One of the lines that I have borrowed from radio talk show host Dennis Prager is this: “I prefer clarity to agreement,” which means that I would rather we both honestly understand one another’s true positions even when we fundamentally disagree with one another than that we come to some misleading politically-worded compromise following a “dialogue.”
I came across the following today and thought it worth posting. The author is a Democrat politician and clearly reveals his own personal bias at the outset. But he also points out that even his own side has “routinely disappointed” him and then proceeds to offer five very fair questions for both sides in the gun control debate. I will interact with him on the questions he poses for my position, in which I state my own bias that the 2nd Amendment exists for a very important reason and that as long as we intend to remain in any meaningful way connected to our Constitution, we need to safeguard the right for citizens to keep and bear arms and fight efforts to infringe on that right:
Questions you should ask politicians about guns (according to a politician)
By Mike Gatto
Feb 27, 2018 | 10:30 AMMy father was murdered by a handgun-wielding assailant, so the firearms debate is personal for me. And I’m routinely disappointed by how disingenuous it is on both sides. I worry that each party just wants to mobilize its base and raise campaign funds rather than solve tough policy problems.
Next time you hear a politician offer a simplistic solution, here are some questions to ask.
If the politician favors gun control:
1. What will tougher laws accomplish when there are already roughly two guns in circulation for every American adult? Are you proposing the mass seizure of firearms? It’s not just the 2nd Amendment that’s at issue, but the 5th, which prohibits the taking of private property without compensation.
2. You say you favor an “assault weapon” ban, but most murders in the U.S. are committed using handguns. Do you have a separate plan to address handgun violence (which occurs daily)?3. For that matter, do you realize that there is no sound legal or technical definition of an “assault weapon?” The 1994 ban, which expired in 2004, was rife with loopholes. Rather than political catchwords, explain your intentions using terms that have a precise meaning, like “semiautomatic.”
4. You’ve suggested that the 2nd Amendment should be read to protect only the muskets and rudimentary rifles extant at the time the Constitution was drafted. Do you realize how problematic this logic is? Do you believe the 1st Amendment should protect print newspapers but not television broadcasts, web-based journalism, or social-media posts?
5. The Constitution belongs to the people of the United States, and if the requisite supermajorities agree, the people can amend it to reflect changing mores. So have the guts to be honest: Do you believe we should repeal the 2nd Amendment?If the politician does not favor gun control:
1. You’ve offered “thoughts and prayers” for the victims. Do you realize how trite that sounds? Could you please take the initiative to change your phrasing once in a while? And is there anything besides thinking and praying that you believe you can do?
2. You say you believe the solution is not to pass more gun laws, but to enforce the ones we already have on the books. So what have you done to insist that the relevant agencies do just that?
3. According to the National Rifle Assn., only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. You’ve extended that logic to schools, advocating that we arm teachers. But most mass shootings happen so fast, there isn’t much time to react. I can’t imagine my first-grade teacher stopping a determined killer, and I don’t believe parents want schools to look like prisons. Besides, is it fair to turn teachers into security guards? Do you really believe arming educators is the solution?
4. The 2nd Amendment confers a right to bear arms, but no constitutional right, even free speech, is absolute. So if you make blanket statements about the 2nd Amendment, why don’t you tell us where you draw the line?
5. Background checks won’t end gun violence. But they can stop a portion of the mentally ill population (or criminals or domestic abusers) from purchasing guns legally. How can you argue that a better system won’t prevent at least some crimes?
Even under pressure, I fear politicians on both sides are neither honest nor realistic on this issue.
But here’s what we can do. The low-hanging fruit if we want to lower rates of gun violence is to address drug use and mental health problems. Large percentages of those incarcerated for violent crimes committed those acts under the influence of drugs or to obtain money to buy drugs. And a large percentage of mass shooters are mentally ill. So try to notice the signs of mental illness and addiction, and do whatever possible to get friends and family the help they need.
Meanwhile, by all means, ask politicians those tough questions.Mike Gatto, a Democrat, served four terms in the California Assembly. He is an attorney and legislator in residence at USC’s Unruh Institute of Politics. Twitter: @mikegatto
I have not met Mike Gatto and frankly have never heard of him. But I have respect for this man because I believe he tries to be equally tough on both sides in this debate and I have the sense that he too prefers clarity to bogus agreements that are nothing but words loaded with loopholes intended to deceive the public into believing that something was done when in fact it wasn’t.
