What Hillary Has In Mind Is Far More Devious Than Abolishing The Second Amendment

by Bob Owens: Hillary Clinton has—for better or worst—decided to run as the first major party candidate in the history of the United States to make hollowing out core constitutional rights a key plank in her presidential platform.

The basic human right to keep and bear arms for one’s defense reflected in the Second Amendment has inexplicably become a core target of Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. It’s a position even more extreme than Clinton’s gun control positions in the 1990s and early 2000s, and far more extreme than her near-Republican turn as a candidate she ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democrat primaries.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Clinton favored a punitive 25% tax on handguns designed to make it cost prohibitive for poor people—you can chose to read that as “minorities” and you wouldn’t be wrong—to obtain pistols and revolvers for personal defense. She also wanted to drive most small gun dealers out of business by imposing a an exorbitant $2,500 licensing fee. Clinton was also a fan of “universal” background checks at this time, and supported a bill to require federal registration of every new gun sold.

Clinton backed off her zealous support of gun control as she ran for President in 2008, attempting to position herself as a moderate against an upstart U.S. Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Clinton went so far as to mock Obama for his infamous “bitter clingers” comment, to no avail.

She still lost.

Eight years after that painful defeat and after a dangerous turn as Secretary of State under her formal rival, Clinton emerged in 2015 as a candidate convinced that she could win running far to the left of both her 2008 candidacy and even her extreme views of the 1990s.

Clinton’s public views on the human right to bear arms have not just shifted radically to a statist bent; she has also made that desire to attack this core right one of the driving focuses of her 2016 campaign. On Clinton’s behalf, Democrats went so far as to write the Second Amendment out of existence in their 2016 party platform, just two weeks ago.

It’s a bizarre decision to make at a time when gun sales are at an all time high, where more Americans than ever before have concealed carry permits, gun rights are expanding across most of the United States, and gun ownership has rapidly shifted away from being largely a rural white male tradition (“Gun Culture 1.0”) to one where the fastest growing demographics are younger, urban, and female ( the much-discussed “Gun Culture 2.0”).

This celebration of the human right to bear arms has been a joyous one. Shooting sports are the fastest growing high school sports in the United States, and different shooting sports such as IDPA, three-gun and the Precision Rifle Series are growing incredibly fast.

More than 100 million new firearms have entered the market just during President Obama’s administration, leading him to being amusingly celebrated as “the greatest gun salesman of all time,” even among his allies in the media.

And while 1/3 of the firearms in this nation joined the market within less than a decade, much to the alarm and disgust of gun control supporters, guess what happened to violent crime?

It’s plummeted. So have accidents with firearms.

The media hype about a spike in mass shootings is likewise a lie, or more precisely, “a redefined truth.” The traditional definition of a mass shooting has always been “four or more people killed in a single event that is not a familicide, terrorist attack, or a gang-related event.” Within the past two years, however, the mainstream media arbitrarily switched to completely different definition created by a self-described anti-gun propagandist, where any shooting in which four people are injured is mass shooting.

Now, when Pookie does a drive by of a rival gang and wounds Miguel, Jose, and Clarence, but Clarence gets a round off in return and wings Pookie, that’s now a “mass shooting,” whereas before, it was just one incident on an average Friday in Barack Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago.

According to this new hysteria-inducing definition of “mass shootings” there were more than 400 mass shootings in the United States in 2015. In reality there were four mass shootings in the United States in all of 2015.

The last time we actually had a significant spike in violent crime, do you want to know who was President?

Another Clinton.

It’s clear that Hillary’s much-publicized assault on the human right of individuals to bear arms has worried both her handlers and her allies in the mainstream media.

Just today, there are three different articles by three different news organizations attempting to downplay the radical nature of her attacks on this core constitutional and human right.

Bloomberg News has concocted a Q & A in an effort to position Clinton’s stance as a moderate one. CNN posted an article attempting to reassure the fast-growing number of gun owning Democrats that candidate Clinton isn’t looking to take their guns in a piece that intentionally glosses over what hillary herself has made a core argument in her attack on gun rights. Likewise, Kevin Drum has taken to the digital pages of Mother Jones in an attempt to moderate Hillary Clinton’s true goals towards gun rights so that the increasing number of liberal gun owners won’t stay home in November.

All of these media outlets—and many others, curiously enough—are making the same strawman defense of Clinton, by noting the technical inaccuracy of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s claim that “Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment.”

Donald Trump is categorically wrong here.

Hillary Clinton knows that there is ever-lessening support for abolishing the Second Amendment as tens of thousands of Americans decide to becoming gun owners every single day (an average of 72,243 guns have been sold every day in 2016 , more than 16 million through July). She also knows that there is not nearly enough support in Congress or among the states to abolish a core constitutional right.

She has instead decided upon an equally effective, but far more devious approach that doesn’t require the overwhelming support of the states or the American people.

At the heart of Hillary Clinton’s attack on the human right of armed self-defense is her full-frontal assault on the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a mouthful more easily remembered as the PLCAA.

Hillary Clinton and several allies have been consistently focusing on the PLCAA for months, claiming that it provides the firearms industry “immunity” from being held responsible for its actions.

This is a bold, direct, and intentional lie to the American people from Hillary Clinton.

Gun makers and sellers can be sued, and are being sued right now for both negligence and criminal actions.

Remington is presently negotiating a class-action settlement that will cost them millions over a defective trigger design. They’re also being sued as the parent company of Bushmaster in a case resulting from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Century Arms is now battling a lawsuit over safeties that allegedly don’t work.

Badger Guns just lost a famous case for selling guns to an obvious straw purchaser, who used the gun to shoot two police officers.

The owner of Stag Arms has been banned from the industry for life and his former company hit with $500,000 in fines for paperwork violations.

The PLCAA has never offered blanket immunity to the industry as Hillary Clinton has repeatedly claimed. As the cases above clearly show, manufacturers and sellers who make defective products or who act criminally can of course be sued, just like any other business.

All that PLCAA does is prevent gun control zealots from filing waves of frivolous lawsuits meant to bankrupt retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers, destroying the gun industry via frivolous lawsuits since they can’t get the public to agree to ban guns.

Let’s be perfectly clear: the only reason to repeal the PLCAA is so that deep-pocketed gun control groups financed by anti-gun billionaires can file wave after wave of frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt manufacturers, distributors, and gun dealers. Whether manufacturers are guilty of any crimes is beside the point; they will be bankrupted by having to pay teams of lawyers millions of dollars to defend them.

Clinton’s goal of removing the PLCAA exist for no other reason that to hollow out the right to bear arms by bankrupting the industry through a wave of frivolous lawsuits.

Tell me, my fellow Americans, which is more devious?

Is it more repulsive to honestly claim to the world that you want to abolish the Second Amendment so that voters can judge you an on the merits of your position, or is it more vile to claim to “respect the traditions” of gun owners, while plotting to destroy the entire industry and render the right impossible to exercise?
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Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com. A long-time shooting enthusiast, he began blogging as a North Carolina native in New York. His personal blog i bob-owens.com, and he can be found on Twitter at @bob_owens.

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