Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (best e reader for epub TXT) 📗

precedent that would govern Second Amendment jurisprudence and legislation for almost seventy years.9

A Rose by Any Other Name

Would Not Smell as Sweet

The reign of United States v. Miller allowed both the state and federal governments to infringe continuously upon the fundamental right of the people to keep and bear arms. In 1968 came the Gun Control Act and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which prohibited firearm ownership by certain individuals, including those under eighteen years of age, and most importantly prohibited the private sales of guns between the residents of different states, as well as establishing a national gun licensing system. Of course, the Acts were aptly named, the government having incorporated the most beneficent of motives in the title. Who would not want the streets of their neighborhoods to be safer?

The Acts also created the “sporting use” test, which required that any imported firearms “be generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes, excluding surplus military firearms.” The subjectivity of such a test permitted the government to choose what was sport and resulted in a ban on firearms used for popular gun sports not recognized by the law enforcement agencies. Eerily enough, large portions of the Gun Control Act were almost identical to those of the Control Acts of Nazi Germany, which resulted in the disarming of an entire population of Jews.10

The Gun Control Act of 1968 spawned a variety of similar state regulations, which resulted in an increasing frequency of rebellious grumblings from those who believed that Second Amendment rights guaranteed to the people were being trampled. As a result, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary formed a Subcommittee on the Constitution, which was to examine the rights granted by the Second Amendment.11 The committee at the time consisted of some very familiar names, including Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, Ted Kennedy, and Arlen Specter, as well as the current vice president, Joe Biden. In February 1982, after extensive historical research and hearings, the subcommittee issued its report, and stated that

the conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half of the century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own or carry firearms in a peaceful manner. [emphases added]

Partially as a result of the remarkable findings of the subcommittee, Congress enacted and President Reagan signed into law the Firearm Owner’s Protection Act of 1986, which was billed as an attempt to return back to the people their Second Amendment rights. But of course, as in the past, the claim made by the title of the Act was a falsity. Instead of protecting personal rights, the Act banned the manufacture, transfer, and civilian use of machine guns not manufactured as of the date of the Act; except, of course, for law enforcement officials. The justification was once again that this was for the prevention of violent crime. Even Ronald Reagan, who claimed he believed in the original meaning of the Second Amendment as articulated by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, fell for this.

Of the 175,000 licensed automatic firearms in existence at the time, none had been used to commit a violent crime.12 Considering this information, maybe Reagan should have thought to name the Act more appropriately, rather than being complicit in pulling the wool over the eyes of the people and assaulting their Second Amendment rights.

Federal regulations became more frequent, including an Executive Order by President George H. W. Bush banning the importation of machine guns. Then the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act followed five years later, creating a national background check system and requiring a waiting period before a gun could be purchased. Though the Act mandates that all paperwork received by the BATF be automatically destroyed, quite often the BATF will find excuses to keep the records on file for extended periods.13 Of course, this was another well-crafted title by the government, continuing the deception that its actions were all for our own good, even though no evidence was ever found to illustrate the effectiveness of gun control on violence prevention. Maybe a name like “Make It So Difficult to Get a Gun That No One Does” Act would have been more truthful.

Finally, the federal government gave us the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994, which it actually subtitled with some truth as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. In essence, this Act was a prohibition on the sale to civilians of specified semiautomatic firearms, which were defined as “assault weapons.” The Act designated nineteen weapons by name as assault weapons and then provided a definition of assault weapons that was based on certain combinations of a senseless variety of features.

Especially interesting to note is the fact that while the term “assault weapon” sounds threatening and brings to mind rapid-fire machine guns, in reality “the weapons outlawed by the ban function the same as any semiautomatic and legal hunting rifle. They fire the same bullets at the same speed and produce the same damage. They are simply regular deer rifles that look on the outside like AK-47s.”14 These guns do not fire multiple rounds; only one bullet is ejected each time the trigger is pulled.

The federal government chose to ban weapons on appearance rather than utility and all under its ever-popular guise of crime control. When the ban was set to expire in 2004, there was a hue and cry by politicians that its expiration would facilitate a bloodbath in the streets. Thankfully, the Act was not extended, and, not surprisingly, nothing happened. The lifting of the ban was heralded by no increase in crime. Rather, a study on the assault weapon ban by the federal government’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was unable to find sufficient evidence to illustrate the effectiveness of the