I will deal with Mike Gatto’s “If the politician does not favor gun control” point-by-point:
FIRST, “thoughts” are surely trite, but “prayers” are not to anyone who believes in God and believes that He created us in His image and loves us. Is this an open acknowledgement that Democrats don’t believe in God or in the power of prayer? Because it frankly seems obvious to me at this point that the Democratic Party has radically turned into a secular humanist party and “God” is a nice-sounding thing for these people to say much the way Adolf Hitler referred to God and Christianity as a cynical way to cloak a clearly ungodly thing with the language of pseudo-religiousity.
But having stated that, let me proceed from there: we are at an impossible point with the mainstream Democrat Party – by which I now mean radically liberal (when even the reliably liberal Dianne Feinstein is not NEARLY “liberal” enough for this radical Democratic Party today) – in which they very CLEARLY want to first erode and undermine and ultimately strip the 2nd Amendment of having any actual force or meaning. And so in this climate, every single thing we give them is simply one step closer to what I truly believe is a fascist goal: every single on of the 22 former totalitarian communist regimes and currently including the five current totalitarian communist regimes stripped their people of the right to keep and bear arms. Every single one of them. And when 82% of communist countries are “former” communist countries, I submit that this is just one of many powerful evidences that this system does not work. Adolf Hitler stated, “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjugated races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjugated races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police.” This is the clear totalitarian mindset, to strip people who could be a threat to your regime – such as the people you intend to work to death in death camps – to have access to weapons to fight back against tyranny.
I simply submit that what the Democrats want is opposed to the very heart of what our founding fathers believed was most important to a free society. And we’re seeing it now very starkly as Democrats not only oppose the guns which guarantee my right to free speech, but the very free speech and the right to my religious beliefs protected by the 1st Amendment. We have seen tyrannous impositions on religious belief protected by the First Amendment in the forms of direct and very personal systematic attacks in the name of abortion and homosexuality. Barack Obama repeatedly attacked “The Little Sisters of the Poor” for the thought crime of being pro-life. As just one of his many direct attacks on people who merely tried to follow the crystal-clear teachings of their ancient religion which in fact was the foundation of our nation. And now on our universities that were enshrined as institutions cherishing freedom of thought, ideas and speech, we are increasingly seeing the rabid left essentially scream that anyone who disagrees with them should not have the right to speak. We are now watching a terrifying tactic playing out as liberal activist violently protest conservative speech and literally riot; which is followed by liberal administrators declaring that because liberals are vicious fascist, they have no choice but to ban the conservative right to free speech which these administrators themselves also oppose! Democrats today represent a clear and present danger to everything our founding fathers established.
The framers of the Constitution enshrined the 1st Amendment first because free speech which is the heart of all true freedom was their most cherished goal; and they enshrined the 2nd Amendment right after it because they correctly viewed the right of the individual to keep and bear arms as the greatest safeguard of the 1st Amendment. The 2nd Amendment was a reaction against government tyranny.
We have a situation in which we are seeing more shootings not because there are more guns than there were fifty years ago. In fact there actually were more guns per capital fifty years ago than there are today, and with fewer gun restrictions/laws. And interestingly, overall gun crime has actually gone DOWN in the years since 1993 when Bill Clinton first began to terrorize the American people into starting to buy guns in the fear that their rights would soon be taken away (a policy doubled-down upon by Barack Obama which caused another frenzy of gun purchasing). The result of Bill Clinton’s efforts was the 1994 Assault Weapons ban which was documented to have produced absolutely nothing. And when Democrats keep screaming at us “to do something,” why shouldn’t the onus be upon them to prove that their stripping me of my constitutionally guaranteed rights will actually produce what they falsely claim it will????
But let me get back to the paragraph that precedes the immediately above: we are seeing our society devolve – I believe because of the secular humanism and atheism and the abortion mentality that have created a zeitgeist of nihilism. Nothing is sacred, there is no ultimate judgment, and if I am unhappy there is no reason why I shouldn’t “exercise my right to choose” and “my right to my own body” and start killing as many people as I can just like I learned to do on television programs and movies and video games created by liberals have taught me to do. They have desensitized us to violence because they claimed they had a right to do that even when no, they did NOT have such a right! And now they want to take away the most necessary rights that were guaranteed by our Constitution. Sixty million innocent human beings are now dead, making the Democratic Party ten times more murderous than were the Nazis with the Jews in the Holocaust. Democrats have an absolutely morally vicious agenda. And so, even as Democrats have in fact caused people to become more violent by taking away God and divine morality, I still prefer the violence that they have unleashed to the greater violence they surely WILL unleash in the years that would follow when I wouldn’t have the means to resist them when they come after me the same way Hitler came after Jews and Democrats came after babies.
