An election about immigration . . . and guns

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(A version of this column appears in the Oct. 10 edition of Firearms News — previously Shotgun News — on newsstands now.)

What’s it like when a people have allowed their own government to completely disarm them . . . . . and then that government turns around and admits tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young male Muslim immigrants from primitive backwaters who look at normally-clad Western women — out in the streets “unescorted” without being wrapped head to toe in black burkas — the way a pack of wolfhounds looks at a platter of T-bone steaks unattended on the picnic table?

(Do a Web search for “rapes by Muslim refugees,” or visit my own, recent post on “too much tolerance?” at https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=3413 . Look a little harder, and you’ll actually find Muslim spokesmen and enablers (including lady mayors) saying such women deserve to be raped -– in Germany, and Sweden, and Norway, and Finland -– for failing to dress up like mummies, as required by “Sharia Law.” Start with http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261380/cologne-mayor-victims-migrant-sex-assaults-you-robert-spencer , moving on from there to http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260275/muslim-rape-misunderstandings-come-europe-daniel-greenfield .)

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Not only that, we now learn the radical Islamic terrorists who killed hundreds in a series of coordinated attacks in France a year ago, snuck into the country disguised as . . . “refugees.” (
http://www.foreigndesknews.com/lisas-desk/majority-paris-attackers-entered-europe-posing-refugees/ .)

In the “That’s pathetic” department, as natives race to defend themselves from this massive wave of gang assaults by “refugees,” multiple news sources now report German dealers are completely out of pepper spray, while tens of thousands of Germans are racing to get permits to buy handguns that . . . (wait for it) . . . fire blanks.

“As of June 2016, there were 402,301 small arms carry permits in the National Weapons Register,” the Interior Ministry said, according to Die Welt.

This figure is almost 50 percent higher than last year. But here’s the kicker: “Small arms carry permits, or ‘Kleiner Waffenschein’ in German, are restricted to non-lethal self-defense weapons, such as blank-firing and gas pistols, and flare guns”!

Read it and weep: https://www.rt.com/news/354061-germany-weapons-licenses-increase/ .

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(Who’s facilitating the stealth conquest of Germany via admission of millions of violent Muslim rioters, rapists , and layabouts who -– far from wishing to assimilate and become Germans –- vow to convert all Europe into a “Muslim state under Sharia law”? Chancellor Angela Merkel. Who’s the “favorite foreign leader” of Hillary Clinton, who favors the unlimited establishment of Muslim colonies in America, and says an Australian-style gun confiscation here is “worth a look”? . . . Gee, um, let me see. Oh, that’s right. . . .

‘OPERATION CHOKE POINT’

It may be old news to some, but let’s not let a presidential election slip past without recalling just how corrupt and sneaky these Democratic weasels can be, using their regulatory powers to try and shut down the legitimate commerce in arms -– something they could never accomplish if they simply stood up and proposed a straightforward vote on disarming us.

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The Obama administration has still not made a clean breast of what they were up to -– or convinced us they’ve stopped -– with the regulatory operation known as “Operation Choke Point,” the 2013-2014 initiative designed to destroy several perfectly legal industries of which the East Coast liberal elite disapproves, including “payday lending,” “pawn shops,” and (of course) gun dealers, by “choking off” their ability to maintain commercial bank accounts.

“It turned out there was a list created by a Justice Department program called Operation Choke Point,” Fox News reported back on Jan. 16, 2015. “The list equates legal gun sellers . . . with escort services, Ponzi schemes, people who sell cable TV de-scramblers — and at least 30 other industries” that the Obama administration sought to destroy. (And they wonder why the Obama administration has a little problem with “job creation”?)

The program, which supposedly faced tough questioning in Congress (though we haven’t yet seen any bank regulators indicted) is designed to intimidate banks with the threat of heightened scrutiny and increased audits – even subpoenas — unless they shut down the bank accounts of those industries.

