than 10 rounds? How come you deserve that level of protection — as do your kids — but a working gal living alone in a ground-floor apartment in Georgia or Southern California does not? Are the presence of these firearms in your house a sign of mental illness?\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as confusing to many, though, was what appears to be the president\u2019s most pernicious proposal, \u201cuniversal criminal background checks\u201d on the transfer of firearms.<\/p>\n
The notion that inner-city drug gang members will do anything but laugh at such a requirement is absurd, of course. But the significance to the law-abiding citizen could be startling.<\/p>\n
To date, the federal government has imposed a background check requirement on handgun sales — yes, even at gun shows — through their regulatory authority over federally licensed firearms dealers.<\/p>\n
But Erich Pratt, spokesman for the Virginia-based civil rights group Gun Owners of America, reports that legislative proposals already sent to Congress indicate the goal now is to require even a widow or daughter trying to sell or give away grandpa\u2019s old hunting rifles to travel with the prospective recipient to a federally licensed firearms store — which could be hours away, for rural Nevadans — and there pay to have a \u201cbackground check\u201d performed on the buyer.<\/p>\n
And if the background check database is down, that day or week?<\/p>\n
\u201cTherein lies one of the dangers of giving government bureaucrats the power to approve or deny law-abiding citizens the ability to exercise their rights,\u201d says Mr. Pratt. \u201cAnd probably the most pernicious and dangerous part of this, you already have (New York Gov.) Andrew Cuomo saying that once everyone is in the database, confiscation is an option.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been half a century since Jack Finney\u2019s 1954 novel (and Don Siegel\u2019s 1956 film adaptation) \u201cInvasion of the Body Snatchers\u201d introduced us to the notion of \u201cpod people\u201d — creatures that look like our neighbors but turn out to be pod-grown clones lacking nearly all human qualities including, presumably, any sense of irony. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-qd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1626,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625\/revisions\/1626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}