And so when every single “gun control” measure is merely one more small step toward the giant step for repealing the 2nd Amendment (just like Lenin and Stalin did, just like Hitler did, just like Chairman Mao did, just like the Kim dynasty did), I will fight it tooth and nail. It comes down to this: if you want us to come your way with more common-sense gun control measures, then YOU have to come our way with more definitive pro-2nd Amendment measures. As long as any repeal of the 2nd Amendment is on the damn table, as long as Democrat activists are allowed to keep agitating to something that Hitler and Stalin and Mao failed to be able to do in this country, as you keep hysterically screaming that we need to “do something” no matter how irrational and useless that something is.
SECOND, are you seriously trying to tell me that the refusal to follow the damn law as it already exist on the damn books is somehow OUR fault, you who rabidly fly in the face of THE LAW when it comes to illegal immigration???? Are you seriously that dishonest, that much of a hypocrite???? It’s not just illegal immigration; you did the same thing with our drug laws and a whole host of other laws. We’re now entering the rabid hysterical madness of the leftist “Me Too” movement, but the liberals driving this movement conveniently forget great moments in history when they were the ones fighting FOR powerful sexual predators, such as when Roman Polanski was cheered with a standing ovation by Hollywood liberals for drugging and sodomizing a 13-year old minor girl. Such as when first Ted Kennedy literally abandoned a young girl to die a miserable death and then returned to his party and such as when Bill Clinton was demonstrated to be a serial sexual predator for years and then was protected by Democrats after saying, “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is,” incredibly telling the American people that since he wasn’t in fact actually having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky at the precise nanosecond that he claimed he hadn’t had sex, that in fact he was somehow being honest in saying there is no sexual relationship. The fact of the matter is that Democrats have been the anti-law and the anti-order party for a generation. The fact is that Obama mass-pardoned gun-toting criminals on a regular basis. The fact is that Obama simply refused to prosecute criminals for violating all kinds of gun laws even as he routinely whined for more gun laws. And the fact is that liberal-and-Democrat-dominated cities such as Chicago are notorious for refusing to prosecute gun criminals. So don’t you Democrats damn refuse to apply the law in your Democrat Party bastions and then blame me for it.
Yes, we need to enforce our laws. Republicans believe that; it’s Democrats who need to learn that. When a Democrat-Party-owned liberal state like California becomes a “sanctuary state” in direct opposition to our clear federal laws, when a Democrat, liberal mayor actively defies and interferes with federal law and literally warns criminals that the law is coming for them so they can continue to get away with their violation of federal law – and you actually tolerate that and don’t demand she resign immediately – you don’t get to lecture me about that and not have me point out what a lying, no-good, dirty rotten hypocrite fascist you are. And there is simply no point trying to negotiate with the likes of you because you are totally and utterly devoid of anything even close to honor or virtue or decency or honesty or integrity.
In other words, Mike Gatto’s number 2 FAR more applies to Democrats than it does to Republicans. Don’t you DARE pin that on us. As Jesus put it, look at the damn log in your OWN eye before you mention the speck in mine. So there are actually SIX objections to gun control that Democrats have to answer and only four we have to respond to – EVEN FROM A LIBERAL.
THIRD, are you seriously trying to claim that since gun violence can happen quickly, that there is therefore no reason to try to react to that violence as quickly as possible? There isn’t much time to react, so let’s not react at all. That would be insane, but that is your prima facie argument. No, let’s react. Let’s get that good guy with a gun in as quickly as humanly possible to stop any bad guy with a gun. If you’re going to lecture me that the only way to deal with this is to take away everybody’s right to own a gun as the only possible way to deal with the possibility of a bad guy getting a gun, please refer to the Constitution. That is not an option. And a far better option that actually IS Constitutional is to end “gun free zones” given the fact that 98% of all mass shootings in our history have happened in gun free zones. There’s a reason psychos are attracted to gun free zones for the same reason that there’s a reason that burglars don’t enter homes with the owner pointing shotguns at their faces. Like the death penalty that Democrats refuse to allow, armed citizens is a deterrent to tyranny. It simply is. And so, no, while I am not demanding that every single 1st grade teacher strap a .44 magnum to their belts, I AM saying that there surely ARE teachers and staff members who would be willing to be armed to protect their children.