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Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., said Operation Choke Point began as a means of combating fraudulent businesses, but evolved into an arbitrary list of businesses targeted by bureaucrats in the DOJ and banking regulators purely on “moral” grounds (or perhaps they allowed commerce in untracked cash -– V.S.), backed by no legislation.

“What they’ve done is they put short-term lenders out of business, gun dealers out of business, ammunition manufacturers out of business. Because in America, if you can’t bank, you can’t do business,” Duffy told Michael Tobin of Fox News.

Mike Schuetz of Hawkins Guns in Northern Wisconsin became suspicious that something strange was happening after his local credit union notified him his account would be closed, Fox News reports. So he concealed an audio recorder and visited his credit union.

A manager and then a regional manager told Schuetz the credit union wanted his business, but he had indeed been placed on a list of “high risk” industries.

Fox News found several more businesses — from payment processors to ammunition dealers to pawn shop owners to short-term lenders — who all had their bank accounts closed. In response to an inquiry from Fox News, a spokesman for the DOJ wrote, “We do not target businesses operating within the bounds of the law, and we have no interest in pursuing or discouraging lawful conduct.”

Congressman Duffy of Wisconsin responds “That’s a bald-faced lie.”

Brian Wise, of the U.S. Consumer Coalition, pointed out the FDIC sits on the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, which is the driving force of Operation Choke Point and is chaired by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Also, starting in August of 2013, the DOJ issued subpoenas to banks and payment processors.

The spokesman claimed the FDIC has since rescinded the “high-risk merchants” list.

Wise, with the Consumer Coalition, says there are hundreds and even thousands of businesses across the nation who have had bank accounts closed, and they may not even know their bank was intimidated by Operation Choke Point. “This is one of the greatest abuses of power that the country has never heard of,” Wise said.

So, if you’re concerned about gun rights, it’s obvious you have only two choices at the polls next month. It’s either Republican Donald Trump (who has a concealed carry permit, who thinks teachers who undergo some safety training should be armed, and who says “gun-free zones are target practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill,” or else . . . what’s that? I see my researcher waving her arms in the air to get my attention; something about watching a video of an August interview with Libertarian vice-presidential candidate Bill Weld. And . . . Oh dear. It looks like we may have to make that “only one choice” . . .

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WILLIAM WELD, CREATIVE GUNSMITH

On August 3, 2016, the Libertarian candidate for vice president and former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, was interviewed by the small-time outfit REVOLT TV.

REVOLT TV political Correspondent Amrit Singh asked candidate Weld about guns. (Find the relevant clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnc_v9ZuEls or at http://www.guns.com/2016/08/12/libertarian-vp-nominee-william-weld-is-kinda-anti-gun-video/ .)

Former Gov. Weld explained “The five shot rifle, that is a standard military rifle, the problem is if you attach a clip to it that holds more shells and if you remove the pin so that it becomes an automatic weapon, and those are independent criminal offenses. That is when they become, essentially, a weapon of mass destruction. The problem with handguns probably is even worse than the problem of the AR15.”

Amrit Singh then asks “What can you do to help control this flow of guns, if anything?”

William Weld responds: “You shouldn’t have anybody who is on the terrorist watch list buy any gun at all.”

Now, I’m not an attorney; I wouldn’t want to give legal advice to readers who live in varying jurisdictions. I make no claim to keep track of every bizarre violation of the 2nd and 14th Amendments that may be enacted by the legislative bodies of such gun-grabbing enclaves as Chicago, the state of California, and Washington, D.C. So please consult with a knowledgeable attorney or gunsmith in your bailiwick before making any alterations to your (presumably) legal firearms.

But, having said that, is Bill Weld nuts?

Mr. Weld served as a federal criminal prosecutor from 1986 to 1988, and as governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997, changing his tune to sign into law in 1993 a package of useless and unconstitutional gun control measures which he had previously told voters he’d oppose, including a ban on normal-sized magazines, and a ban on semi-automatic rifles with certain cosmetic features which Dianne Feinstein considers “scary-looking.” He’s surely had plenty of time to study the gun laws he spent years enforcing or even creating.

