CCRKBA challenges mayors to ‘close government gun loophole’
Posted in Sound Off Soapbox by R Lee Wrights on February 19th, 2007 by CCRKBA staff
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today called on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his colleagues in the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” coalition to devote all their resources to closing the government gun loophole.
The Washington Post this week revealed that between February 2002 and September 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported 160 missing firearms. That is in addition to the 352 missing guns the FBI reported lost or stolen in a similar audit in 2002. The newspaper reported that at least 18 of those guns later turned up in connection with criminal investigations, and several had been used in armed robberies.
“Bloomberg and his buddies have been railing about all of the illegal guns they want to take off the streets,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Here’s an opportunity for them to put their energy into an effort that will not infringe in the least on the individual citizen’s right to keep and bear arms.
“The FBI’s missing guns are only the tip of the iceberg,” Gottlieb continued. “In 2003, we know that an audit by the General Accounting Office revealed that some 18 different federal agencies had reported more than 800 guns missing, and that included 19 submachine guns, 541 handguns and assorted rifles and shotguns. And let’s not forget guns lost by, or stolen from, local police agencies, including the 9mm Glock pistol carelessly left by Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske in his parked car on a downtown Seattle street more than two years ago.
“Don’t tell us about some mythical gun show loophole that needs closing,” he observed. “We obviously have a far more serious problem of theft and loss of firearms in our own law enforcement community, and until that problem is solved, Bloomberg and his anti-gun soul mates on Capitol Hill and in mayor’s offices around the country need to leave law-abiding citizens alone.”
Copyright © 2007 Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, All Rights Reserved.
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
James Madison Building
12500 N.E. Tenth Place
Bellevue, WA 98005
Toll Free: 800-426-4302
E-mail: InformationRequest@ccrkba.org
Kent McManigal said,
February 19, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
Why can’t I ever find any of these missing guns lying around? Perhaps they were not “lost” so much as “sold” or “stolen” by the agents.
JNagarya said,
February 21, 2007 @ 6:10 am
It’s amazing the number of individuals who, having no education in actual law, are nonetheless willing to spout off about a “Right” which has never existed under the US Constitution.
Who determines “original intent”? Those who debated and wrote that which became the Second Amendment? Or a single-issue private gun-industry-front organization? Those who think about it know which. Those who have an actual education in law do not go to their favorite wishing well — in this instance the NRA — for the actual law on this issue.
One goes, instead, to the debates by the framers of that which became the “Bill of Rights,” and the Second Amendment. And when one does that — goes to the actual words debated and written by those framers — one learns that the Second has nothing whatever to do with “individual” anything. More pointedly: one discovers they debated an “individual” “right” — that of the “religiously scrupulous of bearing arms PERSON — individual — to NOT be compelled to bear arms. Ya see — as is also made crystal clear by those debates — the Second has only to do with well regulated militia — which is the Founders’ alternative to a standing army. And that the well regulated militia is not merely regulated UNDER law, but the head of it is the state’s governor. Obviously, the constitutional head of the militia is not going to “defend against” or attack the gov’t of which he is — also head.
Even good historians not trained in law know that the purpose of the Second was two-fold: first, to assure the states they could keep their militia — the paranoids who worried about that issue were pointing to the Militia Clauses in Art. I of the US Constitution, which firmly keeps the states’ militias UNDER the umb of civilian law. Second, to get the support of the anti-Federalists — those who opposed ratification of the Constitution — for ratification, which was necessary to that end.
So it’s real simple: the Second was to “comfort” the anti-Federalists with the guarantee that the states’ could keep their militias; and to get their support for ratification.
The debates are readily available to any of the intellectually honest to read for themselves; and in them they will find the terms “people” — which is obviously plurar — and “person” — which is obviously individual — in the last of the several evolving drafts of that which became the Second. And the individual in that draft “shall not be COMPELLED to bear arms” — i.e., would be exempted from militia DUTY, which was not voluntary.
Now consider this fact: No sane, non-suicidal society leaves dangerous substances and objects lying around unregulated. The dangerous “objects” obviously includes guns. Thus, not only is the Second irrelevant to the issue of private, individual ownership of gunes; gun regulation/control has existed in law since the advent of guns. And those who engaged in gun control — and even “grabbing” (that’s why there was no “counterrevolution”) — included the Founders and Framers themselves. See, as example, on the Library of Congress website, “The Tory Act” (adopted and published by the same Continental Congress which adopted and published the Declaration of Independence), in which that Congress wrote: “It is the opinion of this ongress that they [i.e., Tories] be disarmed.”
And they were disarmed, which is why there was no “counterrevolution”.
Contemplate the absence of sanity, as indicated above, and ignorance of both the history of the Second, and the “original intent” of it as made crystal clear in the debates, and the consequences of those: an anti-Constitutionalism/anti-Americanism which is falsely touted as “patriotism” by those who forget that our gov’t consists of “We the People”. Are “We the People” your enemy?