Whatever It Takes
Keith_Indy on Feb 15 2008 at 12:53 pm | Filed under: Election 2008, Firearms, Keith's Page
Talk about trying to speak to both sides of the fence. He’s talking in all the right code words though, and that should have people worried. “Whatever it takes” “Commonsense regulation” The one thing I agree with him 100% on is that the Constitution PROTECTS an individual right to bear arms.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UQTAS80&show_article=1
Barack Obama said Friday that the country must do “whatever it takes” to eradicate gun violence following a campus shooting in his home state, but he believes in an individual’s right to bear arms.
Obama said he spoke to Northern Illinois University’s president Friday morning by phone and offered whatever help his Senate office could provide in the investigation and improving campus security. The Democratic presidential candidate spoke about the Illinois shooting to reporters while campaigning in neighboring Wisconsin.
The senator, a former constitutional law instructor, said some scholars argue the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees gun ownerships only to militias, but he believes it grants individual gun rights.
“I think there is an individual right to bear arms, but it’s subject to commonsense regulation” like background checks, he said during a news conference.
His views on gun control are worrying however.
While in the IL State Assembly he supported the “Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.”
That would include handguns other than revolvers, and single shot pistols. So, that would make 75% of new handguns illegal, right off the bat. That would also make many sporting firearms illegal, including some shotguns.
And it still wouldn’t accomplish a single thing, other than making many gun owners criminals themselves. The results around the country, and in other countries, hasn’t shown most gun control schemes to be an effective method of reducing crime.
This latest spree killing in IL is a perfect example of this. IL requires “All Illinois residents who buy or possess firearms are required by law to have a valid FOID card.” So this guy, if he possessed his firearms legally, had to have gone through some sort of validation process with the IL State Police. That he slipped through the cracks somehow is inevitable. But, as Synova said, to have true freedom, you sometimes have to trust the untrustworthy.
Then, however he obtained his firearms, he entered the “gun free zone” of the college campus, and started shooting. No one was there to respond with force to his force, and he probably knew that would be the case. If such unenforceable laws worked, why not just declare that America is a “criminal free zone,” and have all crime go away.
It is sometimes said that it’s better to have 100 guilty people go free so that 1 innocent person wont be wrongly convicted. Shouldn’t the same calculus apply to other activities and issues.
And this is why you should never rely on the police to protect you from random violence.
Sphere: Related ContentPolice said he reloaded the shotgun in a shooting that lasted less than five minutes, before he took his own life. Police arrived on the scene within two minutes of the first reports, but it was too late to stop the gunman.
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