But rifles with a five-cartridge capacity haven’t been “standard military issue” since about 1942, by which time the 8-shot, semi-automatic Garand had replaced the 5-shot, 1903 Springfield and 1917 Enfield for all American front-line uses. The Germans and Russians and British continued to use manual turn-bolt Mauser K-98s and Moisin-Nagants and .303 Enfields (the Enfield has a 10-round internal magazine) until about 1950, though by 1944 most of their troops were also switching to semi-automatic or “self-loading” rifles or low-cost machine pistols of various types when they could get them.

Removing the floorplate of a pre-1943, 5-shot manual turn-bolt rifle and replacing it with a larger magazine (not a “clip”) isn’t “a separate criminal offense” where I live. It’s not a “criminal offense,” at all. In fact, a 20-round extended mag for the K-98 is called a “trench magazine,” and they’re pretty readily available. Since the size of the magazine in no way changes the one-shot-per-trigger-pull operation of such a manual turn-bolt rifle, the tradeoff for such increased capacity is that you’d be making it more awkward to fire the rifle from a prone position, but this is not a “crime” in most jurisdictions.

Even weirder is the assertion that “If you remove the pin . . . it becomes an automatic weapon.”

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Please, Bill, could you show us a diagram explaining what “pin” I can remove to (illegally) turn my 1903 Springfield -– or, for that matter, even a modern, legal, semi-automatic AR-15 -– into a heavily regulated, Class III machine gun?

But even this bizarre rambling pales next to Gov. Weld’s assertion that the federal government can and should ban firearms purchases by anyone who’s on a “terrorist watch list.”

Terrorism is -– well, sorry, “terrible.” But this is not a list of people who have been accused of a crime, notified of the charges against them, and then provided a due-process opportunity to confront their accusers and insist that someone prove them guilty of anything. No, such lists are merely thrown together by some non-elected federal bureaucracy, often the infamous, blue-gloved, crotch-groping “TSA.”

If they felt like it, what’s to stop some future government gun-grabbers from deciding the entire membership rolls of Gun Owners of America, or Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, or even the National Rifle Association, should be placed on the “terrorism watch list”?

WHICHEVER WAY THE WIND BLOWS

Bill Weld doesn’t get to claim this is just some “slip of the tongue.” He’s been at this for years. Way back on Oct. 1, 1993, the New York Times reported:

“With voters growing increasingly fearful of gunfire on the streets, Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts reversed course this week and proposed some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country.

“Mr. Weld, a Republican who will run for re-election next year, called for a statewide ban on assault weapons — a proposal he opposed during his 1990 campaign — as well as a waiting period for buying handguns and a prohibition on handgun ownership by anyone under 21.”

(As usual, pardon me for pausing to point out that when the New York Times refers to “assault weapons,” they don’t mean assault weapons. They mean semi-automatic, one-shot-per-trigger-pull rifles and shotguns, including the 1936 M-1 Garand and the 1942 M-1 carbine.)

“His proposed legislation would also limit the number of handguns an individual could buy and would impose tough penalties for illegal gun sales and gun-related crimes.”

“The purpose of this common sense legislation is to remove deadly guns from our streets and to take weapons out of the hands of many teens who themselves are becoming deadly killers,” the Governor told the Times.

“As a candidate three years ago, Mr. Weld’s position on gun control had won him the endorsement of the Gun Owners’ Action League, a local lobbying group affiliated with the National Rifle Association,” The Times reported -– again, back in ’93. “And while many law enforcement officials this week praised his turnaround, his critics charged that the Governor was acting out of political expediency.”

Michael D. Yacino, the executive director of the Gun Owners’ Action League, said his group had been betrayed by the Governor, who is an avid hunter and owns four shotguns. “He broke his word to us,” Mr. Yacino told the Times. “I really can’t stand a liar. I don’t know why he’s done such a complete turnaround.”

