Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Obama and his administration are so unfailingly adept in practicing that advice, the theme is now a dictum.
Violent crime incidents and data are easy to obtain, and today, gun violence is the hot topic. One can point to a number of newsy crimes that occurred before Barack Obama took office and many since, yet the Sandy Hook event is jet propulsion to and for Obama. Is it a horrific crime? You bet. Is it politicized by and for the Obama camp? Same answer.
The federal ban on assault weapons expired in September 2004 and no subsequent Congress has renewed it. Since that date, multiple mass murders have occurred – Virginia Tech, the Seal Beach Salon, the Aurora Colorado theater, Tucson’s Gabby Giffords shooting), to name a few – but suddenly the Sandy Hook event flank-spurs politicians and their followers to open the floodgates.
The media are saturated with force-feeding the public to accept that guns are the foremost problem, and secondarily it’s the National Rifle Association.
Obama took the opportunity, flanked by well-dressed children, to exercise his photo-op moment, appearing to sign some meaningful documents that the media ran with as signing 23 executive orders. False. Wrong. Obama’s show-and-tell merely initiated some executive actions that are nothing more than proposals he could have simply expressed verbally.
The 23 items are basically useless verbiage. They include such things as appointing a permanent head of the ATF, which could have been done at any time in past years; giving schools and communities more flexibility for safety; allowing for more research on violence; yada, yada, yada. There is a lot of vagueness with “direct this, start dialogue on that.” The bottom line is that whatever he said will naturally cost money – a lot of it – and will ultimately have zero impact on protecting children.
There is talk of imparting mental health information to various agencies and entities to prevent gun sales to unstable people. The persons most familiar with that kind of accurate information are mental health professionals and that information is protected by the doctor-patient relationship and rubber-stamped by HIPAA regulations. In other words, all of the tough talk emanating from the White House violates laws and regulations on a number of levels.
With all of the manufactured panic and the left’s fervor for changing the Constitution, out of the woodwork comes “artistic director” (of the Arena Stage Theater) Molly Smith and her life-partner, activist Suzanne Blue Star Boy. They organized the Jan. 26 “March on Washington for Gun Control.” One popular sign was “Stop the NRA.” Stop the NRA from what? Speaking freely and wanting the U.S. Constitution upheld?
One can only wonder what pricked Smith to seek her 15 minutes of fame after all the country has suffered with other mass killings. Smith said: “The issue is guns. The Second Amendment gives us the right to own guns, but it’s not the right to own any gun.” Smith’s statements clearly demonstrate her ignorance, and rather than the left celebrating her, they should be embarrassed by her.
Smith’s imbecilic words drove me to open my copy of the U.S. Constitution again to confirm: “Amendment II. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of people to bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It would seem that “arms” is open for interpretation, but the usual first thought is “guns,” although the word can also mean any item used as a weapon, offensive or defensive. But “the right of people … shall not be infringed” could not be clearer. Nowhere in the Constitution did I find any language whatsoever that defined what kind of “arms” could be owned by an individual.
Leftists horsing around with the Constitution is both arrogant and dangerous. Now we have the Molly Smith types throwing ignorance into the mix.
As long as Smith remains so uneducated and uninformed, she needs to keep her “artistic” directing inside her Arena Stage and stay off of the national stage.
Betty Arenson has lived in the SCV since 1968 and describes herself as a conservative who’s concerned about progressives’ politics and their impacts on the country, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She says she is unashamed to own a gun or a Bible, couldn’t care less about the color of the president’s skin, and demands that he uphold his oath to protect and follow the Constitution of the United States in its entirety. Her commentary publishes Fridays.
Arrogance, Ignorance Threaten U.S. Constitution | Commentary by Betty Arenson