This argument that “I am a teacher and teaching is fundamentally incompatible with protecting children” is again frankly morally insane. I frankly would prefer a teacher who would be willing to protect me to one who militantly refuses to protect me. Yes, please give me the teacher who loves his or her students enough to protect them. And the state of Texas is just one state that believe it or not already found that yes there are TOO teachers who are willing to protect their students.
We can install metal detectors and that would do some good. But when you start paying full-time active-duty police officers to be on site at a school all day, you will drive up the cost of education. And maybe homeschooling kids is then the best option and we should simply fire all ya’all teachers if you won’t lift a finger to protect kids and teach our children in the safety of our homes since you insist on remaining a gun-free zone where 98% of all shootings have happened.
So yes, it IS fair to turn our teachers into security guards. At least if they’re going to claim that they care about their kids rather than their damn leftist Stalinist ideology. Okay?
Or maybe an even MORE unacceptable alternative to these same leftist teachers is that they return to teaching about God and about the divine morality that we used to teach back in the day when our schools weren’t shooting galleries????
FOURTH, this idea that “the 2nd Amendment isn’t absolute” is actually quite laughable when you consider something called “facts.” You see, I happen to know that we already have ALL DAMN KINDS OF LIMITS on the 2nd Amendment. Or else, for instance, I’d have a damned machine gun and I’d be free to shoot any liberal who pissed me off. We have at least TEN MAJOR FEDERAL GUN LAWS not to mention the thousands of state gun laws.
But here’s the funny thing, since you don’t believe in “absolute rights” then I’m glad to hear you’re willing to have a Voter ID card!!!! No? Because you actually DO believe in “absolute rights” even for illegal immigrants and even for felons???? Hey, Nazis, did you know the Nazi Party was ELECTED by voters???? Did you know that the Palestinian people used their right to vote to elect a terrorist group as their leaders????
Homosexuals have absolute rights even to marriage as leftist fascist and yes-homosexual-and-therefore-personally-biased judges simply threw out and disregarded the clear will of the people even in liberal states like California with Proposition 8. The left similarly simply ignored all previous morality as well as any pretense to “science” and has created 63 genders and given them absolute rights that boggle the damn mind. When a girl who is trying to become a boy and pumping herself full of male hormones is allowed to win the girls wrestling championship because she had some kind of damned “absolute right” to compete as a whatever-the-hell-she-is, it is so way past time for you liberals to look in the damn mirror when you whine about “absolute rights” that you make me puke.
The fact is that we conservatives and even we conservative NRA members are FAR more likely to limit the right to keep and bear arms than you have been with all your wicked rights. Capeesh????
I’ll take to you about sensible limits on guns the day AFTER you stop believing that any of your fellow liberals should have any right to believe you have “absolute rights,” let alone the absolute right to keep seeking to take away my constitutionally enshrined rights even as you invent right after right after right to murder your own babies, practice immoral and depraved behaviors, etc.
FIFTH, background checks. We’ve already got them, flying in the face of your frankly incredibly ridiculous argument number 4. above. But at this point, we aren’t allowed to go into somebody’s medical records because fascist liberal judges who dreamed of a world with 60 million murdered babies in America invented “the right to privacy.” At least, unless I want to be “private” about my 2nd Amendment RIGHT which unlike the “right” to abortion actually IS a right.
If you actually would like to end the carnage, please stop being wicked and morally insane and END ABORTION LOGIC. END ABORTION MENTALITY. And we’ll start with this “right to privacy” which was the first “penumbra and emanations”-fake-right invented by judges as they stared into their own crystal ball to visualize a right that had never before existed so they could impose whatever the hell “right” they wanted.
Hey, Democrat, my mental health is as much a private matter between me and my doctor as your abortion is a private matter between you and your doctor. I’m crazy and you’re a murderer and we’re both about to do something truly evil and take another human being’s life.
And maybe you moral monsters should end this vicious cycle.
So let’s END abortion privacy rights which would cause the “right” to abortion to topple like a rotten, termite-infested foundation that it is. And then we can go into the medical records of people requesting to buy a gun and say, “Wait a minute! This man is NUTS! Oh, HELL no!”
So Democrats, being fascist hypocrites, of course want “the right to privacy” to murder babies, but they want to take away the same right so they can take away the 2nd Amendment. Bullcrap. Just bullcrap.
But until then, let us understand that liberals gave the next shooter the right to privacy, the right to choose, the freedom over his own body. And their acts are merely retroactive abortions.
On these issues, kindly deal with the great big fat giant logs in your own eyes, Democrats.