The governor’s spokesman, Ray Howell, told the Times that the governor had not so much reversed his stance, as moderated it. Earlier, he said, the Governor had “thought gun control a less critical component” than imprisoning criminals. “He has supported the Brady Bill from its inception,” Mr. Howell added. . . .”

Thus ends today’s reading from The New York Times.

A man who’s supposedly “an avid hunter who owns four shotguns” believes a lot of Massachusetts “teens” were committing murder with “assault rifles”? Such is my admiration for American inventor John Moses Browning that I’d love to own a Browning Automatic Rifle -– a true assault rifle. But in my lifetime, thanks to the unconstitutional BATF ban on new manufacture or re-importing, the price of one of those things has gone up from about $6,000 to over $20,000. And the original true “assault rifle,” the German Fallschirmjagergewehr-42? Currently estimated by the Rock Island Auction Co. at $160,000 to $240,000. Start saving up your lunch money, teen-agers.

Just for good measure, Gov. Weld also volunteers, unsolicited, near the end of his little interview with Amrit Singh, that the party most likely to split in two in the current campaign is the Republican Party, adding with a smile, “It’s happened before, but one faction went on the elect Abraham Lincoln, so it’s a happy ending.”

Electing the worst tyrant in American history, who launched a war to conquer the Southern states despite the fact the Constitution gave him no authority to do so, who jailed Maryland state legislators without trial because he feared they might vote to secede, who caused the deaths of 600,000 Americans (read Thomas DiLorenzo) was “a happy ending”?

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And the Libertarian Party, at the behest of its recycled presidential nominee, Republican Gary Johnson (who admits he doesn’t even own a firearm, and who showed us how he really feels about the “eye teeth of liberty” when he unceremoniously dumped a replica of George Washington’s flintlock pistol in the trash moments after winning his party’s nomination ( http://www.ammoland.com/2016/06/libertarian-candidate-gary-johnson-throws-gift-gun-in-garbage/#axzz4Lkm6bpOb ), wants this guy to be one heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States.

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I’m sorry, I’ve voted for the Libertarian Party’s nominee in every presidential election at least since 1992, but if you’re concerned about gun rights, or if you want to see some limits placed on the no-questions-asked importation of millions more jihadi Muslim mass murders and gang rapists and “honor killers” — or especially if you’re concerned about both those issues — I don’t see any presidential ticket at this point that could give you any hope but that of Donald Trump and his running mate, that exemplary gun-rights supporter (including support for national reciprocity for concealed carry), the NRA A-rated Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence.

Vin Suprynowicz, the award-winning former columnist and editorial writer for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, blogs at www.vinsuprynowicz.com.

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9 Comments to “An election about immigration . . . and guns”

  1. v ardis Says:

    i look forward to your columns vin and the common sense contained in them, i hope more people are helped to see that as citizens of this country we only have 1 choice and this time its a very important choice, we as a country must stop the political classes from completing the total transformation that they started in 1988 of this country, from a country that was a powerhouse of manufacturing into a country of walmart shoppers who are being displaced by illegals in every facet except taxpaying , we need to put donald trump in the white house there is no question about that – if he only get half of his plans accomplished(illegals/trade/nato/jobs/taxes/america first) that will be leaps and bounds more then we have gotten from the republocats in the last 30yrs , and if we dont get donald – well we get hilliary chavez clinton and we will see this country reduced totally to 3rd world status before she is done
    if i wanted to live in Venezuela
    i would have moved to Venezuela
    keep up the struggle vin
    we fight now with words and ideas
    else we are forced to fight for our very lives and country with actions, not words

  2. Vince Says:

    Quite the coincidence isn’t it? Progressives want less guns and more troublemakers.

    And that overwhelming majority of peace loving Muslims, hm, hm. Those would be the ones whose deafening cry against the jihad we hear, right? Oh, wait.

