NOBODY saw this coming, right?

[unixronin]

"I'm not going to take your guns away."

"I respect the Second Amendment."

"Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear."

"As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons," Holder told reporters.

Yeah, so he lied.  But it's for the children ...er, the Mexicans!  Wait ... Mexican children!  That makes it alright, doesn't it?

"Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," the [State Department] warning said.  "Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico, but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez."

So, the Mexican government is concerned about their drug cartels using fully-automatic weapons (that's "machineguns" to you) and grenades.  Weapons which you can't legally buy in the US without a Class 3 permit (and, for the grenades, a destructive device permit), and which command astronomical prices because no new ones have been allowed to enter private hands since 1986.  (All the legal full-auto weapons that are in civilian hands in the US are in private collections.  As a matter of fact, about three quarters of them are in the private collection of Reed Knight, president of Knight Armaments Corporation and about the closest person in the US to a real-life Tony Stark.)  And barring law-abiding US gun owners from buying semi-automatic rifles that look like them will stop the drug cartels from getting the real thing, which they're already not getting here.

Yeah.  Right.  The logic of that is crystal clear.

Democratic administrations change, but Democratic party bullshit goes on forever.  For all those of you who trusted Obama's promises, and assured those of us who own guns that Obama wasn't going to be Just Another Democratic Gun Grabber, there's a stack of warm washcloths in the bathroom for you to wipe the egg off your faces with.  We told you Bush's chair would scarcely have cooled before Obama and Biden were pushing a new round of gun control laws.  Well, bend over, because here it comes.

Also see this post.

Q:  How do you tell when a politician is lying?

A:  His lips move.

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I am more worried about his speech the other night. If I heard it right, he wants the Government to start directing the national economy, instead of anything like a market. That means that our current economic situation will become calcified into place, we will not have economic freedom until we have a change in government policy.

What good is a right to have a gun, if no one can ever afford one? Let alone learn how to use it.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

While the Libertarian Dream of educated and enlightened and cheat-free self interest is quite nice, deregulation is generally what gets us into these messes. Government isn't there to "direct" the economy, but the mulish insistence by many that ANY government regulation AT ALL is evil won't work.

It was Adam Smith who wrote that any time two or more businessmen meet out of the public eye there is automatically a conspiracy again the common good. As with many other warnings that come from that era, it's wise to heed that one.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Guilty. I admit that my general tendency is to look at man much the way Thomas Jefferson did, to expect them to rise to their angelic natures when left to their own devices.

That said, I do indeed favor regulation in the markets for the purpose of keeping them open and free. Quite a bit of the regulation proposed is to prevent disruptive ideas from changing the current power structures. (It is very oddly conservative coming from the liberals.) Regulation for the sake of saying the markets are regulated is insane. What is the purpose of the regulation proposed? Answer that question, and we can discuss the merits of the regulations.