    I’ve done exactly the same thing, voted Libertarian (or wrote in Ron Paul) since 1992. In 2008 I broke form, held my nose and voted Republican thinking perhaps that the excitement of victory might cause McCain to keel and leave Palin in the cat bird seat.

    Yeah, she seems a bit doofy at times but Obama is a marxist and I’ll take a ditz over one of those any day.

    Well written Vin, thank you!

  3. Suprynowicz: An Election About Immigration & Guns | Western Rifle Shooters Association Says:

    […] H/t to Ms. Wolfe for this election season piece by a long-time freedom fighter. […]

  4. Bruce Layne Says:

    In his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” Trump said he supports a ban on assault weapons and longer waiting periods on gun purchases. That’s your pro-gun defender of the second amendment?.

  5. Vin Suprynowicz » An election about immigration . . . and guns – The way I see things … Says:

    […] Source: Vin Suprynowicz » Blog Archive » An election about immigration . . . and guns […]

  6. Vin Says:

    Hi, Bruce — Yes.

    I’ve said repeatedly that Donald Trump is not my ideal candidate. His positions don’t seem to flow from a consistent, well-thought-out philosophy of the proper (limited) role of government. In other words, he’s not a principled laissez-faire Libertarian, which I greatly regret.

    Unfortunately, neither are Gary Johnson or Bill Weld, who in their current incarnation aren’t even doing the most basic job of Libertarian candidates, which is to explain to anyone who will listen why ALL gun and drug laws and income taxes (in fact, virtually all taxes) are evil and counterproductive; inviting tyranny while destroying prosperity.

    (Johnson/Weld say continuing the War on All Drugs but Marijuana is fine. Weld, at least, is with Dianne Feinstein on “assault weapons” bans. They want to add a national sales or “Value Added” tax ON TOP OF the income tax — see the example of Connecticut, where Gov. Lowell Weicker said he’d replace the state sales tax with a state income tax . . . and the Nutmeggers ended up with both.)

    Trump has changed his positions on many issues, as when he abandoned his past calls for a centralized nationalized health care system — which had previously put him closer to Hillary Clinton on that issue.

    Is he just saying whatever he needs to say to get elected? Actually, the way he’s invited total war from the media-political establishment tends to argue against that explanation. He’s rolling the dice on an uphill campaign AGAINST the Politically Correct, multicultural globalists. What’s unique about this year is that the GOP elite lost control and did NOT succeed in giving us another polite, gentlemanly, don’t-rock-the-boat loser like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush.

    Is Trump, instead, showing some flexibility as he feels his way on some of these issues? I’d surely feel more comfortable saying that about a 19-year-old college freshman than about a 70-year-old man. But it’s possible. He has not spent his life memorizing reassuring, misleading sound bites, after all . . . which is what we’re used to. “A gaffe! Another gaffe!” shout my brethren in the media. “Surely THIS one will sink him!”

    At the Trump campaign Web site at https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/constitution-and-second-amendment , candidate Trump says “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period.” He vows to “nominate United States Supreme Court justices that will abide by the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States that includes upholding the Second Amendment” and to “empower law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves. Law enforcement does a tremendous job, but they can’t be everywhere all of the time.”

    He adds: “Military bases and recruiting centers — to have a strong military, we need to allow them to defend themselves / National right to carry should be legal in all 50 states . . . / Gun and magazine bans — the government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own.” And he’s called for 50-state reciprocity on CCWs.

    Trump himself has a concealed carry permit. I have never known an anti-gun politician to do that — and advertise it — just to “fool us.” That tells me something.

    Gary Johnson owns no firearms — in fact, when he was given one recently, he publicly threw it in the trash. Hillary doesn’t need to carry; she’s had armed bodyguards (who she insults continually, being a general man-hater) for decades, and the BATF and those great FBI snipers to kill anyone who gets too troublesome.

    On the other hand, as I’ve also pointed out here, Donald Trump’s support for “stop-and-frisk” verges on the wacky. It throws away black (and civil libertarian) votes for no reason, since the courts will keep throwing it out. How can you be in favor of MORE self-defense concealed carry, with FEWER restrictions . . . and simultaneously support unconstitutional “frisks” without probable cause, the only conceivable real-world purpose of which is to “catch black men with weapons so we can run them in”?

    The man is a frustrating puzzle. But no one else is in a position to stop Hillary Clinton, who DOES have a consistent, well-thought-out political philosophy — to impoverish us and destroy more jobs by “soaking the rich” with tax rates up to 65 percent, to Balkanize this once great nation into squabbling factions (including a huge new influx of unassimilable Muslim jihadi “refugee” rapists and terror-bombers), to finish imposing “multi-cultural” Marxism while enriching herself by selling the presidency to the highest bidder, the same way she sold the powers of the Secretary of State to pile up $2 billion in the “Clinton Foundation.” ( http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263941/huma-abedin-hillarys-bribe-broker-matthew-vadum .)

    If you wonder where Hillary stands on protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms of military usefulness, spend just 60 seconds here, where the NRA explains what Hillary and Obama mean when they say the “Australian solution” is “worth a try”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGit3zF808 .

    Politics sucks. Anyone you vote for is likely to betray you willingly in part, and in part simply because the political system is (as a wise man once said) an advance auction of stolen goods, where any good law has to be decorated up like a Christmas tree by at least 217 members of Congress, “earning their bribes,” before it goes anywhere.

    It’s appealing to go hide in the woods, asserting “I’ll be fine because I’ve got my gun and my property rights; none of this stuff affects me.”

    Really? Are you sure? Take a look at what the multiculturalists are doing via Muslim immigration in Europe, with German mayors advising German women to start wearing Muslim garb, since otherwise if they get raped it’ll be their own fault: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/05/cologne-mayor-women-careful-migrant-mass-rapes-promises-guidance-can-prepare/ or https://pjmedia.com/blog/pc-europe-now-blaming-women-for-provoking-muslim-rapists/?singlepage=true .

    Do a Web search for Phil Haney, author of “See Something, Say Nothing.” Listen to him detail how the Obama administration has systematically gutted our ability to track & combat Islamic terror. If Hillary and her beloved Huma gets four or eight more years to double down on that — if her tag-team partners in the media see they can get away with what they’re doing to Trump this year — how much harder will it be to “reverse course” in 2024?

    Now tell me any other way to stop Hillary Clinton — and the increasingly desperate political-media combine that supports her — other than electing Donald Trump.

    As Wayne LaPierre says: “If she could, Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine, run an entire national security industry into the ground and put your name on a government registration list. If she gets her hands on the Supreme Court and stacks it with just one more justice, every total gun ban she dreams — every confiscation scheme she craves — will stand up in her court and we’ll be kissing our Second Amendment freedom goodbye.

    “Folks, I’m not kidding. If she gets even one Supreme Court nomination, Hillary’s court will hold that the Second Amendment is a government right — not an individual right — and you can kiss your guns goodbye.”

    It’s now a two-way race, Bruce. That’s YOUR “pro-gun defender of the second amendment?”

    — V.S.

  7. Al Liguori Says:

    Breathless—even afraid—of sharia? Awaken to halacha and the noahide deceit: http://judaism.is/noahide-deceit.html

  8. Libertarian Party Is Controlled Opposition | thinkpatriot Says:

    […] Added yet later : Johnson/Weld do not believe in the 2nd Amendment, and thus do not believe in Personal Liberty. Not at all libertarian, more Republic light merging with progressive ideology. We are left with Donald Trump as the peace candidate, relative to Clinton, and freedom candidate, relative to Libertarian and Green candidates.  If Clinton, the choice is whether they can get WWIII going before the citizens overthrow that government. […]

  9. Daily Reading #2 | thinkpatriot Says:

    […] An election about immigration . . . and guns […]